My best friend got a PlayStation 2 the Christmas it came out, along with SSX, TimeSplitters, NBA Live 2001 and Madden NFL 2001.
After the first weekend, the only games from that four that we kept playing were TimeSplitters and SSX.
Madden and Live just couldn't match the Dreamcast 2K games at the time.
I would bring my Dreamcast over, and both of us would team together and play the 2K1 games co-op online.
I even had a couple of friends who didn't like sports games too much, but they would still get a kick out of plugging the Dreamcast keyboard into the third controller port and talking trash to the other team while my friend and I did all the work on the field.
All that stuff was amazing back in the year 2000.
Live 2001 ended up just being a bad game, and Madden 2001, while not terrible, just didn't feel like that much of an upgrade over the Nintendo 64 version, which both of us already had.
I would say the PS2 Maddens didn't really get going strong until Madden 2004.