There's an awful game on the Xbox360 arcade called Avatar Football. I played the demo to try to fulfill my starving need for quality football. It was thoroughly awful.
What it did do however, was create a 32 team league with names like "Denver Stallions", Oakland Pirates". The NFL team colors are ALMOST copied. Players are either white guys or black guys. Teams can be renamed though, as can players.
If 2K quietly licensed their AP2K8 or NFL 2K5 gameplay code to that indie developer to replace the awful gameplay that currently exists, I would easily drop $60 on that download and never look at madden again.