At the end of NFC Championship game on Sunday between the New Orleans Saints and Los Angeles Rams, if you were thinking, even an unfeeling, glitch-filled robot could have made that pass interference call, we might just have a simulator for you. It’s called Madden NFL, and it’s a video game where fake referees make calls on fake football.
After the “silence heard round the world,” a.k.a. what I’m calling the most egregious non-call ever, a couple of intrepid gamers decided to see if they could recreate the play in Madden to see how computer referees called the play. The results were, well, as they should have been in real life.
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Here’s a recording of one iteration of the play, put out by MLB Network reporter Robert Flores:
And just in case you’re thinking to yourself, duh, it’s a video game, it’s omniscient and supposed to be objective and accurate, we’ve got another Madden gamer who set up basically the same play—but this time with the pass interference setting cranked all the way down to zero:
Yup, even a setting where you can allow the players to get away with the exact thing real life Nickell Robey-Coleman got away did not let simulation Robey-Coleman get away with it.
The only truth from this point forward—in this iteration of consequences in our timeline—is that the Rams are playing in the Super Bowl and the Saints aren’t. If only we could live in video games.
