The 5 Worst Cover Athletes In Sports Video Game History

After a nearly decade-long hiatus, NCAA Football is coming back. The video game series was discontinued amid the debate around whether college athletes should be able to profit off of their name, image, and likeness (NIL). Thankfully the world finally came to its senses and decided that of course they should be able to. College Sports is a massive industry with coaches making huge amounts of money. Why should the players be the only ones that can't profit? And now that players can profit off of NIL, EA Sports is bringing the popular video games back.

College Football 25 is set to release this summer. And recently they dropped the first teaser trailer.

And in honor of its return, Andrew Salciunas has been doing a week in ode to sports video games. Talking about the best sports videos, the best songs from sports video games, cover athletes, and more.

And today, he is going back to the cover athlete motif. But rather than talking about who missed out on being cover athletes, he focused on the worst ones of all time. These guys graced the covers of a sports video game, even though they really didn't deserve to. Either because they were not very good to begin with, were a one-season wonder, or their careers went off a cliff shortly after being on the cover.

He went beyond just the scope of NCAA Football and looked at all sports video games. From Madden to NBA Jam, and even the much-maligned NFL Tour. These athletes had no business being on the cover of a video game.

I remember watching TV when they announced Hills as the winner. They picked Hillis over Michael Vick when he was on the Eagles. Really? Peyton Hillis? Come on man.

You are probably reading this and saying "who?". Exactly. Zabransky wasn't even a Heisman finalist and never ended up logging a stat in the NFL. Way to really market your game with this choice

I had this game. I loved this game. I played this game way too much as a 6-year-old. As a 6 year old I didn't realize how bad it was to have Keith Van Horn on the cover. If I knew how bad it was, like I do now, I probably wouldn't have played it.

This was just a mess. This was during the prime of the "is Favre retiring" news cycle. It was such a bad choice that they had to create new covers because Favre ended up getting traded!!! So congrats to you if you ended up buying a limited edition Favre Jets cover.

I bet you forget Shawne Merriman existed. He was actually a good player the first few years of his career, but cover worthy? We talk about the Madden curse all the time. Well after Merriman made the cover for NFL Tour (horrible game), he ended up playing in just 33 of his last 80 career games.