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Madden NFL 23 is a fantasy in which you can enjoy a hyped-up simulation of NFL football with wild plays and unlikely outcomes. But a bit of reality will be patched in soon, as the game’s publisher, EA, is removing a touchdown celebration that has an unfortunate resonance with recent life-threatening events.
Damar Hamlin, a 24-year-old safety for the Buffalo Bills, collapsed soon after tackling a Cincinnati Bengals player during a Monday Night Football game on January 2. Local and league medical officials attended to Hamlin for 19 minutes, during which he received CPR and required an automated external defibrillator to restore his heartbeat after a cardiac arrest. Medical experts later suggested that Hamlin may have suffered an incident of commotio cordis, when a blow to the chest interrupts the electrical signals of the heart and creates an erratic heartbeat that stops blood flow to the brain.
Hamlin was later placed on a stretcher, given oxygen, and taken to a Cincinnati hospital. The game remained suspended for more than an hour before the NFL suspended it indefinitely. It was later canceled entirely. Hamlin was released from intensive care in Cincinnati on Monday and has returned to Buffalo, where he was released today.
All of which makes it a bit jarring to be able to trigger a team celebration in Madden NFL 23 in which a scoring player lies on the ground while a teammate pretends to administer CPR and another mimes applying a defibrillator.
A Madden NFL 23 touchdown celebration involving simulated CPR and defibrillation, soon to be removed from the game.
EA Sports told CBS Sports that it is “taking steps” to remove the celebration “via an update in the coming days.” The celebration has been available in the last three yearly versions of Madden. Madden did not invent emergency medical intervention as a touchdown celebration, as players have been spotted giving CPR to a ball in 2017 and, as recently as last Sunday, doing a more brief and subdued version of teammate CPR (for which the player apologized).
It’s debatable whether a full-on, three-person faux-resuscitation celebration would be allowed in modern NFL games, even before Hamlin’s collapse. The league moved to limit celebrations in 2006, imposing an automatic 15-yard penalty against any team whose player used props, the goalpost, or the ball for “excessive celebration.” It changed course in 2017, keeping the goalpost restriction but allowing for football props, celebrating on the ground, and group actions. But “offensive” and “prolonged” celebrations, or those directed at the opposing team, are still penalized.