Yeah, that's legitimate...I was making a lot of assumptions about the nature of the deal and the financials invovled, and of course I'm just guessing since I have no intimate knowledge of how everything was structured or how the parties are faring from the exclusivity deals. And to clarify, I think that the "Madden NFL" game has demonstrated profitability over time; not sure that would hold true for any other "non-Madden" football game, NFL-licensed or not (sadly...).
Conceptually, though, I think game companies are moving away from licensed products and trying to create their own IP's so that they can keep all of the cake and not have to share. There are few sports games that generate enough revenue for their development/marketing and the costs associated with the license (exclusive or not) to be worth it, and I'd say that short list is probably NFL and maybe NBA and FIFA (only because that's the worldwide version of the NFL license). T2 cannot wait for the MLB exclusive license to end fast enough, and they clearly have been disappointed by the revenue streams generated by that deal (which never made sense to me in the first place, given that it had a huge gaping hole for 1st-party development...in essense, they paid for exclusivity and didn't even get an exclusive license).
Given the huge amounts of money it would take to get a development team together and start a new football franchise from scratch, which everyone except EA would have to do at this point, and without the pop culture cache that the name "Madden" has to guarantee a certain number of sales (the significant percentage of people who buy that game every year because that's just what they do...), the sums of money the NFL would expect for exclusivity would likely be prohibitive to any other company. In addition, it would likely take at least a few years, even if the hypothetical new non-Madden NFL game were mind-bogglingly awesome, to develop and audience just because they don't have that Madden name on the box (unfortunately, our OS fiefdom doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the overall game industry numbers...). That leaves just EA as a serious bidder for the license, and at that point they are telling the NFL how much they are willing to pay, not vice versa. We are already seeing evidence of who wears the pants in this arrangement with this latest announcement, which is the closest thing to genuflecting that the NFL ever does with any of its licensing partners.
At this point, even if the NFL offered the exclusive license to another non-EA company at half the price of what the EA deal is worth, I'm still not sure it would make sense for another company to bite. If I were an investor in Activision or T2 or Disney or whoever, I would certainly not be thrilled to see them bid on the license; no matter the quality of the game, if it doesn't say "Madden" on the box it's automatically at a severe disadvantage. That's the evil empire EA and Madden have become.