Sure she's dumb, but can she play?

When last we left our heroine (and by heroine, I mean me), I was being confronted by a John Madden hologram demanding to assess my football skills, and I had chosen to make a tactical retreat.

I've been fairly busy the last few days, but I want it to be shown in the record that two nights ago I fired up the old Xbox and took the entire Madden football test, and let me tell you, it was not gentle. Unfortunately because this is my life, none of my results got saved, and it took me until this morning to get my courage back up.

“You know, honey,” (this is my husband talking now), “the game lets you skip the quiz. You don't have to take it.” Thus my husband reveals himself as a Philistine who knows nothing about the importance of acquiring knowledge.

So now what I'm going to do is take the quiz again, and this time I will write about it as I go, so if things still don't take at least my results won't have been skewed any more than they already have by seeing this test before. The test is a simulator of game situations that you may encounter in Madden Football, and the truth is that it doesn't really test your knowledge of the game of football as much as your ability to press specific buttons on an Xbox controller in a timely fashion when prompted. Still, it is better than nothing.

There are four parts to the test: Rush Offense, Pass Offense, Rush Defense, and Pass Defense. My skill in each of these areas will be rated either Rookie (poor), Pro (fair to middlin'), All-Pro (pretty good), or All-Madden, and come on, don't we all want to be All-Madden, all the time? My combined scores will add up to my Madden IQ, which, you ought to know, defaults to a median of FIVE HUNDRED, because that's a reasonable IQ score for someone who plays a lot of sports video games. Anyway, you're bored already, so let's get this train rolling.

RUSH OFFENSE

A rush offense is when a team runs the football forward instead of passing it (which means throwing). For anyone reading who really really doesn't know about football, the goal of the team with the ball is of course to cross the goal line and score points, but that is generally so unlikely (because you only get four chances), that the officials of the game let you start over if you make it ten yards. So your goal is to go forward ten yards. I am good at rush offenses because you don't have to be good at anything to be good at them; all you have to do is dodge the guys that are trying to knock you over, and who among us hasn't been doing that for years?
On Rush Offense I score All-Pro and my Madden IQ has risen to 534, which should easily win me a scholarship to the university of my choice.

PASS OFFENSE

Pass offense is when you throw a ball to another dude and make it his problem to score points. The simulator wants me to push a button which will throw a video game ball, and if the guy I throw it to catches it, I win. This seems unfair to me, because I have no control over the skill of the pass catcher, but we cannot live in a perfect world or even a simulation of one, so all I can do is grin and bear it. I probably shouldn't complain at all though, because there is no question that these imaginary football gentlemen are much better at catching things that have been thrown at them as I am.
My Pass Offense score is Pro and my Madden IQ drops slightly to 528, which should still be good enough for me to get a job on a brain trust somewhere.

RUSH DEFENSE

The defending team doesn't have the ball. They want to stop the other team from going forward ten yards so that they can get the ball back. Rush defense just means knocking down the guy with the ball, and I can't figure out how to do it. I'm never sure which little simulated guy I'm controlling, or whether I'm supposed to just hold the button down or press it one time or mash it, and the upshot is I do not score even a single point in this area.
I score nothing at all in Rush Defense and my IQ has dropped to an alarming 453, so Stephen Hawking has stopped returning my calls.

PASS DEFENSE

For pass defense, one guy is throwing a ball to another guy, and I am supposed to stop this from happening, which I manage to do once by accident.
My score in Pass Defense is Rookie, and my Madden IQ drops again, to 387.

So, to recap, I am not very good at anything athletic except running away from things, which translates on paper to an IQ Score of THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY SEVEN. And I'm not even holding the results upside-down! I knew you had to be a genius to understand football.