Madden NFL 22 has been a series the fanbase could set its collective watches by. The month, if not the week the game comes out every year has been an easy one to predict. There's also the fact that, good or bad, it hasn't been hard to guess what's going to be included in the next Madden NFL game from one year to another. The rollout, what sort of features would be included, and even when to expect the official announcement are all things that tend to come every year consistently. However, it appears that Madden NFL 22 is going to break with one of the series' most important traditions: consistency.

It seems extremely unlikely that Electronic Arts is going to skip a year with its Madden NFL series. There's simply too much at stake for the franchise. Whether talking about the fact that Madden Ultimate Team is one of its biggest moneymakers or the fact that this will be the first full release on the new consoles; there's too much money to be made. So why hasn't Madden NFL 22 been announced yet? That's the big tradition that EA seems to be breaking with this year's edition. It has almost never been this late in the spring before the next installment was at least announced, if not already shown off.

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All the usual indicators of when to expect an announcement about Madden NFL 22 in the past have to be thrown out the window at this point. In the last 10 years, there has only been one version of Madden NFL that was announced by EA this late in the spring. Madden NFL 19 was announced in the last week of May, which isn't necessarily reflective of a bad thing. It's not unheard of for the game to get a later spring reveal.

The bad news is that, in the last 10 years, the overwhelming majority of the reveal dates have actually been in April. The few other May announcement dates for Madden NFL have come in early to mid-May. How many times has Electronic Arts waited even until the first week of June to unveil an installment in the incredibly long-running series? In the last decade, that number is zero. Not once. So while EA and the Madden franchise "may be breaking a serious tradition," the fact is that it's already broken that tradition.

The big question that comes along with the realization that the game's announcement is late, is why? There is a chance that Electronic Arts is simply waiting for E3 2021 since it's waited this long already. Alongside the announcement at what is still one of or the biggest video game conferences, comes potential hope that EA is going to have a "mic drop moment" alongside the official announcement. Fans of the series have been waiting for a big change to the series, and perhaps this is the year those big changes are delivered.

However, a skeptic might let their thoughts wander in the opposite direction. Perhaps EA isn't making the reveal the spectacle it has in the past, because there just isn't that much to get excited about. There's even the built-in rationale that the pandemic simply made it too hard to make wholesale changes to Madden. The question that follows that being the rationale, though, is whether or not expectations that Madden NFL 22 was going to make some big changes would sway fans in any way. At least some of the questions surrounding the game will likely be answered when the game is finally announced.

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