And the reason those games weren't released yearly is because you actually had to put out a quality product to get noticed amongst the crowd of competing products back then.
Here are the number of sports games that were put out on in the (roughly) 5 year run of the SNES:
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Now here is where we're at in year 3 of the Xbox 360:
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Two companies account for almost all those games (2K/EA), and of course, those numbers are only going to go down now that 2K sports is left making only three sports games: hockey, pro baseball, and pro basketball.
With no competition, and a fan-base that continually rewards EA by purchasing several million copies per year--including tons of people who willingly purchase what they admit to be a mediocre product--EA has no reason to stop charging people full price for their marginal, yearly updates to what has become a sagging, wrinkly football engine that gets prettied up once a year with little more than some shiny makeup and lip gloss.