Every Madden Player Who Held a 99-Rated Stat

In 1999 a student at the University of Central Florida won a one-day tournament in NCAA 99 Football and was hired by Electronic Arts as a game tester for his trouble. His name was Donny Moore. By 2013 his job title included the words Ratings Czar, which made him the man who decided how fast and how strong every player in the NFL would be in Madden, and he was not sentimental about the top of the scale. “Everybody can’t be a 99,” he said.

Players notice, and they lobby. In April 2014 the Browns receiver Travis Benjamin, rated 98 for Speed, said, “I should be the fastest guy in the game.” The Giants punter Steve Weatherford watched his Strength jump from 45 to 88 once Moore read that he bench-pressed 400 pounds. Kerry Rhodes, a Jets defensive back rated 21 for Throw Power, posted a video titled ‘WTF Madden!’ of himself out-throwing the lineman Nick Mangold, and got his raise. The numbers are a running argument with the real sport, and they move during the season as well as between editions.

What follows is every player who got to the very top of the physical scales, in the order they first arrived. EA’s own data covers the recent games; older ones survive through official strategy guides and a fan archive that matches EA’s numbers almost cell for cell. The four oldest editions, Madden NFL 98 through Madden NFL 2001, have no fully recovered roster, so the few entries from those years say exactly where their numbers come from. Madden NFL 2003, 2005, 10, 11 and 12 and the 2013 Madden NFL 25 survive with holes in them too, chiefly missing columns, positions or teams and, for Madden NFL 10, most teams’ ratings beyond Speed and Acceleration. Two different games are called Madden NFL 25, and they are told apart here by year.

Brett Favre

In October 2007 Greg Jennings offered a scouting report on his quarterback: “He’s 70 years old and overthrowing us in practice – a lot.” Brett Favre was 38, and on October 29 he threw Jennings an 82-yard touchdown pass on the first play of overtime in Denver. The arm had been the whole point of him for a long time by then.

Madden got there early. A single fan database, nfldraftbuzz, has Favre’s Throw Power at 99 when Madden NFL 99 shipped, and the number stands on firmer ground for Madden NFL 2002, 2003 and 2004, where the maddenratings.net spreadsheets, Prima’s strategy guides or, for 2004, both of them show it. Those ratings followed his run as the first player to win three consecutive MVP awards, 1995 through 1997, the last of them shared with Barry Sanders. In 1990 he had survived a car crash that cost him 30 inches of intestine, then beat Alabama for Southern Miss about two months later.

EA eventually put him on the cover of Madden NFL 09, and the Packers traded him to the Jets before the game reached stores, so EA offered a free downloadable cover in the right uniform. His streak of 297 consecutive regular-season starts ended on December 13, 2010, with a numb right hand. “There’s probably been a lot of times the streak should have ended,” he said, which is the sort of thing a man can afford to admit after 297 of them.

Jerry Rice

The scouting report on Jerry Rice in 1985 fretted about his lack of blazing speed, and the Dallas Cowboys, holding the No. 17 pick, assumed the worry would keep him on the board for them. San Francisco moved up to No. 16 and took him. What the stopwatch missed, ESPN later put plainly: he “didn’t possess incredible speed, he was agile, ran precise routes and his huge hands seemed to pull in everything.”

That agility is what Madden NFL 99 rated at 99, at least in the nfldraftbuzz database, the only surviving record of the number and the reason this entry carries an asterisk. The rest of the case needs none. Rice caught four of Joe Montana’s Super Bowl touchdown passes: a 14-yarder that tied Super Bowl XXIII at 13-13 early in the fourth quarter, on a night he finished with 11 catches for 215 yards and the MVP award, and three more a year later in a 55-10 rout of Denver, from 20, 38 and 28 yards.

He retired with 1,549 receptions, 22,895 receiving yards and 197 receiving touchdowns, and the Hall of Fame took him in 2010. Asked about his gifts, Rice declined the premise. “I don’t think I’m such a natural, I think what I’m doing is very hard work,” he said. The cornerbacks he spent two decades leaving behind would probably have preferred the natural.

Deion Sanders

On September 5, 1989, Deion Sanders hit a home run for the New York Yankees, and on September 10 he returned a punt 68 yards for a touchdown in his first NFL game, for the Atlanta Falcons. Guinness World Records lists him as the first person to do both in the same week. The better-known version, in which he played both sports on one day, never happened: on October 11, 1992, he suited up for the Falcons in Miami and the Braves in Pittsburgh, and never got into the baseball game.

Speed was the thread through all of it. The 4.27 he supposedly ran at the 1989 NFL Combine is lore rather than record, since there is no video, only onlookers. Madden NFL 2000 shipped with him at 99 Speed and 99 Agility, if nfldraftbuzz, the lone surviving source for that roster, has it right. By then he had been the 1994 Defensive Player of the Year with San Francisco, returning three interceptions for touchdowns of 74, 93 and 90 yards, and had won Super Bowls with both the 49ers and the Cowboys.

ESPN calls him the only athlete to have played in both a Super Bowl and a World Series. In 2012, when EA rated his legend version at 99 for speed in Madden NFL 13, he told ESPN, “I should be 100 across the board in every category.” He has never been accused of underselling the product.

Marshall Faulk

“I have been playing Madden Football since 1991 and have been hoping that someday it would be my turn to be on the cover,” Marshall Faulk said in May 2002, when EA named him the face of Madden NFL 2003. The game had already priced him in.

In Madden NFL 2002 his Agility was 99 at launch, agreed by the maddenratings.net archive and the nfldraftbuzz database; Prima’s official strategy guide prints the same number under a column misprinted as Acceleration, which is an understandable mistake to make about Faulk. For Madden NFL 2003, nfldraftbuzz alone records a 99 Acceleration. He was the first player to gain 2,000 yards from scrimmage in four consecutive seasons, 1998 through 2001, and was MVP for the 2000 season, when his 26 touchdowns set a record that Priest Holmes broke in 2003. ESPN credits his “unique route-running ability at the running back spot” with making the Rams’ famous offense work, and Isaac Bruce called him “the engine that made this sports car run.”

Then came the box art. CNN, totting up the supposed Madden curse in October 2003, noted that Faulk had 21 touchdowns and more than 2,000 total yards before the cover and 10 touchdowns and fewer than 1,500 after it. He went into the Hall of Fame in 2011 anyway, at the first time of asking. Curses, it turns out, do not get a vote.

Randy Moss

Randy Moss skipped the 1998 NFL Combine and ran at Marshall’s pro day instead, where his coach remembered a 4.25 in the 40-yard dash, into the wind, run twice for good measure. The Vikings took him 21st overall. He caught 17 touchdown passes as a rookie, a rookie record, and Madden spent the next decade looking for numbers big enough to hold him.

The result is the longest run on this list, a qualifying rating in ten different editions. Moss held 99 Speed at launch from Madden NFL 2002 through Madden NFL 06, 99 Acceleration from 2003 through 06, and 99 Jumping from Madden NFL 2004 through Madden NFL 11, with one detour upward: a 100 Jumping in Madden NFL 09, in both the fan archive and the GameSpot guide, though nfldraftbuzz has 99. That was the edition after 2007, when Tom Brady threw him a 65-yard touchdown on December 29 for his 23rd of the season, breaking Jerry Rice’s record of 22.

The season ended in Glendale. With 2:42 left in Super Bowl XLII, Brady found Moss from 6 yards on third-and-goal for a 14-10 lead, which would have been the most famous of all the Super Bowl touchdown passes Tom Brady threw had the Giants not scored with 35 seconds left and won 17-14. Defenses spent years answering him with the ‘Randy Rules’, double coverage with a safety over the top. Madden needed only the one number.

Sebastian Janikowski

Kickers are not supposed to go in the first round of the NFL draft, and in 2000 the Oakland Raiders took one 17th overall anyway. Al Davis wanted Sebastian Janikowski, a Polish-born former youth soccer player and two-time Lou Groza Award winner at Florida State; Jon Gruden wanted a receiver named Sylvester Morris. Davis won, and told the rookie, “Just don’t disappoint me.”

Madden took the leg seriously from the start. His Kick Power opened Madden NFL 2002 and Madden NFL 2003 at 99, by the fan archive and Prima’s guide respectively, and in Madden NFL 09 he was rated 100, a figure the GameSpot guide and maddenratings.net agree on while the nfldraftbuzz database says 99. The 99 came back once more in Madden NFL 13. In between, on September 28, 2008, he attempted a 76-yard field goal against San Diego, and on October 19 of that year he beat Brett Favre’s Jets with a 57-yarder in overtime.

On September 12, 2011, on the last play of the first half in Denver, he made a 63-yarder to tie the NFL record. “I had a dream I broke the record and it was here in Denver,” he said afterward. “The ball really carries here.” He left the Raiders as their career leader in points, with 1,799, and the thin air had very little to do with most of them.

Tony Boselli

The Houston Texans spent the first pick of their expansion draft, on February 18, 2002, on a left tackle who would never play a down for them. “We have a Hall-of-Famer and we haven’t played a game,” general manager Charley Casserly said of Tony Boselli, which turned out to be correct, though not in the way he meant.

Boselli had been the first draft pick the Jacksonville Jaguars ever made, second overall in 1995, and in seven seasons he made five Pro Bowls, three first-team All-Pro teams and the NFL’s All-Decade Team of the 1990s, despite only playing half of the decade. The maddenratings.net archive of Madden NFL 2002, the edition released in August 2001, rates his Strength at 99 at launch. That autumn the left shoulder went. He started three games, went on injured reserve, had three surgeries on it and retired on July 17, 2003, without having taken a snap in Houston.

The Hall of Fame elected him on February 10, 2022, in his sixth straight year as a finalist, and he was enshrined that August as the first Jaguars player in Canton. Anthony Munoz, the Hall of Fame tackle whose film he had studied at USC, knocked on his door with the news. Asked whether he wished he had played for a grander franchise, Boselli said, “No. I’m good with the Jaguars.” Houston got the headline and none of the snaps.

Ahman Green

Ron Wolf, the Green Bay general manager, said he timed Ahman Green at 4.16 and 4.19 seconds for 40 yards at a Nebraska pro day, and that nobody believed him. The official combine figure was 4.44. Both camps had a point, as the 2003 season went on to demonstrate.

That year Green ran for 1,883 yards, a Packers single-season record, and on December 28 against Denver he took the first snap after a goal-line stand 98 yards for a touchdown, the longest run in franchise history, on his way to 218 yards in a 31-3 win. Madden had already decided about him. The shipped roster of Madden NFL 2004 lists his Acceleration at 99 in the maddenratings.net spreadsheets, and nfldraftbuzz, with no second witness, records the same 99 a year earlier in Madden NFL 2003. Madden NFL 2004 went on sale on August 11, 2003, before a single carry of the record season, which makes the rating a forecast rather than a reward.

He had arrived from Seattle in a 2000 trade carrying the reputation of a fumbler and left as the Packers’ career rushing leader, passing Jim Taylor in 2009. He was also a serious player of the game that rated him. “My thing is Xbox,” he told Packers.com in 2005, the year he played Madden against DeShaun Foster for a Sports Illustrated feature. History does not record whether he picked the Packers, but it would be a surprise.

Champ Bailey

On January 14, 2006, with Denver leading New England 10-6 in the third quarter of a divisional playoff, Tom Brady threw for Troy Brown in the end zone and found Champ Bailey instead. Bailey ran it back 100 yards and did not score. Tight end Ben Watson, who had chased him the length of the field, shoved him out at the 1-yard line, Bill Belichick’s challenge failed, and Denver scored on the next snap on the way to a 27-13 win.

The Hall of Fame says the return set the record for the longest non-scoring play in NFL history, a peculiar distinction even among the defensive players who intercepted Tom Brady in the playoffs. Madden had him clocked well before then: 99 Acceleration in the shipped rosters of Madden NFL 2003, 2004 and 2005, and 99 Speed in the last two, first as a Redskin and then as a Bronco. The switch came on March 4, 2004, when Washington sent him and a second-round pick to Denver for Clinton Portis. By Madden NFL 07 his 99 had moved to Agility.

He made 12 Pro Bowls, which the Hall of Fame calls the most by any defensive back, and reached Canton in 2019. Of the Watson tackle, he said, “I never saw the guy coming, but I was going as hard as I could.” He is remembered, fairly, for the one yard he didn’t get.

Larry Allen

John Madden, who knew a good deal about offensive linemen and had a video game named after him, said opponents did not sleep easy before facing Larry Allen, because “he was so doggone strong and there wasn’t much you could do against him.” The game took its namesake’s word. Allen’s Strength was 99 when Madden NFL 2003 and its 2004 sequel reached stores, both times as a Dallas Cowboy, and in Madden NFL 08, by then a San Francisco 49er, he was rated 100.

The legend behind the number is part measurement and part weight-room folklore. The Cowboys’ Ring of Honor page credits him with a 700-pound bench press and a 900-pound squat, and a team staffer who watched the 700 in spring 2001 said the bar bent. At the 2006 Pro Bowl’s Strongest Man competition he reportedly put up 225 pounds 43 times. Less disputed is a Monday night in New Orleans on December 19, 1994, when Allen, a 325-pound rookie, chased down the linebacker Darion Conner after an interception and hauled him down at the Dallas 16.

He came from Sonoma State, a Division II school, made 11 Pro Bowls, won Super Bowl XXX and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2013 in his first year on the ballot. He died on June 2, 2024, at 52. Nobody who lined up across from him ever asked for a recount.

Shawn Springs

Before the 1997 draft, Shawn Springs told the Seattle Seahawks he would run a 4.2 in the 40-yard dash. By his own recollection he managed a 4.35 and a 40-inch vertical jump instead, and Seattle traded up to No. 3 to take him anyway, the highest pick the franchise had ever spent on a defensive back.

The investment looked sound by his second season, 1998, when he intercepted 7 passes, returned 2 for touchdowns and made the Pro Bowl. Madden NFL 2003, released on August 12, 2002, shipped with Springs at 99 in both Speed and Acceleration, figures that Prima’s official guide and the nfldraftbuzz database agree on. On March 4, 2004, the day Washington traded Champ Bailey away, the Redskins signed Springs to replace him, and he took Bailey’s No. 24. “Champ brought excellence to the east coast,” he said. Springs had grown up in Silver Spring, Maryland: “I never imagined I would end up playing right down the street.”

The story that outlasts the football belongs to his father. Ron Springs, a former Cowboys running back, needed a kidney, and in December 2005 The Washington Post reported that Shawn had offered one of his own, knowing it would probably end his career. Ron would not hear of it. “I couldn’t have let him do that, because I always prayed and wanted him to be a professional athlete,” he said. In 2007 his old Dallas teammate Everson Walls gave him one instead.

Plaxico Burress

A 99 Jumping rating usually goes to a man who can leave the ground in a hurry. Plaxico Burress earned his by already being most of the way up there. The Steelers’ first-round pick in 2000, eighth overall out of Michigan State, was listed at 6-foot-5, and in 2002 he caught 78 passes for 1,325 yards, including a 253-yard afternoon against Atlanta on November 10 that ended, improbably, in a 34-34 tie.

Madden NFL 2004, released on August 11, 2003, gave him the 99, according to the maddenratings.net archive with nfldraftbuzz in agreement. It is his only appearance at the top of any of these scales, and it rewarded a receiver who settled contested balls by being taller than the argument.

His most famous catch needed no jumping at all. Before Super Bowl XLII he predicted a 23-17 Giants win over the unbeaten Patriots and said he guaranteed it, a forecast Tom Coughlin was not happy to hear. Late in the game Eli Manning told him at the line, “if we get single coverage, I’m throwing it.” Burress faked inside on Ellis Hobbs, who lost his footing, and caught the 13-yard touchdown that won it. The score was wrong. Nobody in New York has ever minded.

Clinton Portis

Southeast Jerome made his debut at a Washington Redskins media session in 2005, and over the following weeks he was joined by Sheriff Gonna Getcha, Inspector 2-2 and a physician called Doctor Don’t Know. All of them were Clinton Portis, in costume, and Sports Illustrated gave the cast a feature in its November 28, 2005 issue.

Behind the wigs was a back Madden had already rated at the top of the scale. In Denver he ran for 1,508 yards as a rookie in 2002 and 1,591 in 2003, the second total in only 13 games, and on December 7, 2003, he put 218 yards and five touchdowns on Kansas City. “It was the game that got me traded,” he said later. That spring Denver swapped him for Champ Bailey and a second-round pick, a deal Portis regarded with some satisfaction: “they also got a pick for me, so I felt like I was hot stuff.”

Madden NFL 2005, released on August 10, 2004, five months after the trade, opened with his Acceleration at 99 as a Redskin, a figure the fan archive, nfldraftbuzz and Prima’s Redskins star box all share. He followed it with 1,315 yards in 2004 and 1,516 in 2005, then a Washington record, and finished with 9,923 rushing yards and 75 rushing touchdowns. Doctor Don’t Know, so far as anyone can tell, was never consulted about any of them.

Dante Hall

The Human Joystick was Dante Hall’s other nickname, and it described what it looked like when he returned a kick. On October 5, 2003, against Denver at Arrowhead, he cut left, cut right, stutter-stepped, ran backward and then looped outside for a 93-yard punt return with 8:20 left, giving Kansas City a 24-23 win and its first 5-0 start. It was his fourth return touchdown in four games, which the AP called an NFL record. “He’s a human highlight reel. He’s like Michael Jordan. It’s ridiculous,” said his teammate Eric Hicks.

Madden caught up the following summer. Madden NFL 2005, Madden NFL 06 and Madden NFL 07 each opened with him at 99 for both Acceleration and Agility, six 99s for a fifth-round pick, 153rd overall in 2000, listed at 5-foot-8. The X-Factor nickname was good enough for Gatorade, which picked him in 2004 for the first television spot of a new product line called, naturally, Gatorade X-Factor.

He left Kansas City with a franchise-record 11 return touchdowns and entered the Chiefs Hall of Fame in 2023. Mike Shanahan, asked about that Denver punt, said there had been a clip. The officials did not see one, and neither, apparently, did Madden.

LaDainian Tomlinson

In April 2007, fresh off a season of 31 touchdowns and 186 points, both NFL records, LaDainian Tomlinson was reportedly offered the cover of Madden NFL 08 and reportedly turned it down over money. The cover went to Vince Young. The ratings went to Tomlinson regardless.

The 2006 season had been absurd: 1,815 rushing yards and 28 rushing touchdowns on top of the receiving scores. On December 10 against Denver he tied Shaun Alexander’s single-season touchdown record on a 6-yard run with 3:57 left and broke it 47 seconds later, on a play the Chargers called power 50. “I believe he is the finest running back to ever wear an NFL uniform,” said his coach, Marty Schottenheimer. Madden NFL 08 duly shipped with Tomlinson’s Agility at 99, and Madden NFL 09 kept it there; three years before that, Madden NFL 2005 had given him 99 Acceleration, as the fan archive and nfldraftbuzz both record.

There was more to him than carrying the ball. He scored in 18 straight games across 2004 and 2005, tying Lenny Moore’s league record, caught 100 passes in 2003, and threw 7 touchdown passes on 12 attempts over his career. Canton elected him in 2017. Madden had needed rather less persuading.

Laveranues Coles

In 1999 Laveranues Coles and Peter Warrick walked out of a Tallahassee Dillard’s with $412.38 worth of clothing for which they had paid $21.40, and Coles, who handed over the money, was the one Florida State dismissed. The Jets took him in the third round of the 2000 draft, 78th overall, because Bill Parcells overruled his staff. “Parcells basically slammed the table and said, ‘Well, it ain’t your decision, it’s mine. Take the kid,’” Coles recalled.

The kid caught 89 passes for 1,264 yards in 2002 and then left for Washington, where he made his only Pro Bowl after an 82-catch, 1,204-yard season in 2003. Madden NFL 2005 shipped with him as a Redskin at 99 Speed, a number the fan archive, Prima’s guide and nfldraftbuzz all agree on. It did not keep him happy. After 90 catches for 950 yards in 2004 he wanted out, and in March 2005 Washington sent him back to the Jets for Santana Moss in what the AP called “a swap of receivers who were unhappy with their respective teams’ conservative offenses.”

On December 26, 2005, Coles caught a 27-yard touchdown from the 42-year-old Vinny Testaverde, the last score of ABC’s final Monday Night Football game. The network’s run had begun in 1970 with the Jets losing 31-21 at Cleveland. It ended with them losing 31-21 to New England.

Brian Westbrook

With 2:19 left at Texas Stadium on December 16, 2007, and Philadelphia leading Dallas 10-6, Brian Westbrook broke free at the Cowboys’ 25 with nothing ahead of him but the end zone, and stopped at the 1. Dallas had no timeouts. The Eagles knelt three times and went home. Jon Runyan had told him beforehand, “Take a knee, Westbrook, take a knee,” and Andy Reid credited his Villanova education.

That was the season Westbrook led the NFL with 2,104 yards from scrimmage and made first-team All-Pro, and Madden’s numbers had seen it coming. His Acceleration was 99 when Madden NFL 07 and Madden NFL 08 shipped, missed the mark for 09, and was back at 99 for Madden NFL 10, where ESPN’s ratings rundown in May 2009 also put his Agility at 99; nfldraftbuzz has that one at 98. Back on October 19, 2003, he had returned a Jeff Feagles punt 84 yards with 1:16 left to beat the Giants 14-10. “That was my coming out party,” he said.

He came out of Villanova, then in Division I-AA, where in 1998 he ran for 1,046 yards and caught passes for 1,144, a season the College Football Hall of Fame calls the only one of its kind at any level. The Eagles took him 91st overall in 2002. He retired one of six players with at least 30 rushing and 30 receiving touchdowns, and the rushing total would be one higher had he been less clever.

Leonard Davis

In May 2007 PETA gave Leonard Davis its Compassionate Action Award. He had found a horse named Ranger stuck belly-deep in mud in a sinkhole across the street, fastened straps around it and pulled it free with his John Deere tractor. Wade Phillips, his new coach in Dallas, had a single reservation: “I don’t know that he needed that tractor.”

Madden had reached the same view of his strength. Davis held a 99 there in Madden NFL 07 as an Arizona Cardinal, and again as a Cowboy in Madden NFL 09 and Madden NFL 11, with Madden NFL 10 added if the nfldraftbuzz database alone is to be believed. Arizona had taken him second overall in 2001 and moved him between guard and both tackle spots, and the label that followed him to free agency was underachiever. Dallas signed him on March 4, 2007, for seven years and $49.6 million, including a $16 million signing bonus that was a club record, and installed him at right guard. He made the next 3 Pro Bowls. “Guard is Davis’ natural spot and where he should’ve been playing all along,” the Cowboys’ website concluded.

At training camp that summer he was listed at 6-foot-6 and 354 pounds, and the running back Julius Jones explained his plan for running behind him: “They can’t even see me.” Davis finished with the 49ers in Super Bowl XLVII, playing 6 special-teams snaps in a 34-31 loss. After the horse, it was light work.

Ted Washington

Covering the week of Super Bowl XXXVIII, Sports Illustrated observed that reporters could not get five minutes into a conversation with Ted Washington without asking about his weight. The Patriots said 365 pounds, at 6-foot-5. “It doesn’t matter how much I weigh,” Washington said. “I’ve played for 13 years. I must be doing something right.”

New England had acquired him from Chicago on August 19, 2003, for a fourth-round pick: a 35-year-old nose tackle whose run of 119 consecutive starts had ended with a broken left fibula the previous September. He started for the team that won that Super Bowl, and the Panthers’ center, Jeff Mitchell, described the experience of blocking him. “Even with two guys on him, you don’t hope to move him. You just have to count on controlling him.” The Buffalo Bills, his employer for three Pro Bowl seasons, remember him as Mt. Washington.

The 99 came late. Cleveland signed him on March 13, 2006, to a two-year deal, and he turned 38 that April. Madden NFL 07 opened its first roster with the Browns’ nose tackle at 99 Strength, his only appearance at that number, on which the fan archive, Prima and nfldraftbuzz all agree. His father, Ted Washington Sr., had been a linebacker for ten seasons with the Houston Oilers. The son played 17 seasons for seven teams, and the top rating arrived near the very end of them.

Adrian Wilson

Eight sacks is a respectable season for a pass rusher. In 2005 Adrian Wilson, a strong safety for the Arizona Cardinals, had 8, more than any player at his position had managed since sacks became an official statistic in 1982, and nobody passed him until Jamal Adams in December 2020.

The jumping was the other half of the act. Wilson’s vertical at the 2001 Combine is listed at 39.5 inches, at 6-foot-3, and the 08 and 09 editions of Madden each began with his Jumping at 99, a number recorded in unison by the fan spreadsheets, GameSpot’s guides and nfldraftbuzz. The season before the first of them brought a fitting coincidence: on October 1, 2006, at Atlanta, he ran an interception back 99 yards to the end zone, the longest such return in Cardinals history according to the AP. ESPN’s Mike Sando later summed him up as “a 6-foot-3, 230-pound strong safety and a threat to injure anyone in his path.”

He spent all 12 of his seasons in Arizona, played in the franchise’s first Super Bowl and finished with 27 interceptions and 25.5 sacks, which ESPN in 2015 counted as one of six players in league history with at least 25 of each. The membership card arrived on December 16, 2012, when he sacked Detroit’s Matthew Stafford for number 25. It was the last sack of his career, and he had needed exactly that one.

Devery Henderson

The television broadcast signed off with the wrong score. On November 9, 2002, Kentucky led LSU 30-27, its coach had already been doused with a cooler, and fans were on the field when Marcus Randall threw a desperation pass 65 yards in the air from his own 25. Two Wildcats tipped it, Devery Henderson caught it one-handed at the 15 and ran in for a 75-yard touchdown as time expired. LSU won 33-30. An LSU website poll named the play the Bluegrass Miracle, with 4,497 votes.

Speed was the point of him. LSU said he had been clocked at 4.36 seconds in the 40-yard dash before the 2004 draft, and the Saints took him 50th overall. Madden NFL 08 gave him 99 Acceleration out of the box, on the evidence of the fan archive, the GameSpot guide and nfldraftbuzz alike, and in 2008 he averaged 24.8 yards a catch, first in the NFL. On September 25, 2006, the night the Superdome reopened after Hurricane Katrina, he scored on an 11-yard double reverse that Drew Brees sprang with a downfield block.

Brees supplied his other footnote to history. On October 7, 2012, he threw Henderson a 40-yard touchdown, his 48th straight game with a touchdown pass, breaking the record Johnny Unitas had set from 1956 to 1960. Henderson, ESPN pointed out, was wearing Unitas’s old number, 19.

Devin Hester

Jeff Joniak, the Bears’ radio voice, had barely settled into Super Bowl XLI when Devin Hester took the opening kickoff 92 yards for a touchdown, 14 seconds in. The Hall of Fame describes it as the only time that has happened in Super Bowl history, and Joniak’s call is hard to improve on: “From Riviera Beach, Florida, to the biggest stage in sports: Devin Hester, you are ridiculous!”

Two months later the game made it official in its own medium. In April 2007 an EA representative confirmed to GameSpot that Hester would carry a Speed rating of 100 in Madden NFL 08, the first perfect Speed rating in the series’ history. “That’s just about the best thing you could have told me,” he said. The 100 survived into Madden NFL 09, with 99 Acceleration and Agility alongside it both years, before Madden NFL 10 eased him back to 99 Speed. By Madden NFL 13 his Acceleration had returned to 99 in EA’s own table.

As a returner he took 14 punts and five kickoffs to the end zone in 156 regular-season games, plus a 108-yard missed field goal against the Giants as a rookie, and in 2024 he became the first return specialist to reach Canton. On his retirement day in December 2017, the Bears rookie Tarik Cohen said he had used Hester a lot in Madden “because he was the only player who ever had 100 speed on Madden.” In the strict matter of Speed, the rookie was right.

JaMarcus Russell

Madden NFL 08 went on sale on August 14, 2007, with JaMarcus Russell on the Oakland roster at 99 Throw Power, more commitment than Russell had yet given the Raiders. The first overall pick held out through training camp and into Week 1, agreeing on September 12 to a six-year deal worth up to $68 million, with $31.5 million guaranteed. Sports Illustrated called it the longest holdout by a No. 1 pick since Bo Jackson refused to sign with the Buccaneers in 1986.

The arm, at least, had a reference. In the Sugar Bowl on January 3, 2007, he threw for 332 yards and 2 touchdowns in LSU’s 41-14 win over Notre Dame, and that April he became only the second LSU player drafted first overall, after Billy Cannon in 1960. Lane Kiffin, the Raiders’ coach, later said he begged Al Davis to take Calvin Johnson instead. Davis, firing Kiffin in 2008, put his own view in writing: “I do realize that you did not want us to draft JaMarcus Russell. He is a great player. Get over it.”

The stat sheet declined to get over it. Russell started 25 games in three seasons, went 7-18, threw 18 touchdowns against 23 interceptions and finished with a 65.2 passer rating, and after the Raiders released him on May 6, 2010, he never played another NFL down. “People are always saying that I’m a bust. I want show them I’m not,” he said in January 2013. Throw Power was never the problem.

Lee Evans

Over seven seasons in Buffalo, Lee Evans caught passes of 87, 85, 83, 83, 77 and 70 yards, and both 83s came in the first quarter of one game. That was November 19, 2006, at Houston, where J.P. Losman found him twice from 83 yards out and Evans finished with 11 catches for 265 yards, a Bills single-game record by the reckoning of the SB Nation site Buffalo Rumblings, in a 24-21 win.

Madden had already clocked the start. His Acceleration was 99 when both the 08 and 09 Madden games shipped, by every surviving dataset, after a 2006 season of 82 catches and 1,292 yards, both career highs, and 8 touchdowns. The Bills had taken him 13th overall in 2004 out of Wisconsin, where he once caught 5 touchdowns in a game against Michigan State, and on October 28, 2007, he took an underthrown ball off a rookie named Darrelle Revis for an 85-yard score.

The play people remember came later and went the other way. In the AFC Championship Game on January 22, 2012, with Baltimore on the New England 14 in the final minute, Joe Flacco threw to Evans in the end zone and the ball came loose as cornerback Sterling Moore struck his arm. Billy Cundiff then missed a 32-yard field goal with 11 seconds left, and the Patriots won 23-20. Acceleration, as Madden measures it, has nothing to say about the last half-second of a catch.

Reggie Bush

At USC’s pro day in April 2006, Reggie Bush ran the 40-yard dash in 4.33 seconds, jumped 40.5 inches and announced, “I think I proved I should be the No. 1 pick.” Houston took Mario Williams anyway. New Orleans took Bush second, and on October 8 his first NFL touchdown was a 65-yard punt return with 4:17 left that beat Tampa Bay 24-21.

Madden went further than any front office. Madden NFL 08 shipped with his Acceleration at 100 and his Agility at 99; Madden NFL 09 reversed them, 99 Acceleration and 100 Agility, which makes him the only player on this list rated 100 in two different attributes. ESPN, explaining the phenomenon in January 2009, named Bush as its example of a perfect 100 in agility. Madden NFL 11 had the Agility at 99 again. In the 2009 playoffs he scored on a 46-yard run and an 83-yard punt return in one game against Arizona, and a few weeks later the Saints beat the Colts in Super Bowl XLIV.

Off the field, his honors took a stranger route. He won the 2005 Heisman Trophy with 784 first-place votes, forfeited it in September 2010 after the NCAA ruled that he and his family had received impermissible benefits, and got it back on April 24, 2024, when the Heisman Trust cited “the enormous changes in college athletics over the last several years.” The Madden 100s, by contrast, were never taken away.

Steve Smith Sr.

A 5-foot-9 kick returner taken 74th overall in 2001 is not supposed to win a receiving triple crown, and in 2005 Steve Smith won one with a little help: his 103 catches tied Larry Fitzgerald, his 12 touchdown catches tied Marvin Harrison, and only his 1,563 yards led the NFL outright. He had spent most of the previous season injured, after breaking his leg in the 2004 opener, and he shared the Comeback Player of the Year award with Tedy Bruschi.

Madden rated him 99 in Acceleration and Agility in its 2008 edition and again a year later, the archive and the GameSpot guides agreeing, which is about as precise a description as a video game can give of a small man getting open against large ones. The playoffs had already shown it. On January 10, 2004, at St. Louis, he caught a 69-yard touchdown from Jake Delhomme on the first play of the second overtime to win 29-23, and three weeks later he scored from 39 yards in Super Bowl XXXVIII. On January 15, 2006, at Chicago, he caught a Panthers playoff-record 12 passes, for 218 yards.

He finished with 1,031 receptions and 14,731 yards over 16 seasons, the last three with Baltimore, and on October 6, 2019, Carolina inducted him into its Hall of Honor as the franchise’s career leader in receiving yards, with 12,197. His 1,563 yards of 2005 stood that day as the club’s single-season record.

Ted Ginn Jr.

The Miami Dolphins spent the ninth overall pick of the 2007 draft on Ted Ginn Jr., a receiver and returner from Ohio State, while the quarterback Brady Quinn waited until 22nd. Madden NFL 08, released that August 14, put the rookie at 99 Acceleration and 99 Agility before he had played an NFL down, and Madden NFL 09 repeated both. Sports Illustrated was less patient. By November 2008 it reported that some were ready to label the ninth overall pick a bust.

He answered in the third quarter at Giants Stadium on November 1, 2009, returning one kickoff 100 yards with 10:10 left and another 101 yards with 3:09 left, and Miami beat the Jets 30-25. For San Francisco on September 11, 2011, he went 102 yards with a kickoff and 55 with a punt for touchdowns in the last four minutes against Seattle, two scores that SFGate timed at 59 seconds apart. He had agreed that week to cut his salary from $2.2 million to $1 million.

Ginn lasted 14 seasons, played in two Super Bowls, caught 412 passes for 5,742 yards and scored 7 times on returns, without a Pro Bowl to show for any of it. “My dad always told me to leave my name on something, I left my name on something,” he said when he retired. The name is there on the Madden 08 and 09 rosters too, at 99 in two columns.

Adrian Peterson

Madden NFL 08 rated the rookie Adrian Peterson 85 overall, and on November 4, 2007, he ran 30 times for 296 yards against San Diego, breaking Jamal Lewis’s single-game record by one yard. He gained 253 of them in the second half. Ten days later he gave the jersey and pants to the Hall of Fame.

Madden revised its opinion. His Acceleration stood at 99 when Madden NFL 09 came out in August 2008, with the GameSpot guide agreeing, and again in Madden NFL 11. On December 24, 2011, at Washington, he tore the ACL and MCL in his left knee, and in 2012, his first season back, he ran for 2,097 yards on 348 carries, finishing just short of Eric Dickerson’s single-season record and winning the MVP award. NFL.com noted that he “had more rushing yards than 24 teams.”

The next edition, Madden NFL 25 in its 2013 version, carried him on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One covers, while Barry Sanders took the older consoles, and had him at 99 Acceleration once more, a number known only because of what happened next. The game did something it rarely admits to: a fan-hosted transcription of EA’s notes shows the Week 11 roster update of the 2013 season trimming it from 99 to 98. He finished his career with 14,918 rushing yards and 120 rushing touchdowns, and that week is the only time this list records Madden taking one of his 99s away.

Braylon Edwards

GameSpot’s strategy guide for Madden NFL 09 introduced Braylon Edwards as “one of the league’s top targets (a 100 spectacular catch rating),” a generous description of a receiver whose hands were the subject of a long public conversation. Spectacular Catch is not one of the seven ratings here. The number beside it is: Jumping, at 99, recorded for the launch roster by maddenratings.net and nfldraftbuzz alike, with nfldraftbuzz alone carrying the same 99 into Madden NFL 10.

The game was reacting to 2007, when the third overall pick of the 2005 draft caught 80 passes for 1,289 yards and 16 touchdowns for Cleveland, a touchdown total beaten that year only by Randy Moss’s 23. He had won the 2004 Biletnikoff Award at Michigan, and Draftscout lists his vertical leap at 38 inches. The next season he caught 55 for 873 yards and 3 touchdowns, and on October 7, 2009, after the first shutout of his career, Cleveland traded him to the Jets. “Is he going to catch every pass that’s thrown to him? No,” said Rex Ryan, his new coach, by way of welcome.

He finished with 359 catches, 5,522 yards and 40 touchdowns. In March 2024 police in Farmington Hills, Michigan, said Edwards, then 41, had stopped an attack on an 80-year-old man in a YMCA locker room and “played a pivotal role in saving the victim’s life.” His own summary was shorter: “At the end of the day, that’s what you do.”

Darren McFadden

Twice the runner-up for the Heisman Trophy, to Troy Smith in 2006 and Tim Tebow in 2007, Darren McFadden left Arkansas as the Razorbacks’ career rushing leader, with 4,590 yards, and the second player, after Ricky Williams, to win the Doak Walker Award twice. They called him Run DMC. Oakland took him fourth overall in 2008 and, a year after the JaMarcus Russell holdout, signed him quickly, for $60 million over six years.

Madden NFL 09 greeted the rookie with 99 Acceleration, a figure maddenratings.net, nfldraftbuzz and GameSpot’s guide all share, and the guide added that he “boasts high speed, acceleration, agility, juke move, and is a Stiff Arm Ball Carrier.” He hurt his toe in his second NFL game, after running for 164 yards against Kansas City, and that set the pattern. The good days were very good: on October 24, 2010, at Denver, he scored four touchdowns in a 59-14 win that set a Raiders scoring record. His 1,157 yards that season were one of only two 1,000-yard years in a ten-year career, and the other, 1,089 yards, came for Dallas in 2015. He never started 16 games in a season.

John Madden, whose name was on the box, called him “one of the most underrated backs in the history of the Raiders.” The game that bore his name had rated him rather highly.

DeAngelo Hall

Virginia Tech’s athletics department records that DeAngelo Hall once ran a 4.15 in the 40-yard dash on the school’s indoor track, the fastest time ever posted by a Tech football player, a number that tends to send scouts reaching for their own stopwatches. Atlanta drafted him eighth overall in 2004, and by Madden NFL 09 he was a 99 for Speed, now an Oakland Raider, in every dataset that survives.

The Raiders had sent Atlanta a second-round and a fifth-round pick for him in March 2008 and then signed him to a seven-year, $70 million contract with $24.5 million guaranteed. GameSpot’s guide called him “one of the fastest players in the game.” Eight games later Oakland released him. STATS had counted him beaten 40 times for 552 yards on 66 passes thrown his way, and Washington signed him that Saturday.

Washington got the better of the bargain. On October 24, 2010, at Soldier Field, Jay Cutler threw four interceptions, and by the standard accounts Hall caught every one of them, returning the third-quarter one 92 yards for a touchdown in a 17-14 win. He made 3 Pro Bowls in all and finished with 43 interceptions. Oakland had measured the speed correctly; it was the coverage that came in under the rating.

Pat Williams

In 2006 the Minnesota Vikings allowed 985 rushing yards all season, 2.8 a carry, the fewest in the league, and they led the league again in 2007 and 2008. The explanation was a pair of unrelated defensive tackles named Williams, known together as the Williams Wall, and the nose tackle of the two, Pat, is the one Madden NFL 09 rated 99 for Strength, a number on which every surviving dataset agrees.

He had gone undrafted out of Texas A&M in 1997 and spent eight years in Buffalo before Minnesota signed him. The GameSpot guide gave him a 98 overall and named him the Vikings’ “Power Move D-Lineman”; NFL.com listed him at 6-foot-3 and 317 pounds. In December 2008 the NFL suspended both Williamses for four games over bumetanide, a banned diuretic found in a weight-loss supplement called StarCaps; neither was accused of taking steroids, and the case wandered through federal and state courts until the Minnesota Supreme Court declined Pat’s appeal in April 2011. The fight, he said, had cost him close to $1 million.

In 2010 the AP described him, at 38, as “the oldest defensive player in the NFL.” That season the Vikings also managed to misspell a Williams: a Reebok error put W-I-L-A-I-M-S on Kevin’s back against Green Bay, while Pat’s jersey and that of the safety Madieu Williams came out right. Three Williamses on one roster, and Madden needed to rate only one of them 99.

Shawn Andrews

In the 2004 draft the Philadelphia Eagles took Shawn Andrews 16th overall and the Cincinnati Bengals took his older brother, Stacy, 123rd. Both came from Camden, Arkansas. Five years later the Eagles signed Stacy as well, putting the brothers on one roster at last, and Shawn did not play a down that season. His back would not allow it.

In between he had been very good. Andrews made the Pro Bowl at right guard in 2006 and 2007 and was first-team All-Pro in 2006. Madden NFL 09 put his Strength at 99, recorded by maddenratings.net, nfldraftbuzz and GameSpot, whose guide also shows a separate 99 for run-block strength that falls outside this list. nfldraftbuzz, on its own, has the 99 Strength again for Madden NFL 10. At Arkansas he had won the Jacobs Blocking Trophy in 2002 and 2003 and been a unanimous All-American as a junior.

The back finished what defensive linemen could not. The Eagles released him on March 17, 2010, and the Giants used him at left tackle that autumn, where an AP story described “the 335-pound starter” taking injections to play after two back surgeries. The family name returned to a roster in 2026, when his son JJ, a five-star basketball guard and McDonald’s All-American, joined the Arkansas Razorbacks.

Tom Brady

GameSpot’s guide to Madden NFL 09 ran a table of every quarterback above 95 Throw Power on the day-one roster, and Tom Brady sat alone at the top, at 99. Directly beneath him, at 98, were JaMarcus Russell and Brett Favre, who both appear on this list for other editions. The same guide gave Brady a Speed of 64, which was charitable to a man whose reported time in the 40-yard dash at the 2000 combine was 5.28 seconds.

The 99 rewarded 2007, when Brady threw a then-record 50 touchdown passes for an unbeaten regular-season team and became the first Patriot named MVP. Madden NFL 09 went on sale on August 12, 2008. On September 7, in the first quarter of the opener against Kansas City, safety Bernard Pollard dove at his legs as he threw a 28-yard pass to Randy Moss, and the Boston Globe soon confirmed torn ACL and MCL ligaments in his left knee. That completion was his 11th and final pass of the season. The best-rated arm in the game had lasted less than a quarter of real football.

He came back in 2009 with 4,398 yards and 28 touchdowns, and by the end the sixth-round pick, 199th overall, had collected 7 Super Bowl titles and 649 touchdown passes. In 2017 he fronted Madden NFL 18, whose deluxe version EA called the G.O.A.T. Edition. The Speed rating was not discussed.

Wes Welker

On October 10, 2004, with the Miami Dolphins 0-5 and their kicker, Olindo Mare, hurt, an undrafted receiver whom San Diego had cut after one game kicked a 29-yard field goal and an extra point against New England, kicked off three times and returned five punts and five kickoffs. The Sun-Sentinel reported that Wes Welker was the first NFL player since 1989 to kick off and return kickoffs in the same game. The NFL Combine had not bothered to invite him.

The Patriots traded for him in March 2007 and watched him catch 112 passes that season, tied for the league lead. Madden NFL 09 shipped with his Acceleration at 99, Madden NFL 10 kept it, and the table EA itself published for Madden NFL 13 had it at 99 once more. All told he had five seasons of at least 100 catches, including 123 in 2009.

The 123rd was his only catch at Houston on January 3, 2010. Moments later his left knee buckled, without contact, as he tried to elude the Texans safety Bernard Pollard, the same man whose hit had ended Tom Brady’s 2008 season, and the ACL and MCL went. Welker retired with 903 receptions, 9,924 yards and a perfect career record as a kicker: one field goal in one attempt, and two extra points in two.

Willie Parker

Willie Parker barely carried the ball at North Carolina, where coach John Bunting wanted him to bulk up into a power back and called him “The Clinton Bypass” for his habit of bouncing outside. He skipped the NFL Combine, went undrafted and signed with Pittsburgh in 2004 for the league minimum of $230,000. As a boy in Clinton, North Carolina, his father recalled, he had raced pit bulls on the side streets. He lost to the dogs.

Few others caught him. On the Steelers’ first possession of the second half of Super Bowl XL, on February 5, 2006, he ran 75 yards for a touchdown, which the NFL’s record book, as of its 2025 edition, lists as the longest run from scrimmage in Super Bowl history. “Please don’t let me trip, please don’t let me fall,” he remembered thinking. By December 20, 2007, he was leading the NFL in rushing, 1,316 yards to LaDainian Tomlinson’s 1,311, when he broke his right fibula on his first carry of a Thursday night game in St. Louis.

When Madden NFL 09 arrived the next summer, his Acceleration read 99 in all three surviving sources, the one time he reached that number in any of these ratings. He retired as a Steeler on August 3, 2012, with 5,378 rushing yards and 2 Super Bowl titles. “It is a play that defines me,” he said of the 75-yarder, and the record book, as of that edition, had not argued.

Albert Haynesworth

Bleacher Report’s preview of Madden NFL 10, in July 2009, listed Washington’s new defensive tackle as “99 OVR/99 STR/98 POW MOVE,” three figures that between them explained why the Redskins had just paid Albert Haynesworth $100 million. The seven-year contract, signed on the first day of free agency that February, carried $41 million guaranteed, and Sports Illustrated later called him the first defensive player to sign for $100 million. ESPN’s ratings coverage and nfldraftbuzz both confirm the 99 Strength.

Tennessee had drafted him 15th overall in 2002, and he left the Titans as a two-time first-team All-Pro and the 2008 Sporting News Defensive Player of the Year, after 8.5 sacks that season. Washington got 2.5 sacks from him in 2010 and a long argument with Mike Shanahan. Haynesworth skipped offseason workouts, boycotted a mandatory minicamp and needed 10 days to pass the team’s conditioning test, and on December 7, 2010, the club suspended him without pay for the last four games for “conduct detrimental to the club.”

In July 2011 Washington traded him to New England for a fifth-round pick in the 2013 draft. In March 2015 he told a Nashville radio station what Washington had cost him. “At Washington, it took my love away from the game,” he said.

Asante Samuel

Four playoff interceptions returned for touchdowns is the most in NFL postseason history, by the league’s 2025 Record & Fact Book, and the total belongs to Asante Samuel. One of them came off Peyton Manning, a 39-yarder in the AFC title game in January 2007. The ball people remember, though, is one he did not catch. With 1:20 left in Super Bowl XLII and New England ahead 14-10, Eli Manning threw deep for David Tyree, and Samuel could not hold on to what would have been a game-sealing interception. On the next snap Manning escaped and found Tyree for 32 yards and the Helmet Catch.

New England had drafted him in the fourth round, 120th overall, out of UCF in 2003, and he led the league with 10 interceptions in 2006, level with Champ Bailey. Philadelphia signed him the moment free agency opened in 2008, and he led the NFL again in 2009, with 9. Madden, which already counted him among the Eagles’ two best players at 95 overall, put his Agility at 99 three years in a row: in Madden NFL 10 if nfldraftbuzz is right, and on firmer ground in Madden NFL 11 and 12.

The relationship ended in public. In October 2011 he accused the Eagles’ front office of “playing with a lot of money, playing fantasy football, doing their thing.” In April 2012 Philadelphia traded him to Atlanta. The return was the 229th pick.

Calvin Johnson Jr.

The so-called Madden curse holds that a cover athlete’s season goes wrong, and Calvin Johnson disposed of it about as thoroughly as anyone could. Fans voted him onto the cover of Madden NFL 13, beating Cam Newton in the final of ESPN’s bracket on April 25, 2012, and that season he caught 122 passes for 1,964 yards, setting the NFL single-season record. When he passed Jerry Rice’s 1,848 on December 22, Rice said on the ESPN broadcast, “if anyone’s going to do it, I prefer Megatron to do it.” Detroit missed the playoffs, which the curse may score as a partial win.

The nickname came from his teammate Roy Williams at his first training camp in 2007, after the Transformers villain, and the frame supported it: 6-foot-5, 239 pounds, with a 42.5-inch vertical leap at his pro day. Madden priced in the leap before the yardage. ESPN’s Madden NFL 10 receiver rankings put his Jumping at 99, and the fan archive kept it there for Madden NFL 11 and 12, though nfldraftbuzz has the Madden 10 figure at a startling 87.

He retired on March 8, 2016, at 30, after nine seasons, all in Detroit, with a statement that read, “I have played my last game of football.” He had 731 catches and 11,619 yards, and Canton inducted him in 2021, the first year it could.

Chris Johnson

In 2013 National Geographic matched Chris Johnson against a cheetah for a special called Man v. Cheetah. The cheetah won, which was more than most defensive backs could say. At the 2008 Combine he had covered 40 yards in 4.24 seconds, a time the AP still described as the Combine record when John Ross beat it with a 4.22 in 2017, although Rondel Menendez had run the same 4.24 in 1999.

Madden NFL 10 shipped with his Speed at 99, and it stayed there at launch for the 11, 12 and 13 editions, the last confirmed by EA’s own published table, and once more in the 2013 version of Madden NFL 25, with 99 Acceleration added in the 11 and 12 editions. That run took in 2009, the season he became CJ2K: 2,006 rushing yards, 2,509 yards from scrimmage, the AP Offensive Player of the Year award and first-team All-Pro. Tennessee had found him 24th overall in 2008, out of East Carolina, and on December 17, 2012, against the Jets, he broke a 94-yard touchdown run, the longest of his career.

He finished with 9,651 rushing yards and six straight 1,000-yard seasons to open his career. The 2,509 yards from scrimmage of 2009 sat at the top of the NFL’s 2025 Record & Fact Book, ahead of Marshall Faulk’s 2,429 from 1999, which is the kind of company a 99 Speed rating is supposed to keep.

Larry Fitzgerald

In his teens, the future Cardinal Larry Fitzgerald worked as a ball boy for the Minnesota Vikings, whose roster then included a young Randy Moss. In 2026 it was Moss, on a friend’s yacht in Florida, who told him he was going into the Hall of Fame.

The jump from the sideline was considerable. In the 2008 postseason Fitzgerald caught 30 passes for 546 yards and 7 touchdowns in four games, and the Cardinals counted the yards and touchdowns as the most in a single postseason in league history. In Super Bowl XLIII he caught a short pass from Kurt Warner and ran 64 yards untouched for a 23-20 lead with 2:37 left, before Pittsburgh won 27-23. Madden NFL 10 then put him on its cover alongside Troy Polamalu, the Steelers safety, in what Destructoid reported as the first two-player cover in the series, and the same edition gave him 99 Jumping, per ESPN’s ratings rundown. The fan archive kept the 99 through Madden NFL 11, 12 and 13.

He played 17 seasons, all for Arizona, and finished with 1,432 receptions, a total that trailed only Jerry Rice’s in the league’s 2025 record book. When the voters chose him for Canton on February 5, 2026, at the first opportunity, the man who read out his name was Kurt Warner, who had thrown him the 64-yarder.

Mason Crosby

Two seconds remained at Lambeau Field on September 9, 2007, when a sixth-round rookie named Mason Crosby kicked a 42-yard field goal to beat the Eagles 16-13, his third of the afternoon after a 53-yarder and a 37-yarder. He stayed in Green Bay long enough to score 1,918 points and make 395 field goals, both franchise records.

Madden NFL 10 and 11 both opened with his Kick Power at 99, ESPN’s 2009 Packers ratings table among the witnesses for the first of them. His longest kick, 58 yards, came at Minnesota in 2011, and in Super Bowl XLV he made the 23-yarder with 2:07 left that set the final score, 31-25 over Pittsburgh. In 2020 he made all 16 of his field-goal attempts.

He also had the other kind of day. On October 7, 2018, at Detroit, he missed four field goals and an extra point, which ESPN’s Rob Demovsky reckoned made him the first kicker since 2001 to miss five kicks in one game, and then made a 41-yarder with 2 seconds left. Three weeks earlier he had gone 5-for-5 against Minnesota, tied the club record, and missed a 52-yarder at the end of a 29-29 tie. Asked about the time he chased down Cordarrelle Patterson on a kickoff return and forced a fumble, he explained, “I played free safety in high school.”

Mat McBriar

In 2006 the Dallas Cowboys’ punter, a Melbourne-born former University of Hawaii player named Mat McBriar, averaged 48.2 yards a kick, the best in the NFL, and made the Pro Bowl. In 2010 he did it again, at 47.9, and went back. In between, on October 12, 2008, his first career blocked punt was returned for a touchdown on the final play of an overtime loss to Arizona, and he fractured his kicking foot, ending a season in which he had been averaging a career-best 49.0 yards.

Madden NFL 10, released the following summer, rated his Kick Power at 99, at least according to the nfldraftbuzz fan database, which is the only surviving record of that figure; the full Madden NFL 10 ratings are among the harder ones to recover, and no second dataset covers Dallas punters. If the number is right, Madden handed a 99 to a punter coming off a broken foot, which is either faith or good scouting.

He had reached Dallas undrafted, by way of brief stops in Denver and Seattle in 2003, and his career ran to 602 punts for 27,191 yards, a 45.2 average over 11 seasons with the Cowboys, Eagles, Steelers and Chargers. In 2009, a year before his second Pro Bowl season, he dropped 38 punts inside the 20, which is the punter’s version of a good handwriting grade.

Percy Harvin

Sports Illustrated’s verdict on Percy Harvin’s night in Super Bowl XLVIII was that he “pretty much earned his entire year’s contract with one play.” The play was the opening kickoff of the second half, which he returned 87 yards for a touchdown to put Seattle ahead 29-0 on the way to a 43-8 rout. The contract needed earning: after a hip operation he had been available for 20 snaps of the regular season.

Minnesota drafted him 22nd overall out of Florida in 2009, and he was that season’s AP Offensive Rookie of the Year. Madden’s agility numbers followed him through three launch rosters: 99 in Madden NFL 10 on ESPN’s ratings page, where nfldraftbuzz has 98; 99 in Madden NFL 11 by nfldraftbuzz alone; and 99 in Madden NFL 12 with every source agreeing. Seattle wanted him badly enough in March 2013 to send the Vikings the No. 25 pick, a seventh-rounder and a 2014 third-round choice, and then paid him $67 million over six years, $25.5 million of it guaranteed.

Migraines followed him throughout. After he collapsed at a Vikings practice in August 2010 he told NBC’s Andrea Kremer that his doctors believed sleep apnea was the primary cause. He retired in April 2016, came back for Buffalo that November and retired again in March 2017. The Super Bowl return is the line on his record that needs no footnote.

DeSean Jackson

On December 19, 2010, the Eagles trailed the Giants 31-10 in the fourth quarter at the New Meadowlands, scored 21 points to tie it, and then watched the Giants punt to DeSean Jackson in the final seconds. He muffed it, picked it up and ran 65 yards for the winning touchdown as time expired, which the Eagles describe as the first game in NFL history to end on a walk-off punt return. In 2013 NFL.com readers voted it the greatest play in league history.

Speed was the whole act. Jackson ran an official 4.35 at the 2008 Combine at about 169 pounds, and Philadelphia took him 49th overall. Madden NFL 11 and Madden NFL 12 both shipped with his Speed and Agility at 99 together, and Madden NFL 13 kept the Agility. In 2009 he scored 8 touchdowns of at least 50 yards, tying the NFL record, and became the first player chosen for the Pro Bowl at two positions, receiver and returner.

The speed occasionally outran the paperwork. On Monday night, September 15, 2008, as a rookie at Dallas, he caught a 60-yard pass from Donovan McNabb and flipped the ball away at the 1-yard line before crossing the goal line, and Brian Westbrook scored on the next play instead. When Delaware State hired him as head coach on December 27, 2024, the school noted that he held the NFL record for the most catches of 60-plus and 80-plus yards. None, presumably, stopped at the 1.

Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie

A typo opened the 2018 retirement statement of Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, and it said most of what needed saying: “A kid with one kid and no college offers lasted 11 years in the NFL.” He had one kidney, he had played for four high schools in four years, and only Tennessee State, an FCS school, recruited him.

Arizona took him 16th overall in 2008, the first FCS player picked in the first round since 2000, after a Combine at which, an NFL front-office official told the Chicago Tribune, “He stole the show”: a 40-yard dash timed at 4.33 or 4.29 seconds, depending on the source, and a 38.5-inch vertical jump. Madden took the jump seriously for a long time. His Jumping was 99 in six consecutive launch rosters, from Madden NFL 11 through Madden NFL 16 by way of the 2013 Madden NFL 25, with four different teams along the way.

He also acquired a relative that spring. The Chargers cornerback Antonio Cromartie, who appears later on this list, was his cousin, and according to a Colts.com draft feature they had only recently met. Rodgers-Cromartie went on to play in two Super Bowls, with Arizona and Denver, and lost both; the second was the night Percy Harvin opened the second half by running a kickoff back 87 yards. He made 2 Pro Bowls and intercepted 30 passes, which for a player with one kidney and one scholarship offer is a perfectly respectable return.

Antonio Cromartie

Ryan Longwell’s 57-yard field-goal try at the end of the first half at the Metrodome, on November 4, 2007, fell short, and Antonio Cromartie, waiting at the back of the end zone, caught it and ran it all the way out. The return covered 109 yards, the longest play possible. Cordarrelle Patterson eventually matched it, in 2013, with a kickoff return inside the same building.

That was the season Cromartie led the NFL with 10 interceptions, breaking a Chargers record that Charlie McNeil had set with 9 in 1961, and the jump in his game was no accident. Eight months after tearing his ACL at Florida State he went to the 2006 Combine, and at his pro day a few weeks later he raised his vertical from 38 inches to 42. San Diego took him 19th overall. Madden NFL 12, which listed him as a New York Jet, rated his Jumping at 99 with every source in agreement, and Madden NFL 13 and the first of the two Madden NFL 25s kept him there, until the Week 9 roster update of that season trimmed it to 98, as EA’s update notes, preserved by fans, record.

His cousin Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie held the same 99 for six straight editions. Antonio settled for three, plus 4 Pro Bowls and 31 interceptions. The 109 yards, short of a change to the rulebook, can be equaled but never beaten.

Haloti Ngata

“Just a man standing on top of the world with a heart full of gratitude,” Haloti Ngata wrote on March 18, 2019, in an Instagram video filmed at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. “I’m retiring on top.” It is hard to think of a more literal way of making the point.

Strength had been his business throughout. At the 2006 Combine he managed 37 bench-press repetitions at about 338 pounds, and Baltimore took him 12th overall out of Oregon. By the time Madden NFL 12 came out he had been a first-team All-Pro in 2010, and the game set his Strength at 99, a figure ESPN’s ratings coverage, the fan archive and nfldraftbuzz all share. NFL.com, looking back, said he “consistently forklifted offensive linemen into the quarterback’s lap,” and the Ravens’ own website credited him with ‘one breaking of Ben Roethlisberger’s nose,’ which it seemed to count as a career highlight.

He won Super Bowl XLVII with Baltimore on February 3, 2013, made 5 Pro Bowls and left for Detroit in 2015 in a trade for fourth- and fifth-round picks that Eric DeCosta, the Ravens’ general manager, later described as a ‘sickening feeling.’ The Ravens put him in their Ring of Honor on October 11, 2021, two years after the mountain.

Chris Rainey

Agility, in the pre-draft sense, is measured by two drills that resemble a man trying to escape a small room: the 20-yard shuttle and the three-cone. Chris Rainey ran them in 3.93 and 6.50 seconds, numbers that one fan-run database places in the 98th and 99th percentiles of halfbacks it has measured. Pittsburgh, undeterred by a 5-foot-8, 180-pound frame, drafted him 159th overall in 2012, out of Florida.

Madden NFL 13 put his Agility at 99 when it went on sale, as both maddenratings.net and nfldraftbuzz record. His NFL career amounted to 18 games and 2 touchdowns, with the Steelers in 2012 and the Colts in 2013. Madden NFL 15 then listed him with Indianapolis at 99 Agility again, which showed more faith than Indianapolis had: the Colts released him on July 28, 2014. The 2013 Madden NFL 25, in between, had not rated him 99 at all.

The agility found a better market in Canada. With the BC Lions in 2016 he returned kickoffs for 1,359 yards and punts for 942, and over the seasons CFL.ca itemizes he ran back 302 punts for 3,072 yards and 4 touchdowns, in a career that took in Montreal, BC and Toronto. CFL.ca’s ledger shows 92 regular-season games, 2 division finals and no Grey Cup.

Darren Sproles

“When my height and weight were announced, I could hear laughing from the audience,” Darren Sproles wrote of his 2005 Scouting Combine. The NFL lists him at 5-foot-6. San Diego took him in the fourth round, 130th overall, out of Kansas State, where he had led the nation with 1,986 rushing yards in 2003.

In 2011, for New Orleans, he gained 2,696 all-purpose yards, a single-season record when he set it, just ahead of Derrick Mason’s 2,690. Madden NFL 13 answered with 99 Agility at launch, by both surviving fan datasets, and with something rarer. EA had run a fan vote for category ratings, and its own published table, which had Sproles at 98 Acceleration, level with Chris Johnson for the best among running backs, said the winners would appear in the week-one roster update; ESPN said they would arrive when the game shipped. Either way, his Acceleration went to 99.

He played 15 seasons for the Chargers, Saints and Eagles and collected a Super Bowl LII ring in a season he had lost in September, when he tore his ACL and broke his arm on the same play. His summary, in the 2019 letter announcing his retirement, was characteristically short: “I rode it until the wheels fell off.”

LeSean McCoy

“McCoy’s 99 Elusiveness (tied with Jamaal Charles, ranked first in NFL), 99 AGI (first), and 98 ACC (first) make Shady a very dangerous man in Madden NFL 15,” EA’s Donny Moore announced in July 2014, which is about as close as the ratings office comes to a love letter. Elusiveness falls outside this list. The Agility does not.

The affection was long-standing. Madden NFL 13 had already opened with his Agility at 99, and in Madden NFL 25’s 2013 edition the Week 3 roster update lifted it from 98 back to 99, three months before the snow game. On December 8, 2013, in a snowstorm at Lincoln Financial Field, he ran for 217 yards and two fourth-quarter touchdowns against Detroit, and he finished the season as the NFL’s rushing champion with 1,607 yards, then the Eagles’ single-season record.

Sports Illustrated’s Andy Benoit called him “the most dynamic runner the NFL has seen since Barry Sanders” and suggested that the lateral agility might have been why Chip Kelly, who preferred his backs to run north and south, traded him to Buffalo for Kiko Alonso in March 2015. Madden NFL 16 duly listed a Buffalo Bill at 99 Agility. When McCoy retired as an Eagle in 2021, he said, “My only regret I have is not being an Eagle in my prime.”

Matthew Stafford

Steve Sabol, the president of NFL Films, said that no player his company had wired for sound had ever been as dramatic as Matthew Stafford against Cleveland on November 22, 2009. The rookie, drafted first overall that April, hurt his non-throwing shoulder late in the game, eluded the trainers, ran back on for the final play and threw a 1-yard touchdown to Brandon Pettigrew with no time left for a 38-37 win. He finished with 422 yards and 5 touchdowns.

The arm became a fixture at the top of Madden’s scale. EA’s published table for Madden NFL 13 had his Throw Power at 99, after a 2011 season of 5,038 yards and 41 touchdowns, both Lions records, and the fan archive keeps him at 99 through the 2013 Madden NFL 25 and Madden NFL 15. Madden NFL 16 opened at 99 too, until the Week 4 roster update shaved it to 98.

Detroit traded him to the Rams for Jared Goff and draft picks on March 18, 2021, and in his first season in Los Angeles he won Super Bowl LVI, 23-20 over Cincinnati. On February 5, 2026, at 37, he was named the Most Valuable Player of the 2025 season, after leading the league with 46 touchdown passes and only 8 interceptions. Madden had believed in the arm for a long time. The voters caught up eventually.

Mike Wallace

Ninety-five yards from Ben Roethlisberger at Arizona on October 23, 2011; 95 yards from Joe Flacco against Pittsburgh on November 6, 2016. Mike Wallace caught the longest passes of his career for and against the same team.

He had arrived in Pittsburgh as an 84th overall pick from Ole Miss in 2009 and averaged 19.4 yards a catch as a rookie, the best in the league, including a 19-yard touchdown with no time left to beat Green Bay 37-36 that December. EA’s published receiver table for Madden NFL 13 gave him 99 Acceleration and 99 Speed. The fan archive and nfldraftbuzz record the Speed at 98, and Behind the Steel Curtain’s review of that game agreed, noting that “His speed and 99 acceleration allows Wallace to burn cornerbacks.” The Acceleration, at least, is beyond dispute, and in the next edition, with Wallace by then a Dolphin, a fan copy of EA’s Week 11 roster update shows it falling from 99 to 98.

Miami had signed him on March 12, 2013, for five years and $60 million, with $27 million guaranteed, which NFL.com called the richest contract among that year’s free agents. He moved on to Minnesota, Baltimore and Philadelphia and finished with 538 catches and 8,072 yards. The Steelers, who saw both 95-yarders, presumably preferred the first.

Thomas Morstead

“We’re running Ambush,” Sean Payton told the Saints at halftime of Super Bowl XLIV, with New Orleans trailing Indianapolis 10-6, and a 23-year-old rookie punter named Thomas Morstead absorbed the news. “It’s the biggest stage in the world… I was terrified,” he said later. His onside kick to open the second half bounced off the Colts’ Hank Baskett, Chris Reis came up with it, and the Saints went on to win 31-17.

The leg was usually asked to go farther. In 2012 Morstead averaged 50.1 yards a punt and made the Pro Bowl; the 2025 edition of the league’s record book lists that average as the best season in Saints history. Madden rated his Kick Power 99 at the launch of both the 13 edition and the next year’s game, maddenratings.net and nfldraftbuzz agreeing, until the roster update for the January 2014 playoff weekend lowered it to 98. New Orleans had drafted him 164th overall in 2009, out of SMU.

His best-known act came in a defeat. In a Divisional Round loss at Minnesota on January 14, 2018, he tore rib cartilage, kept punting, and was among the first Saints back on the field for the Vikings’ meaningless final extra point. Vikings fans responded by donating to his foundation, more than $100,000 by the following Wednesday night and about $200,000 by Friday. He took the money to Children’s Hospital in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Greg Zuerlein

Missouri Western’s alumni magazine introduced its most famous kicker in January 2013 with a sentence fragment: “Legatron. Greg the Leg.” Three months earlier, on September 30, 2012, Greg Zuerlein, a sixth-round rookie with the St. Louis Rams, had made field goals of 58 and 60 yards against Seattle in a 19-13 win.

He had taken an unusual road to that afternoon: three seasons at Division II Nebraska-Omaha, until the school shut its football program after the 2010 season, and then one at Missouri Western, where he made 21 straight field goals. The 2013 game titled Madden NFL 25 gave him 99 Kick Power, by the reckoning of both fan datasets. In 2017 he was a first-team All-Pro, having gone 7-for-7 at Dallas on October 1.

His biggest kick went 57 yards. In overtime of the NFC Championship Game on January 20, 2019, at the Superdome, it beat the Saints 26-23 and sent the Rams to Super Bowl LIII. In September 2020, with Dallas, he contributed a different sort of masterpiece, an onside kick that barely rolled 10 yards before the Cowboys recovered it on the way to a 40-39 win over Atlanta. His special teams coordinator, John Fassel, explained the technique: “It’s laying on the turf like a watermelon and you spin it like a watermelon would spin.”

Jamaal Charles

Four touchdown catches and a touchdown run in one afternoon is the kind of line people normally manufacture with a controller, and on December 15, 2013, at Oakland, Jamaal Charles produced it with his legs. The catches, all from Alex Smith, covered 49, 39, 16 and 71 yards; the run covered 1. Kansas City won 56-31, and his 5 touchdowns and 30 points drew level with the club’s single-game records, which had belonged to Abner Haynes since 1961.

Madden moved the following week, whether or not it had been watching. Roster Update #17 to the first game called Madden NFL 25, issued for Week 16, took his Acceleration from 98 to 99, by the reckoning of a single fan archive that copied the change log. He is one of the few names here who reached the top in December rather than in August.

The speed had been on the record for years. On January 3, 2010, at Denver, he ran 25 times for 259 yards, a Chiefs single-game record, and in 2010 he gained 1,467 yards at 6.4 a carry and was named a first-team All-Pro. He left Kansas City with 7,260 rushing yards, more than anyone else in the franchise’s history, and a career average of 5.4, which Bleacher Report, when he retired in May 2019, called the fourth-most of all time. The Chiefs had found him in 2008, out of Texas, with the 73rd pick.

Marquise Goodwin

Before he caught a pass in the NFL, Marquise Goodwin finished 10th in the long-jump final at the London Olympics on August 4, 2012, with a best of 7.80 meters, having reached 8.11 in qualifying the day before. Buffalo drafted him 78th overall the following spring, out of Texas, after a 4.27 in the 40 at the Combine that no receiver that year could beat.

Madden took the stopwatch at its word. During his rookie season, a Week 12 roster update to the 2013 Madden NFL 25 lifted his Acceleration from 96 to 99, and Madden NFL 15 shipped with him at 99 until the Week 7 update took a point back. Both figures come from a fan archive that copied EA’s rosters and update notes, with nfldraftbuzz agreeing on the launch number: good evidence, if not EA’s own.

His best-remembered catch came in Santa Clara on November 12, 2017. In the early hours of that morning he and his wife, Morgan Goodwin-Snow, had lost their baby son after premature labor. He played anyway, caught an 83-yard touchdown pass from C.J. Beathard in the second quarter, blew a kiss to the sky and dropped to both knees in the end zone while teammates gathered around him. The 49ers beat the Giants 31-21 for their first win of the season. The Pro Football Writers of America gave him the George Halas Award for 2018, which goes to the player, coach or staff member who overcomes the most adversity to succeed.

Matt Prater

Few ratings on this list have moved as often as the Kick Power of Matt Prater. The first Madden NFL 25, in 2013, started him at 99; the Week 12 update took a point off, Week 15 put it back and the Super Bowl update removed it again, according to a fan transcription of the notes. Madden NFL 15 opened at 99 too, until Week 7. Madden NFL 22 began him at 98, raised him to 99 in an update dated September 22, 2021, and lowered him on December 3, 2021, in the Week 12 update, when EA trimmed Kick Power by exactly 1 point for 35 of the 37 kickers on file. Joey Slye and Graham Gano fell to 98 with him, which left Justin Tucker alone at 99.

The leg had earned its fluctuating reputation. On December 8, 2013, as the first half ended against Tennessee in Denver, Prater made a 64-yard field goal, breaking the 63-yard record that Tom Dempsey had set in 1970. ProFootballTalk reckoned it “would have been good from at least 65 1/2.” It remained the league record until Tucker’s 66-yarder on September 26, 2021. In that 2013 season Prater also made 75 extra points without a miss, a single-season record.

The 2006 draft ignored him entirely after his years at UCF, and the Lions, Dolphins and Falcons each cut him before Denver signed him. On September 7, 2025, his 32-yarder as time expired beat Baltimore 41-40 for Buffalo.

Byron Jones

“You are now a verified freak, Mr. Jones,” Mike Mayock told NFL Network’s viewers on February 23, 2015, and for once the hyperbole had a tape measure behind it. Byron Jones of UConn had just gone 12 feet 3 inches in the broad jump at the Scouting Combine, which NFL.com said was “thought to have broken a 46-year-old world record,” while conceding that “nothing has been made official yet.” The standing long jump had left the Olympics after 1912, so nobody was in a hurry to ratify it. He added a 44.5-inch vertical, and he did it all without running the 40, because he was recovering from surgery on a torn labrum.

Dallas took him 27th overall that spring, and Madden NFL 16 gave the rookie 99 Jumping, by the agreement of two fan databases. Madden NFL 17 and 18 kept the number, with a copy of EA’s own data joining the fan sources. He moved from free safety to cornerback in 2018, made his only Pro Bowl that year, and in 2020 joined Miami on a deal NFL.com expected to be five years and $82 million, which made him the best-paid cornerback in the league.

The legs did not last as long as the jump. After missing the 2022 season he wrote, on February 25, 2023: “Today I can’t run or jump because of my injuries sustained playing this game.” The Dolphins released him on March 15, 2023.

Josh Allen

EA’s appraisal of the rookie, in a Madden NFL 19 article on first-year quarterbacks, was short and confident: “he sports a 99 Throw Power. That makes him the strongest passer in the game.” Buffalo had traded up from the 12th pick to the seventh in April 2018 to take Josh Allen out of Wyoming, and on September 23 at Minnesota he hurdled the linebacker Anthony Barr for a first down, which is not in the quarterback manual.

The number then refused to move. Allen held 99 Throw Power at launch in seven straight editions, from Madden NFL 19 to the 2024 Madden NFL 25, and in EA’s in-season data for the 22, 23 and 24 games it never dipped, Super Bowl included. He was the Madden NFL 24 cover athlete, the first Bill to get the job since the game began putting players on the box in 1994, and on February 6, 2025 he was named the MVP of the 2024 season, with 27 first-place votes, after scoring 41 touchdowns by air, ground and, once, as a receiver. Madden NFL 26 set the arm at 98 for the whole season.

No arm outruns pass rushers. On December 21, 2025, at Cleveland, with 1:09 left in the first half, Alex Wright and Myles Garrett shared a sack that cost him 22 yards and left the ball at the Buffalo 1, which put Allen among the quarterbacks Myles Garrett sacked in his record-breaking season of 23. The Bills won 23-20 anyway.

Tyreek Hill

“Following Week 6, we maxed out Hill’s speed to 99,” EA announced in its Madden NFL 19 midseason ratings post, and the game left him there through the 2024 Madden NFL 25. From Madden NFL 20 through 24 his Acceleration matched it, and EA’s weekly files for 22, 23 and 24 show both at 99 in every iteration, for a Chief in the first of those and a Dolphin in the other two. Madden NFL 26 began him at 98.

The case had been made in his rookie season. On November 27, 2016, at Denver, Tyreek Hill scored on an 86-yard kickoff return, a 3-yard run and a 3-yard catch from Alex Smith, and Kansas City won 30-27 in overtime. NFL.com said no one had scored all three ways in one game since Gale Sayers in 1965. Next Gen Stats timed the return at 22.77 mph, the second-highest ball-carrier speed it logged that season. The highest, 23.24, was his too, on a kickoff return against Houston that an offensive holding penalty wiped out. His center, Mitch Morse, called him “a freak of nature.”

The Chiefs had taken him as a fifth-round pick in 2016, after he ran 4.25 at his pro day at West Alabama, by NFL.com’s account. Miami traded for him ahead of the 2022 season, and in 2023 he caught 119 passes for 1,799 yards, which made him the first player to pass 1,700 receiving yards in more than one season. Calvin Johnson’s 1,964 survived.

Aaron Donald

Ratings adjusters are not given to gushing, but Donny Moore made an exception in July 2022: “If we were going to bring back a 100 rating, it should first come for Aaron Donald.” The context was his overall rating, which this list ignores, but Donald’s Strength had already reached 99 as well.

He had climbed there slowly. His Strength as a rookie in Madden NFL 15 was 93 and in Madden NFL 19 it was 97, even as he sat in the 99 Club for his overall rating. Madden NFL 20 finally gave him 99 Strength, and the next four editions kept it, and in the three of those for which EA’s own in-season files survive, no week shows it lower.

The Rams had drafted him 13th overall in 2014 out of Pittsburgh, after a 4.68 in the 40 at 285 pounds. He collected 20.5 sacks in 2018 and the Defensive Player of the Year award for 2017, 2018 and 2020. His most famous moment arrived at the end of Super Bowl LVI on February 13, 2022: a tackle for no gain on third-and-1, then, on fourth down with 43 seconds left, the pressure that hurried Joe Burrow into an incompletion and sealed a 23-20 Rams win.

He retired on March 15, 2024, after 10 seasons, and came back on August 30, 2026, on a one-year, $20 million contract. Madden NFL 27, handed a 35-year-old, put his Strength at 97, which is roughly what retirement costs.

DeAndre Hopkins

Eleven seconds remained when Kyler Murray took the snap against Buffalo on November 15, 2020. He threw the ball 43 yards toward the end zone, and DeAndre Hopkins caught it over three Bills defenders for a 32-30 Cardinals win. Hopkins finished with seven catches for 127 yards and was named the NFC’s Offensive Player of the Week, an honor that undersold the afternoon.

Madden had rated precisely that skill for some time. Madden NFL 20 gave Hopkins, then a Houston Texan, 99 Jumping, and in March 2020 Houston traded him to Arizona for David Johnson and draft picks, so the same 99 changed teams with him. Madden NFL 21, 22 and 23 kept it, and EA’s files for the last two show it unchanged through every weekly update and the Super Bowl.

The hands helped. At the 2013 Combine they measured 10 inches, and by December 1, 2018, according to Pro Football Focus, he had yet to drop a pass that season on 102 targets. Houston had drafted him 27th overall in 2013 out of Clemson. His mother, Sabrina Greenlee, lost her sight in 2002 when an attacker threw lye and bleach at her, and after touchdowns he gave her the ball.

Over 13 seasons and five teams he caught 1,006 passes for 13,295 yards and 85 touchdowns. On July 31, 2026, Georgia Tech announced that he had joined its staff as assistant wide receivers coach, where the jumping is mostly done by other people.

Graham Gano

Sixty-three yards, with 0:01 on the clock and Carolina a point behind the Giants, was the distance Graham Gano faced at Bank of America Stadium on October 7, 2018. He made it, the Panthers won 33-31, and NFL.com noted that it tied Tom Dempsey for the longest game-winning field goal in NFL history. Giants.com later called it the longest field goal an opponent had kicked in Giants history, which did not stop the Giants from signing him on August 19, 2020.

Madden caught up the next summer. Madden NFL 20 gave him 99 Kick Power at launch, Madden NFL 21 did the same, and Madden NFL 22 started him there too, with EA’s files keeping him at 99 through Week 11 before the update that cost nearly every kicker in the game a point.

He had taken a roundabout road. Born in Arbroath, Scotland, he won the 2008 Lou Groza Award at Florida State, making 24 of 26 field goals, then went undrafted, was waived by Baltimore and joined Washington on December 8, 2009. He made the Pro Bowl after the 2017 season as a replacement for Greg Zuerlein, having led the league at 96.7 percent, and for the Giants he made 37 field goals in a row, beginning on September 20, 2020. Through 2025 he had made 342 field goals in the regular season, and none of them went farther than the one against the team that later employed him.

Brett Maher

Three field goals of 60 yards or more by one kicker had never happened in the NFL until October 2019, when NFL.com reported that Brett Maher of the Dallas Cowboys had become the first kicker in league history to make that many. He had done it with a 62-yarder against the Eagles on December 9, 2018, another 62 at the Jets on October 13, 2019, and a 63 against the Eagles a week later, each as a first half ended. The last was the longest field goal in Cowboys history at the time.

Distance was never the trouble; the short ones were. Dallas cut him on December 9, 2019, after he had made 66.7 percent of 30 attempts. By the time Madden NFL 21 came out on August 28, 2020, rating his Kick Power 99 by the reckoning of the fan ratings archives, he was a New York Jet, and the Jets released him on August 31, 2020.

He went back to Dallas and in 2022 scored 137 points, with a league-leading 78 touchbacks. Then, in a wild-card win at Tampa Bay on January 16, 2023, he missed four of five extra points, which Yahoo Sports called an NFL record for a game. Dak Prescott, unshaken, announced afterward: “I’m Money Maher’s biggest fan.” In 2026 Nebraska, where he had once been the Big Ten’s Kicker and Punter of the Year, made him its special teams coordinator.

Joey Slye

A foot, by CBS Sports’ estimate, separated Joey Slye from a field goal no NFL kicker had ever made. His 65-yard attempt against the Saints on October 25, 2020 fell about that far short, and on November 8 a 67-yarder at the end of the Chiefs game drifted wide right in a 33-31 Carolina loss. Neither counted, which is how kicking works.

He had arrived by the back door, undrafted in 2018 and cut by the Giants before the Panthers signed him on August 1, 2019, and he got the job when Graham Gano went on injured reserve. As a rookie he made 25 of 32 field goals and led the NFL with eight from 50 yards or more, a Panthers record. Madden NFL 22, released on August 20, 2021, gave him 99 Kick Power in EA’s own launch file. Carolina released him eight days later, and in that one season he passed through the Texans, the 49ers and Washington while the rating outlasted every job, until the December update trimmed it to 98 along with almost everyone else’s.

The long ones kept coming. On October 29, 2023 he made a 61-yarder against the Eagles, a Commanders franchise record, and on September 29, 2024, for New England at San Francisco, a 63-yarder that broke Stephen Gostkowski’s Patriots mark of 62. In 2025, with Tennessee, he kicked the first game-winning field goal of his career, as time expired against Arizona in a 22-21 win. It was from 29 yards.

Justin Tucker

Ford Field was the scene of both of Justin Tucker’s most outrageous games. On December 16, 2013, he kicked six field goals there, of 29, 24, 32, 49, 53 and 61 yards, the last with 0:38 left, and Baltimore beat Detroit 18-16. On September 26, 2021, in the same building, he made a 66-yarder as time expired for a 19-17 win, then the longest field goal the league had seen. It held that distinction until Cam Little’s 68 on November 2, 2025.

When EA raised his overall rating from 87 to 99 for a limited time after the 66-yarder, CBS Sports pointed out that “He had 99 kicking power prior to the ratings boost.” EA’s own files show that Kick Power at 99 at the launch of Madden NFL 22, 23 and 24 and in every update of those three seasons, and the same 99 turns up for the 2024 edition in a pair of fan datasets that agree.

Through the 2024 season he had made 417 of 468 field goals, 89.1 percent, the best career rate among kickers with 100 or more field goals in the NFL’s own record book covering seasons through 2024. His 1,775 points set a Ravens record. At Texas he studied under the Russian bass Nikita Storojev, and Baltimore Magazine reported that he could sing operatic arias in seven languages. He had first tried soccer as a boy and given it up: “I was getting too many yellow cards. I really liked the contact.”

Ryan Stonehouse

Sammy Baugh’s punting average of 51.4 yards had been the NFL’s single-season record since 1940. In 2022 an undrafted rookie from Colorado State broke it, averaging 53.10 on 90 punts for the Tennessee Titans, and in 2023 Ryan Stonehouse averaged 53.06, so that the two best seasons in the record book belonged to the same man by the end of 2024.

Tennessee had made room for him by releasing Brett Kern, its all-time leading punter, on August 29, 2022. In his first three NFL games, SI reported, he averaged 57.0, 55.5 and 60.3, the last including a 70-yarder against the Raiders. He was a second-team All-Pro for 2022.

Madden gave the leg its due. EA’s launch file for Madden NFL 24 rated his Kick Power 99, and it stayed there through every update of that season; two fan datasets have him at 99 again in the 2024 Madden NFL 25. Madden NFL 27 launched with him at 99 as well, as a free agent with no team listed and an overall of 74, and by the Week 1 update he had dropped out of EA’s file entirely.

The technique came from home. His father, Paul, punted at Stanford and an uncle at USC, and Stonehouse drops the ball underhand, the family way. His college athletic department’s profile noted that he had once bought “an old Ford van for $750″ to convert, and that people told him he looked like Jeff Spicoli.

Dexter Lawrence II

Double teams are the usual tribute paid to a dominant defensive tackle, and NFL Research counted 1,103 of them against Dexter Lawrence II on pass rushes across five seasons, which made him the only player in quadruple digits as of April 2026. His double-team rate since 2021, 53.2 percent, was the league’s highest. Offensive coordinators had reached the obvious conclusion.

He had looked the part from the start. At the 2019 Combine he weighed 342 pounds, ran the 40 in 5.05 seconds and did 36 bench-press repetitions, and the Giants took him 17th overall out of Clemson with a pick they had received from Cleveland in the Odell Beckham Jr. trade. In 2024 he collected 9.0 sacks in 12 games, a career high, 3.0 of them on Geno Smith.

Madden noticed in the middle of that season. The 2024 Madden NFL 25 opened with his Strength at 96, and EA’s in-season updates raised it to 99. Madden NFL 26 started him there and kept him there through Week 13, but the Week 14 update dropped him to 97 while lifting Vita Vea past him. Madden NFL 27 left him at 97, by then as a Cincinnati Bengal; the Giants had traded him in April 2026 for the No. 10 pick. His new coach, Zac Taylor, described one goal-line stop against Miami as looking “like a giant flying squirrel, jumping over the top of the center,” which is not a phrase usually applied to 350 pounds.

Brandon Aubrey

Professional soccer and software engineering were both behind Brandon Aubrey by the time he kicked in the NFL. Toronto FC had drafted him 21st overall in the 2017 MLS SuperDraft after four years at Notre Dame, and after two seasons in the lower leagues he went to work writing code. In early 2019, watching a kicker miss on television, his wife told him: “You could do that.” He took what MLSsoccer.com reported as more than a 50% pay cut to join the USFL’s Birmingham Stallions in 2022.

Dallas signed him, and he made his debut on September 10, 2023, at 28. He then made his first 35 field goals, an NFL record to start a career. On September 22, 2024 he hit a 65-yarder against Baltimore, the longest in Cowboys history, and on December 4, 2025 at Detroit he made kicks of 55, 57 and 63 yards in one game, a record for field goals of 55 or more.

EA’s view arrived in two editions. Madden NFL 26 put his Kick Power at the 99 ceiling from launch to the Super Bowl iteration, and Madden NFL 27 opened the same way, its ratings recap calling him “the best kicker in the game” with “the best Kick Power at a 99 max rating.” On April 20, 2026 the Cowboys gave him a four-year, $28 million extension, the largest deal for a kicker in NFL history at the time. The software industry presumably coped.

Cam Little

“No joke, I haven’t even hung it up or done anything with it. It’s literally sitting in the pantry.” Cam Little was describing the ball from his 70-yard field goal against Pittsburgh on August 9, 2025, which he struck as the first half ended and which counted for nothing, because it was the preseason.

The regular season gave him another chance. On November 2, 2025, at Las Vegas, he made a 68-yarder as the first half expired, breaking the NFL record of 66 that Justin Tucker had set in 2021, and Jacksonville won 30-29 in overtime. On January 4, 2026, against Tennessee, he added a 67-yarder, then the longest outdoor field goal in league history, a kick to which Next Gen Stats had given a 4.4% chance of success. He had been a sixth-round pick in 2024, 212th overall, out of Arkansas.

EA got there first. Madden NFL 26 already had his Kick Power at 99 for the whole season, and Madden NFL 27 kept it, the game’s ratings recap saying he “definitely earned it after breaking the NFL record with a 68-yarder.” He also became, on December 14, 2025, the youngest player in NFL history to reach 50 field goals, at 22 years and 119 days. Asked about the record, Little was relaxed: “They’re gonna break that probably in no time, or I’ll break it again, so who knows.” Then on October 11, 2026, in London, his 57-yarder with one second left beat the Eagles 19-17.

Joe Milton III

Zero career starts is not the usual resume for the strongest arm in a video game, but Joe Milton III had exactly that when EA’s Madden NFL 27 ratings recap announced that “Dak’s backup Joe Milton clocks in with 99 Throw Power, the highest in the game for the second year in a row.” Madden NFL 26 had rated him 99 at launch and in every update through the Super Bowl, as a Cowboy with a 68 overall.

He had played only in relief. New England drafted him in the sixth round in 2024, 193rd overall, out of Tennessee, and on January 5, 2025 he replaced Drake Maye against Buffalo and went 22 of 29 for 241 yards, with a 48-yard touchdown pass to Kayshon Boutte and a 1-yard touchdown run. The Patriots won 23-16, which dropped them from the No. 1 pick in the draft to No. 4, and Robert Kraft fired the head coach, Jerod Mayo, after the game.

Dallas traded for him on April 3, 2025. Brian Schottenheimer, asked about the arm, said Milton “probably would’ve put a dent in Malik’s chest.” EA’s Madden NFL 27 launch file, without explanation, listed Milton on no team. The Cowboys waived him on August 31, 2026, and on October 16, 2026 the Philadelphia Eagles signed him off the Cowboys’ practice squad after Jalen Hurts was ruled out. EA’s Week 6 file had him back, an Eagle, with 99 Throw Power and 5 career games behind it.

Vita Vea

Strength in Madden is normally settled in August, but in Madden NFL 26 the top of the scale changed hands in December. Dexter Lawrence II held the defensive tackles’ 99 from launch through Week 13, with Vita Vea a point behind at 98. The Week 14 update swapped them: Vea went up to 99, with his overall rising from 93 to 94, and Lawrence went down to 97. Vea stayed at 99 through the Super Bowl update, and Madden NFL 27 opened with him there again, through Week 6.

The strength was never in doubt. At the 2018 Combine he did 41 bench-press repetitions at 347 pounds and ran the 40 in 5.10 seconds, and Tampa Bay made him the 12th pick of the 2018 draft, out of Washington. On November 24, 2019 at Atlanta he caught a 1-yard touchdown pass from Jameis Winston, his first NFL touchdown, in a 35-22 Buccaneers win. He was a Super Bowl LV champion when Tampa Bay beat Kansas City 31-9 on February 7, 2021, and by the 2026 season he had made 2 Pro Bowls.

The rating proved steadier than the contract talks. On July 27, 2026 he asked for a trade. His agent, Collin Roberts, said he did not “see it ending in anything but a trade,” and the general manager, Jason Licht, replied: “I have no plans on trading Vita.” Licht won. On August 19, 2026 Vea agreed to a one-year, $30 million extension, fully guaranteed, through the 2027 season.

Xavier Worthy

“That dude’s a video game. Like a 99 speed in Madden!” an NFL executive texted the insider Jordan Schultz after Xavier Worthy’s pro day in March 2024. The game took a while to agree. Madden NFL 25, the 2024 one, started him at 98 Speed, a point behind Tyreek Hill, who was the fastest player in it.

The case had already been made with a stopwatch. At the Scouting Combine on March 2, 2024, Worthy ran the 40 in 4.21 seconds, breaking John Ross’s 4.22 from 2017. “I watched the combine my whole life as a kid,” he said afterward. Kansas City traded up from 32 to 28 to draft him, and on September 5, 2024 he scored on his first NFL touch, from 21 yards, in a 27-20 win over Baltimore. In Super Bowl LIX on February 9, 2025 he caught 8 passes for 157 yards and 2 touchdowns, a Super Bowl record for a rookie receiver, though the Eagles won 40-22.

Madden NFL 26 raised him to 99 Speed and kept him there for all 22 iterations of the season. Then, on July 29, 2026, EA revealed that he would be the only player at 99 Speed when Madden NFL 27 launched, under the caption “Will anyone catch him?” Jameson Williams and Jahmyr Gibbs were next, at 98. The launch file listed 3,111 players, and exactly one of them was at the top of the speed scale.