Although the 2005 NFL season finally ended with Sunday's Super Bowl, there'll still be Monday night football on television screens at a bar in Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood, where a boisterous league of video gamers works up a real sweat on the virtual gridiron.
With all the shouting, cursing and flailing, if people who didn't know better strolled into the River Horse on Madden Mondays, they might think a fistfight was about to break out.
"Sometimes people walk in and they totally are like they just walked into the 'Twilight Zone,' " said River Horse bartender and league participant Mauro Colona. "It's never violent, but people yell and scream a lot."
In the midst of their fourth season, Madden Mondays draw 22 regular competitors who lug in their own TVs and PlayStations, don the gear of their chosen teams and become the main attraction at the River Horse, 701 E. Center St.
Most approach the head-to-head matchups with intensity you'd expect to find at Lambeau Field, not in front of a glowing 17-inch Samsung.
A steady din of expletives, clanking pint glasses and the blare of John Madden's voiceovers is broken by the occasional tirade from a frustrated player.
Many times that player is Cory Baumann, a 26-year-old substitute teacher in the Germantown School District. In a league full of sore losers with a knack for cursing like sailors, Baumann took home an award for worst temper last season, which he capped by smashing a controller after getting bounced in the first round of the playoffs.
"I played Renato early in the season and just destroyed him," Baumann said about his antics last season, in a match against league member Renato Umali. "I get him in the playoffs and don't even worry about it. . . . Somehow he just shut me down and beat me. . . . Immediately I threw down the controller and like three buttons broke."
Named after TV commentator and former Oakland Raiders coach John Madden, Madden NFL debuted in 1989 and has become the most lucrative sports video game in the market.
The latest version, Madden NFL 06, sold 1.7 million units in its first week.
The game has advanced considerably since its inception. Teams and players reflect the statistical strengths and weaknesses their real life counterparts amassed the previous season. Players can access dozens of offensive plays and defensive schemes, and the sights and sounds of the game are akin to stepping into an NFL Films episode.
The craze has spawned hundreds of leagues like Madden Mondays at bars, basements and college dorms around the country, as well as members-only Web sites offering insider tips and virtual blitz schemes. There are even big money national competitions.
Thirty-two of the best Madden players in the country will meet in Honolulu on Friday to compete for $100,000 in the EA Sports Madden Challenge.
Jeremy Bach, a high school teacher who took on the Monday night shift at River Horse after taking a hiatus from teaching when his son was born, said he started the league to lure people into the bar.
Players pay $20 per season and play about two games a week. The player left standing at the end of the playoffs and the "Madden Bowl" takes home $250 and "The Joey," a six-inch Heisman Trophy knock-off named after the first season's winner. And when the real NFL season is over, the league continues for a few more weeks.
Bach, the league commissioner, said it's taken on the feel and camaraderie of a bowling league.
"The comedy is the spirit of it," Bach said.
Another Madden Mondays regular, Adam Loeb, a 25-year-old writer from Chicago, has trekked to Milwaukee for two seasons, but has yet to post a single win.
"This year in the first game I got very close to winning . . . until he got an interception and ran it back for a touchdown," Loeb said. "I want to make this very clear, though. I am not a sore loser, although we have plenty of that here."
The players' over-the-top personas generate as much excitement as the action on the field - er, screen, said Umali, a graduate film student and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who made a documentary about the league's third season.
"I realized kind of immediately that there are a lot of rich story lines here . . . the male bonding that goes on," Umali said.
Still, for the characters at Madden Mondays, it's not about the money, said Andy Mental, a 25-year-old rock musician who sports a too-small Packers jersey with matching green and gold Zubaz pants.
"It gives you something to look forward to on a Monday night. . . . You get to see grown men act like 9-year-olds."