Ed Hartwell Madden Career Madden NFL 2004 - Peak 81 OVR

Ed Hartwell won the Buck Buchanan Award as the top defender in Division I-AA at Western Illinois in 2000, then came off the board as a fourth-round pick by Baltimore in 2001. He spent his rookie year on special teams before growing into the weakside starting job next to Ray Lewis, and in 2003 he piled up more than 100 tackles on one of the meanest defenses in football. He never missed a game across his four Ravens seasons.

That production earned him a rich free-agent contract from Atlanta in 2005, but a torn Achilles wrecked the deal and held him to 13 games and 63 tackles as a Falcon. Short stops in Cincinnati in 2007 and Oakland in 2008 closed out the NFL run, and he later won a UFL title with the Las Vegas Locomotives.

Madden charted both the climb and the fall. He opened at 49 in the 2001 edition as a special-teamer, jumped to 87 by 2004, hit a peak of 89 in 2005, then slid back to 83 by 2007 as the leg injury kept taking its cut.