Michael Carter NT - 49ers Madden Career 1992-1993 - Peak 36 OVR

Michael Carter had the strangest few weeks of any rookie's year. In August 1984 he won an Olympic silver medal in the shot put at the Los Angeles Games; that fall he lined up at nose tackle for San Francisco, and by January he had a Super Bowl ring, the first man to win an Olympic medal and a Super Bowl in the same year. He came out of SMU built like what he was, a world-class thrower, and he turned all that leverage into nine seasons clogging the middle of the best defenses in football.

Madden has almost no record of it. Carter appears in just two of the game's rating tables, Madden NFL '92 and '93, near the end of his career, and on the old 1-to-15 scale the conversions leave him looking like a nobody, a 29 and then a 36. The numbers are close to meaningless, and they miss him completely, because a nose tackle's job is to eat two blockers so the linebackers stay clean, and no rating category has ever known how to score that. Carter's prime, three Pro Bowls and the heart of three championships, came in the mid-1980s, before the game started keeping count.

He won it all three times, after the 1984, 1988 and 1989 seasons, and made the Pro Bowl in 1985, 1987 and 1988. For the measure of the bloodline: his daughter Michelle Carter took the event one better and won Olympic gold in the shot put in 2016. Two low Madden cards are all the game has of him, and they tell you nothing, which is its own kind of tribute to a player whose whole value never showed up in a box score.