Damone Clark Madden Career 2023-2026 - Peak 75 OVR

Damone Clark was a tackle machine and a defensive leader at LSU, a national champion as a sophomore, a production that should have made him a high pick. Instead he needed spinal fusion surgery on his neck before his rookie year, and the risk dropped him to the fifth round in 2022, where Dallas took a gamble and stashed him on the non-football injury list to start the season.

The comeback was real, and the Madden card tracked it. He opened at a 65, missed the first seven games recovering from the neck, then played his way into the lineup, and after a 109-tackle 2023 with seventeen starts the grade climbed to a 75 peak in Madden NFL 25. That was the number of a genuine starting linebacker, remarkable for a player who had been told a surgeon needed to fuse his spine before he could take a snap, the rating rewarding a full and unlikely recovery.

The role shrank under a new coordinator in 2024, and the card eased to a 72 as his snaps thinned, before he bounced between Dallas and Houston and on toward Detroit. Clark never quite locked down a permanent starting job, but the fact that he started sixteen NFL games at all, after the neck, is its own kind of triumph. His climb from a 65 to a 75 is the measure of a career that the medical charts said might not happen.