Sunday night's Super Bowl 49 broadcast featured many WTF moments, right? From Left Shark to Nationwide, to one of the worst and costliest coaching decisions in pro football history. It also featured Seattle receiver Doug Baldwin pretending to crap out a football in celebration of his third-quarter touchdown. Did you know you can do that in a video game?
Not in Madden! Hell, no, not in any product licensed by the league that is sure to fine Baldwin whatever he would have been paid had the Seahawks won. ($97,000 is a winner's share.) This is All-Pro Football 2K8, the unlicensed football simulation 2K Sports published in 2007, two years after EA Sports and the NFL went exclusive together.
YouTube user wEEman33 (via OperationSports) points out APF 2K8 had secret end zone celebration animations that would trigger if the user didn't key in one. In this, it shows the player leafing through an invisible newspaper while perched on an invisible crapper. Plop goes the ball. wEEman33 recreates the scene here, using custom rosters to portray the Seahawks and Patriots.
NBC cut away from Baldwin's antics before it could be fully comprehended what he was doing, though many sports writers (and online publications) observantly recognized poop humor and questioned Baldwin about it. He claims it was a gesture to a specific person, or to a group of persons, neither of whom he identified. Whatever, who cares. He's the guy who pretended to shit a football in the worst choke job in Super Bowl history.
All-Pro Football 2K8 was no stranger to controversy. The game wasn't licensed by the league or the NFL Players' Association, so 2K Sports went and got a ton of old-timers and all-time greats (and, with Barry Sanders, John Elway and Jerry Rice, probably put the most hall of fame firepower on the cover of a sports video game ever). O.J. Simpson was actually in the game, and the team he was placed on — the Assassins — originally had a scoreboard with an animatronic mascot that would perform a throat slashing gesture. Pre-release outrage forced some changes, though, including putting Simpson on another team.
