Travis Kelce’s promo Madden 26 feature in EA Sports’ video has led to quite the fury in the reply section. For the most part, the angry replies have little to no context or relation to football. Kelce’s Chiefs teammates have defended him for quite some time now, but the official Madden account asking the community how far the Chiefs will go this season sparked a different kind of “thoughts” from the community. Instead of an opinion about how far the Chiefs would go, the community showered the account with anger about the current condition of the game, which is expected with how Madden has been treated.
The tweet is somewhat uncomplicated. It’s a hype post with Travis Kelce presumably in a new render for Madden 26 with the hashtag and all. But the comments tell a whole different story. It’s as if EA opened a support ticket instead of engaging in a conversation about the forthcoming NFL season.
From the start it’s clear no one is considering Kelce’s potential to win anything. Everyone is jumping straight into the long list of issues with EA Sports. An individual by the name EVanderwerf16 summed it up nicely with, “Make QB’s fumble offense is so OP,” which is a concise way of saying “yeah, that’s a mood.” Damaine Threatt’s run blocking has also gained a lot of negative attention. Known as @StoryofaChamp, he said, “it sure would be nice to get a title update to fix this crap run blocking. J/s.” Preach.
And it doesn’t stop there. An offline franchise mode meltdown is being dealt with by Justin Borough (@justinborough3), who is yelling, “Fix your offline franchise! Fuckkkkk mannn! Why can’t I load my franchises back up! Always gotta fucking restart. Shit annoying.” If it is true that your franchise save is corrupted, then that is a perfectly valid reason to be super heated. That’s hours of gameplay.
Then the defense… or maybe the lack of defense. Steelers97 (@jsteelers360) went on a rant: “Fix the game !!!! Why when we switch stick our does hit stick and take our zone out of order ! Fix the defense!!!! Can’t tackle can’t deflect the ball anymore. Can’t position better than the WR! Y’all absolutely fucked the game up.” It really is one utter. The common understanding among gamers is that other players are more worried about whether the game actually works properly than they are with any new promotional content.
As if that wasn’t enough, Travis Kelce’s personal life is being talked about along with some other personal and odd comments for a Madden’s tweet. HallieJ72, aka Terri Williams, questioned “Why does he have a wedding ring on 🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️ Can we just stick to football?!” While Nicholas (@Bushmaster2969) quipped “I should see rings on many player’s fingers. Not just one guy.” The promotional art is not being spared as dollαвιll (@dollababyy) threw some shade remarking “Travis won’t do anything this season but look up in the crowd every play” which is a very clear and well-known Taylor Swift reference. It is a Madden and NFL crossover drama.
Clearly, not everyone was engaging in the negative. A couple of the various Chiefs followers were piling on positive remarks. “20-0,” was all Alex Motacek (@AMotacek16) had to say, which consolidated the overall optimistic view. Hohenfeldt (@Roho390) went a step further, saying, “A Super Bowl win. That’s the floor.” The confidence seems high in Chiefs Kingdom, but the game they are playing shows that it still has its fair share of issues.
This is the usual scenario — a company tries to drum up excitement for something new, while the one thing they currently offer is somewhat broken. The players catch a glimpse of the new Kelce render and instead of paying attention to it, they respond with, “cool, but can you fix the favorite plays glitch?” or “how about you make it so my franchise doesn’t delete itself?” Again, this further solidifies their priorities seem to be set in the wrong place.
This is the constant battle with sports games, right? The new edition is always on the horizon, but the current one still needs work. And the community is never shy about pointing that out. They want a functional game first, hype second. The Madden team asked about the football, but the players answered about the game design. And that says everything about the state of the franchise heading into Madden 26. They’ve got a lot of work if they want the conversation to be about football and not faulty code.
