A Combination Made in Heaven: Fantasy Football and Madden

If you’re like me, you spend hours preparing to draft the best fantasy football team ever (and yet still end up in last place, losing to the person who was on auto-draft…life just isn’t fair). Manning or Brady? LaDainian Tomlinson or Adrian Peterson? With so many draft kits available, how are you supposed to know which to choose? EA Fantasy Football is hoping you’ll pick them, since they’ve teamed up with Madden to take the fantasy football craze to a whole new level.

In an attempt to divert people from the popular and free sites of Yahoo and CBS sports, EA has created a paid upgrade where one is able to port one’s fantasy football squads into Madden 09. Forget about paper draft boards, the virtual draft tracker and expert analysis that will be available to download straight to your Xbox 360 or PS3 will make your next draft day better than ever.

With the Fantasy Draft Tracker application (which imports league and team information from the website, tracks the draft, and then uploads the completed results back to the website), it’s like you’re in one of the real conference rooms about to call your pick into Radio City Music Hall…instead of just your parent’s basement. After you pick your team, with the help of the hyped-up voices of EA experts providing commentary on some of the better players, the fun really begins. That’s because once the draft is over, you can play with your sure-to-be-first place squad.

And as you’ve always dreamed, you now can play with your all-star fantasy team on Madden. Just download your dream squad to your 360, and they’re ready to rock all areas available to created teams. Yep, that includes online head-to-head games. So if your best friend beats you on paper one week, don’t worry; you now have a way to prove that your team is definitively better. Anyone can get lucky one week, what with backup running backs constantly stealing the starters’ touchdowns (anyone have Willie Parker last year?…I feel your pain), but winning a Madden battle, now that takes skill. Get pumped: this isn’t your average fantasy football league.