Atlanta Falcons

The Atlanta Falcons Used Madden 17 to Circumvent a New Rule

Published Jun. 30, 2017 6:28 p.m. ET

foxsports

The Falcons are putting Madden 17 to good use.

The NFL recently implemented a new rule, concerning what teams can and can’t share on their social media feeds, while in the middle of a game. However, the Atlanta Falcons cleverly circumvented the new rule, using Madden 17.

Back near the beginning of October, ESPN first broke the news, through memos obtained from the NFL, that teams were now prohibited from shooting live video from inside stadiums, and posting it to their Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Periscope accounts. If teams were found to be in breach of the new rule, they could be fined $25,000 for a first offence, up to $50,000 for a second breach, and up to $100,000 for every subsequent breach of the rule.

But as Gamespot first reported earlier today, the Atlanta Falcons found a clever way to get around this new rule, posting the below video, taken from Madden 17, to their Twitter account, to stand in as a substitute for the real highlight video:

Julio Jones with two big time catches and we are driving.#SDvsATL pic.twitter.com/EBIhUt4Zrl

— Atlanta Falcons (@AtlantaFalcons) October 23, 2016

While this obviously isn’t ideal (because ideally each NFL team would want to share their highlights with the largest audience possible, through social media), it’s a clever way to get around a rather unnecessary rule.

The rule itself was implemented by the NFL to control how teams can share live footage with the consumer, and you’d have to imagine there’s a monetary incentive behind it, given that this is the NFL we’re talking about. Perhaps it’s a move to further incentivize the audience to keep track of the live games through their TV, and not through Twitter instead, a source from which the NFL can have no monetary gain.

Here at App Trigger, we also put Madden 17 to good use, using it each and every week to guess the results from around the league. In our week 7 projections, we accurately predicted that the Green Bay Packers would beat the Chicago Bears, but we weren’t so accurate with the result of the game in London between the New York Giants and Los Angeles Rams.