While I would like to take the credit for this post title, it came as a response to an AI-generated image I created celebrating the Jets going 3-0 in an alternative universe set 25 years ago, which lives on AI Maddeness. The image showed Vinny Testaverde delivering a pizza with a “W,” the cheese sticking to the box in the shape of the letter. I thought it was pretty awesome.
It is all in reference to Testaverde getting things done on Sunday and ensuring the Jets were triumphant in what was a defensive struggle. You can read all about it in this AI Maddeness post, with extra special GIFs highlighting all the action. The image is part of a Jets superfan’s ongoing obsession with both Testaverde and Curtis Martin on his website Gangus Green. He used a different image of Testaverde in his week 3 round-up that has the quarterback delivering pizza in the shape of a W sporting a Jets Pizza shirt and a throwback football helmet. He’s something between a Domino’s delivery driver and a 1950s cartoon salesman.
Testaverde delivers with “W” -this time with pepperoni
Charles’ joke plays off the reality that the real Jets have started the 2025-26 season 0-3, in many ways the upside down of mine. Life is about to get uncomfortable in NYC for Jets head coach Aaron Glenn, while in my football universe he continues to make plays in the Jets’ secondary. I was wondering what would happen when I played the AI Maddeness season week-for-week with the real one, and this sense of competing, alternative universes is key. It highlights how easy it is to create and exist within a media world where “black is white and white is black, people.” A space where we become increasingly unmoored from any sense of reality, and in that regard the In the Mouth of Madness reference in my last post about this project takes on more and more relevance.
AI maddeness Week 3 preview graphic
That’s my deep thought for this post, now on to some of the work I’ve been doing to get the endless hours I’m sinking into this “efficiency engine” under control. I’ve started to come up with a weekly rhythm to the posts. By Thursday or Friday I do a preview post before the coming weekend’s game, like this one for the Jets vs. Bills last week. The deeper we get into a season, the more stats there are to work with, which can make these posts fun. The game preview post goes on the AI Maddeness site, which is kind of a stand-in for nfl.com—I’ll talk more about that shortly.
Throw-back feature image for the AI Sports Zone week 3 recap
The recap post happens on AI Sports Zone either Monday or Tuesday. This task takes a lot of time given I need to get all the data from Sunday’s (or Monday’s) game scraped off the screenshots, organized in a CSV file, and then imported into a spreadsheet. One of the things I want to talk to Tom Woodward about today is seeing how I can go directly to the spreadsheet and save a step. This post also has roughly 5-10 GIFs highlighting plays from the game. Also, on top of all the stat-scraping and GIF-making, I spend an hour or so each week writing up a pretty thorough breakdown of the game, done while re-watching the recording.
The other big post of the week is from Gangus Green, and that’s just a fan’s take on the post AI Sports Zone writes, so that’s pretty easy. I spend most of the time for that site trying to get fun images based on something “he” writes, like the “Vinny Delivers” image. Apart from that, I try and add a “Players of the Week” post to AI Maddeness to mix it up a bit. Madden 2001 features the best performances from an offensive and defensive player for that week, so I just scrape that image and have ChatGPT write a post about it. I also have ChatGPT make a featured image. You can see week 3’s “Players of the Week” post to get a sense of this.
Screenshot image Madden 2001 Player of Week feature
ChatGPT’s re-factoring of the screenshot into a featured graphic for the AI Maddeness blog
That’s a rundown of all the different posts I do at the moment on the various sites, and once I have them it’s trivial to have ChatGPT write a social post to announce and link them for Mastodon—which is where I have accounts setup for AI Maddeness and Gangus Green on social.ds106.us. The automatic comments are humming along, and I still have to get around to adding more commenters.
The difference between the AI Sports Zone and AI Maddeness sites is still a bit arbitrary, they could work on the same site for sure, but the idea is that AI Maddeness represents the professional league voice and AI Sports Zone provides a bit more editorial take. It’s hard to see the difference between all of these big sports news outlets when it comes to game recaps or previews. I think having an editorial writer that does more hot takes for AI Sport Zone would be a good development, and providing more good-natured corporate-style posts about how much AI Maddeness gives back to its community would be good for the league site.
GIFs made with ezgif.com are used to highlight the each in each week’s recap
Also, in order to have both of these feel like more full blown sites, I could essentially feed all the scores from the games that were simulated into ChatGPT and have it come up with recaps and previews for each of them. That might be fun, and I have enough generic stats week-over-week where it would be interesting to see what it does. This would also push me to create a fourth site that is a more official Jets site given AI Maddeness and Ai Sport Zone will be much more than just the Jets if I were to feed in everything.
I spent much of this week building out supporting pages on AI Maddeness for things like Weekly Scores and Schedule, Divisional Standings, and League Leaders. I stole these designs from the nfl.com site circa 2001/2002.
NFL.com’s early 2000s website featuring divisional standings
NFL Stat leaders from the 2001/2002 nfl.com website
I even had ChatGPT put together a team schedule that’s based on a couple of screenshots from the team calendars built into Madden 2001.
Jets schedule built into Madden 2001 that was repurposed with some scraping, CSV and HTML creation
It’s now on Gangus Green’s site, with the excuse that he just started learning HTML for work, so this seemed like a good way to put his labor in service of his real passion.
In terms of other things to do:
- I’ve yet to style each site differently, and while I did get Understrap installed, I haven’t got Visual Code, Copilot and a dev WP environment up and running. Something I’m going back to the Woodward Well for
- A 60-90 seconds AI Sports Zone video recap of the Jets game is on the to-do list
- A NFL Films-style video would also be fun to do here soon
- A podcast with either sports pundits or fans
I think the real break-through I made this week is learning how to organize my chats into specific tasks. My chats were all over the place, and I was writing so much into them that it was impossible to find stuff, so now I have chats for “Weekly League Leaders,” “Standings,” “Player Stats,” “Game Summaries,” etc. I even break out each game preview and recap into its own chat, and I’m finding that a bit of logic and order to the chats is making me far more efficient. Pretty basic file management here, frankly.
Jets vs. Bucs week 4 preview image is now the model for all other weeks
The other piece is I’m asking ChatGPT to provide me with a breakdown of the prompts to get me a repeatable graphic, CSV form, or post. For example, I have settled on the idea of having the helmets of opposing teams for the week’s match face each other on the background of a stadium with the AI Maddeness logo. The one for this coming week’s game came out really well, so I asked ChatGPT to breakdown the components so I can save that prompt for coming week’s graphics, and it did. So I now have it and will just drop it in the chat for coming weeks, removing the trial and error with graphics that was so painful.
Create a horizontal promotional graphic (1200×600 px) in the style of Madden 2001. The image should feature:
- “AI Maddeness” logo (replace any EA Sports branding).
- Two 2000–2001 style NFL helmets, facing each other, centered
- The background should be a packed football stadium with sky above.
- “Week [X]” text at the bottom in bold, large font.
- New York Jets helmet on the left and the [Opponent Team] helmet on the right (update opponent as needed).
Match the style of the “Jets vs Buccaneers – Week 4” graphic you made previously: retro, bold, Madden-2001 inspired. Center the helmets better and make “Week [X]” highly visible.
And I’m starting to do this for all my requests chat-by-chat so that here soon I should at least have a cache of repeatable chats that I can use to quickly get the data in CSV or HTML form, as well as the accompanying images. I mean, a basic logic of organizing your chats that’s simply fashioning requests with predictable outcomes.*
Once I’ve this down for my various tasks, it would be cool to see how seamlessly they can move from request to finished product without the intervention of moving between Google Sheets, the blog, or Mastodon that’s currently happening. How easily can I let the machine know this will be the preview image, here is the game summary, and these will be the 4 or 5 plays I want featured. The GIFs are still manual, I had luck with ChtGPT early, but recently it has been pushing me to EZgif.com. To be fair that site is pretty damn good and easy enough, but it all takes precious time that I was supposed to be saving 🙂
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*In fact, it is all pretty basic to be fair, but that’s probably why it is so damn popular—easy wins in tech again and again.
Honestly, I have no idea really what you are doing but I love that it is is full of crazy passion that fires you up to write long blog posts full of graphics 😉
I can see the value in the way those prompts redo the preview graphics. The Vinny cartoons are cute, but to me there is such a samenesss og that GenAI style that makes me wince.
Madness! Madness! (no bridge blowing up)
For me the point is that sameness also defines the various media outlets and even fans’s writing once they figure out a rhythm or style. There are real limits, no doubt, but if you look at ESPN, NFL.com, or any of those spaces media consistency (sameness) becomes synonymous with brand. I imagine that’s what some folks will be turning to AI for—creating or mimicking a brand to do stupid things like me. Also, it’s worth noting ChatGPt is probably the worst engine for images, I mean look at the mirrored Ws on the first pizza, glitches like that make me laugh.
I have about 14 weeks left of the regular season and perhaps more for the post-season, so the real joy is there will be a definitive end to this season. As I get deeper in I’m wondering if mimicking a sense of verisimilitude is all that interesting—to your point. There is a certain amount of sameness to the posts, but there is also a question of how the process of writing articles like this can be taylorized by the machine, which is kind of an industrial revolution for cultural expression—which seems a legitimate source of some real deep anxiety. I think the only saving grace for me at the moment is it’s fun, and it is keeping me off the sidelines so I can get a clearer sense of what’s at stake … maybe?
This wild. So strange that things like Randy Moss’s face actually improves in quality when redone in AI. This example might help explain the custom gpt/Gemini Gems in terms of tiny tools.
The real Jets should never have fired Joe Douglas. He is a great guy and any issues were not from him. Incredible UR lineman (and my roommate for one semester- which makes me famous by proxy, right?). I think they deserve to suffer now.
An almost 5-year stint as GM anywhere in the NFL is no small feat, so kudos to Joe. But the suffering is generational at this point, and jumping from that ship might be the only way to avoid the suffering. But in an alternative universe Joe can inherit a 5-time super bowl team that was the darling of the 00s 🙂 I’ll make it so!
Also, just those littl GPT tools that allow me to drop in the images now and go has saved me tons of time.. I have about 10 or 15 of them now and the process has gotten easy enough that I can start doing article for multiple games a week based on stats. The real game changer would be, to cross-reference another comment, figure out how to access how the PS1 stores this data and push it directly into these GPTs. That would make this scalable and you could really create a kind of real-time league around the whole thing with multiple players (although that would have to wait for the online Madden which was 2003). But that is the dream, this become a kinda of retro sports league.