Madden NFL makes Super call

The popular John Madden NFL video game is becoming known for something more than jinxing the players who appear on the box cover.

For the sixth time in seven years, the Madden NFL simulation correctly predicted the Super Bowl winner. The simulation spit out New Orleans as a 35-31 winner. On Sunday, the Saints won, 31-17.

"We sim the game one time," said EA Sports' Anthony Stevenson, senior product manager for Madden NFL. "That's what's unique about the NFL, and it's what the Saints proved, it's any given Sunday, you could see any team winning out. And the Saints did, despite being, what, 5-point underdogs?"

Think about the Madden NFL factor when you bet next year's Super Bowl.

• WHERE'S THE PARADE? -- While tens of thousands of fans greeted the Saints upon their triumphant return to New Orleans, it was a far different story in Indianapolis.

When the Colts came home with their collective tails between their legs, they were greeted by a grand total of 11 fans. That's right, 11.

"Win or lose, they're still our team," Brownsburg, Ind., resident Karen Calhoun told the Indianapolis Star.

The small group huddled together in the snow outside the closed Express Mail sorting facility at the airport. Unfortunately, the team plane landed at a private terminal, the players and coaches quietly piled onto waiting buses, and rolled away without getting within a few hundred feet of the 11 people in the greater Indy area who thought it would be great fun to wait in the cold for the Super Bowl losers.

• NEW HOMER HAVEN? -- The New York Mets said Tuesday they will reduce the height of Citi Field's center field wall from 16 feet to 8 before next season. The reason is to help make up for the Mets' massive power outage in the ballpark's first season. They hit 172 home runs at home in the final season at Shea Stadium and only 95 at home last season.

As Mets superfan Matt Cerrone points out at Metsblog, though, things aren't that cut and dried for the Mets. The team actually hit more homers at home than on the road, and David Wright, whose home run total dropped from 33 to 10 last season, hits the majority of his homers to left and left-center field, where Citi Field's walls will remain 12 to 15 feet high.

As anyone who watched the Mets last year could tell you, they had much bigger problems than the ballpark.

• TURNSTILES GONE WILD -- Ticket sales have topped 90,000 for the NBA All-Star Game on Sunday at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, Texas, and Dallas Mavericks officials are hoping for attendance as high as 95,000. But weather far away might have the final say.

If snowstorms persist throughout the northeast, fans, NBA and team officials might have trouble traveling to the event.

"It's going to be a great time, irrespective, but it would be nice if we could get a break here for a day or two," Mavs president Terdema Ussery told the Dallas Morning News. "We have no control over that. That's in God's hands. And we've been doing a lot of talking to Him lately."

Either way, the game will break basketball's attendance record of 78,129, set by Kentucky and Michigan State at Detroit's Ford Field in 2003.

COMPILED BY STEVE CARP LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL