The temperature is rising across America with football fever. NFL training camps are in full swing across the country, people are forming fantasy league pools at work, and today so happens to be Madden Day. What’s Madden Day, you ask? Well, it’s the day celebrating the launch of EA Sports’ annual NFL franchise, Madden.

Drew Brees, quarterback of the Super Bowl defending champion New Orleans Saints, graces the cover of Madden 11 this year. Let’s just hope he doesn’t fall to the Madden Curse and get injured during the upcoming season.

Every year the new Madden game has a new key feature that sets it apart from previous titles. This year’s big new feature is called GameFlow. GameFlow is a new playcalling system that automatically chooses the best play to run given the situation your team is faced with on the gridiron. The typical 300 or so plays to choose from in a team’s playbook are boiled down to one. This should in turn reduce a normal game time from around 60 minutes to around 30.

I think GameFlow is for the casual fan, really. Casual players won’t have to sift through a bunch of plays and think as much about what play they want to run — the game will do it for them. Basically, EA Sports took the Ask Madden feature and built on it to make GameFlow. In OXM’s Madden 11 review, our reviewer gave the game a 9.0, saying that GameFlow took the grind out of playing a game and injected more action instead. Well, I have a different opinion. I still think seasoned Madden players rarely, if ever, used Ask Madden, so I don’t see them using GameFlow. It seems like — and I hate to use this labeling, but — “hardcore” fans will be disappointed with Madden 11’s focus on the casual fan and not on them and the franchise mode they love.

I just get the feeling EA Sports is producing the same Madden game with a new roster update and full of minor improvements.

Of the four big major leagues in America, only the NFL gave exclusive rights to one company: back in 2005, EA Sports signed an exclusive licensing deal with the NFL and NFLPA, thus ending the run for 2K Games’ NFL 2K series and any other non–EA Sports football game using the NFL license. It’s a monopoly no matter which way you slice it. There has been an outcry for a long time about this very issue, and a lot of football fans want 2K Football to come back — or for the NFL to at least give any other developer a shot at making a football game using the NFL license.

Unless it gets extended, EA Sports’ current deal ends in 2012. I say it’s time to let the football-videogame market become a free market once again.