National Football League

Seahawks at Falcons: Game simulation with Madden

Updated Mar. 4, 2020 5:52 p.m. ET

Fansided, Keith Myers/FanSided via 12th Man Rising

Madden 17 likes the Seattle Seahawks’ chance to win in Atlanta on Saturday. The official sim has them winning, but additional simulations are less optimistic.

The Seattle Seahawks travel to Atlanta to take on the Falcons in the divisional round of the playoffs this week. Our friends at AppTrigger employed Madden 17 to see who should win this game.

I think fans from in Seattle will be pleased:

If this happens, I’ll take back anything negative i ever might has said about @EAMaddenNFL. pic.twitter.com/dCy0QllY5p

— 12th Man Rising (@12thMan_Rising) January 12, 2017

Going a bit deeper into that result shows that it came about in an incredibly improbable way. Matt Ryan threw five picks, three of which by Bobby Wagner. Ryan hasn’t had a game that bad since 2012. Ryan only threw 7 picks all season.

On the other hand, the simulation does paint a picture of what Seattle will need to do to win. On top of getting stops on defense, Russell Wilson was extremely efficient.

Wilson only threw for 179 yards, but did so on only 23 passing attempts. He also added 89 yards on the ground. Combined with no turnovers, the Seahawks were able to keep the Falcon’s offense off the field.

Fluky things can happen in a single game. This has additional truth for a video game. To get a better idea of what the software thought of this matchup, I decided to add to the sample size. I skimmed the game 9 more times, giving us a nice 10-game sample to look at. Here are the other 9 scores.

Seattle	Atlanta
23	20
19	30
17	27
31	9
6	42
14	11
9	27
31	18
17	41

Overall, we don’t get a sense that Madden likes one team over the other. Each team won 5, and both teams won a mixture of blowouts and close games.

The Seahawks were held to single digit scoring twice, and held under 20 points 5 times. That’s a bit depressing, although they did manage to win one of those games.

What did we learn from this? Nothing whatsoever. It’s a video game with no connection to the real world. It was fun though, and that’s all I really care about when it comes to Madden.