Passing yardage and rushing averages league-wide have a firm foundation in reality. What's more, the injuries from team to team vary wildly as they do in real life. Madden cards make their way to the PS2 version of Madden 2001. During a game, if you reach certain milestones you receive coins that can be used towards the purchase of packs of Madden cards. Each pack of 100 cards 100 coins, and you earn more tokens as you increase the difficulty level of the game.
Cards come in bronze, silver, or gold and are similar in structure to modern day trading cards.
The cards are divided amongst current players, retired players, cheats, teams, and stadiums. Cards of current players can be used once to improve the performance of a player. Cheats range from ultra-fast players to changing the scoring system. Saving your Madden Cards or your progress in the Franchise mode requires you to save your status to the memory card. When I looked on the back of the Madden case and noticed it required only 143 kilobytes of the 8 megabyte PS2 memory card I was ecstatic.