Todd Bowles Madden Career 1992-1994 - Peak 59 OVR

Todd Bowles is a bigger name in football now than he ever was as a player, but the player was solid. Undrafted out of Temple in 1986, he made himself a starting safety for Washington, won a Super Bowl ring on the XXII team after the 1987 season, and started 82 games over an eight-year career, picking off 15 passes. He spent one of those years, 1991, in San Francisco.

Madden met him as what he was by then, a veteran role player. The game gave him a 56 for his 1991 49ers season and a 59 for 1993 back in Washington, backup-tier numbers weighed down by awareness ratings of 7 and 13, the placeholder the game reaches for when it has nothing on a player. There was no prime for the ratings to catch; Bowles was a steady starter, never a Pro Bowler, and the cards say as much.

What the two low grades cannot tell you is that the quiet safety would become one of the sharpest defensive minds in the sport. Bowles went into coaching, ran defenses that reached the top of the league, coordinated the Tampa Bay unit that won Super Bowl LV, and became a head coach with the Jets and then the Buccaneers. The player was a footnote. The football life is anything but.