Ray Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens had a sub-par 2004-2005 season and his team missed the playoffs after appearing on the cover of the game, thus continuing the "Madden Curse".
This is the last Madden title to use the full year number as future titles would shorten the year.
While Madden NFL 2004 was the first Madden NFL game in the series to introduce play maker controls, they were primarily offense oriented but Madden NFL 2005 adds defensive strategy by allowing the player to individually adjust defenders zone coverage or defensive back coverage schemes and also introduced a textually sensitive tackling stick known as the "hit-stick".