EA Sports fixed Cam Heyward’s Madden 19 rating. Excellent. But Generation Xer Steelers are still smarting, “Where was all of this outrage over Bubby Brister’s Super Techmo Bowl rating?”
For those of you too young to remember, and for those old enough to never forget, Nintendo’s Tecmo Bowl and Super Tecmo Bowl were the Madden of its day. Oh, Madden co-existed with the Tecmo series, but John Madden Football (as it was called then) was more of a PC game.
- The Apple IIc John Madden Football version was more of a football strategy game than a live-action video game.
Tecmo Bowl beat those early Madden incarnations by a mile. The game play of the original Tecmo Bowl had its faults. It didn’t field 11 players, only offered a 4 plays menu, only featured 12 teams, and players could get bounced from the screen when your opponent made a big play.
Super Tecmo Bowl fixed those problems, incorporated the entire NFL, expanded play selection, and offered more realistic game play. The original Super Tecmo Bowl came out in 1991, so it was based on the 1990 season. It was a good game, yet it was not terribly kind to the Pittsburgh Steelers. The main reason?
- Bubby Brister’s Super Tecmo Bowl rating sucked.
Now let’s be clear folks. If the Bubster did suffer from being on the short end of Super Tecmo Bowl ratings stick, its not quite the same level of football “injustice” as Ben Roethlisberger going for so long without getting recognition as an elite quarterback.
1990 was Bubby Brister’s third year as a starter, which when quarterbacks evaluations shift from potential to performance and Bubby’s limitations were becoming clear by then.
- But Super Tecmo Bowl royally screwed Bubby Brister.
Bubby Brister, Chuck Noll in Steelers 1988 opener. Photo Credit: Mike Powell, Getty Images
Super Tecmo Bowl featured 56 quarterbacks, or 2 for each team and, believe it or not, the Super Tecmo Bowl ratings for each quarterback are available on the internet. Where does Bubby Brister rank? 44th Out of 56. In fact, Rick Strom, Brister’s backup is listed at 43.
- Rick Strom threw all of 22 passes in 1990, completed 14 for one interception.
- Meanwhile, Bubby Brister threw 20 touchdown passes in 1990, and earned an 81.6 passer rating.
Clearly Bubby Brister was no Joe Montana, but among others, Super Tecmo Bowl lists Marc Wilson, John Fourcade, Ken O’Brien, Erik Wilhelm, Jeff Carlson(who?), and Tom Tupa (a punter for heaven sakes) above Brister. This despite the fact that Brister had a playoff game win on his resume, and despite the fact that no General Manager in the NFL would have picked any of the players above Brister in 1990.
Indeed, as Steelers fans who played Super Tecmo Bowl learned, Rick Strom WAS in fact a better starter than Brister. (If you’ll believe, there’s actually a Super Tecmo Bowl fan forum where Strom vs. Brister gets debated. And to be fair Super Tecmo Bowl listed Greg Lloyd as the 5th best linebacker, and this was long before Greg Lloyd won national recognition.)
- Ah, how times have changed.
Back then we didn’t have the internet or social media to launch protests over such slights. After walking to school uphill (both ways!) barefoot in the snow, we simply had to buckle our chin straps, grab our game controllers and play the hand dealt to us. Which wasn’t too bad.
Yours truly once led the Pittsburgh Steelers to victory in a college dorm room Super Tecmo Bowl Championship with Rick Strom starting for the bulk of the season. It wasn’t until reaching the Super Bowl against the San Francisco 49ers, Bubby Brister came off the bench to hook up with Louis Lipps to get Gary Anderson into field goal range to force over time.
From there it was Rod Woodson beating Jerry Rice on a jump ball in OT, a couple of runs by Merril Hoge, Warren Williams and Tim Worley and Gary Anderson was kicking another long one for the win. So:
- Kudos to Cam Hewyard for getting his Madden 19 rating boosted,
- Kudos to Antonio Brown for getting on the cover of Madden 19,
- Kudos to me for winning Super Tecmo Bowl in spite of an exaggeratedly bad Bubby Brister rating.
To moral to this story?
Training camp can’t come fast enough, so we can focus on real football again.
