As ig EA's image wasn't hurting enough after the EA Wife thing hit the media.
I know lots of people that will boycott Madden because of this. NFL2K5 was just plain better. Any exclusive deal hurts the quality and popularity of football video games, which can hurt the popularity of the NFL in return.
The easiest way to get past your NAT router is to set your private IP in the DMZ field in your router settings. This'll expose ALL your ports to the net, the same as if you weren't using a router. Only one machine on your network can do this at a time.
This method is useful when you have no clue what port to open.