If you play simulation Madden Franchises, and you take the preseason even remotely seriously, then you've probably noticed that EA hasn't changed preseason substitutions logic since the NFL shortened the preseason to 3 games instead of 4. This means that the third preseason game is still treated as the old "dress rehearsal", with the starters playing through the 3rd quarter. This is not how NFL teams play the 3rd game anymore. Now, the starters maybe play through the first quarter -- if at all. Instead, coaches now use the 3rd (and final) preseason game to field test their rookies and deep reserves before the final cut days.

But in every Madden since, the CPU leaves its starters in through the 3rd quarter. If you want to sub in your backups, you put yourself at a huge disadvantage, and their relative poor play can even result in loss of morale that can hurt their overall ratings.

Because I do take the preseason seriously as a team-development tool, the 3rd preseason game might very well be the single most infuriating thing about Madden for me. I hate it. Not only is it horribly unfair due to the talent level imbalance, if I try to sub deep reserves in early, but I swear the CPU also goes into robo / turbo mode and throws downfield every play.

Worse yet, being that I play Da Bears, I keep getting my 3rd preseason game scheduled against the Bills. Even though the Bills actually have one of the highest run percentages in the NFL, the Bills in Madden are allergic to running the ball. Now, granted, quite a few of those real-life runs are probably un-scripted scrambles by Josh Allen, but still... In any case, in my Madden preseason games, Josh Allen puts up 400 yards passing and 5 TDs in 3 quarters, and its so fucking annoying, and it makes me want to stop playing Madden altogether.

EA has provided no settings or options to change the CPU's behavior, nor mechanics for making the CPU intelligently substitute its reserves for evaluation or development, and we cant change CPU depth charts (even for "meaningless" preseason games).

As such, it always comes down to us in the community to to fix the things EA refuses to fix. Whether that be custom slider sets, disabling broken features (when possible), updating rosters to fix player ratings, or providing house rules for running Franchises. In this video, I want to share a method for forcing CPU substitutions early in the 3rd preseason game with minimal cheating.

If you get this error message, then training will stop working completely, and will just hang on an infinite load screen.

Is your Madden 17 franchise getting hung up on an annoying bug that prevents you from doing weekly training? Are you getting a dialogue saying "Training is not ready. Ensure that you have focus players selected."? I had this happen to me, and the resolution is not immediately obvious. I searched the EA troubleshooting forums and Reddit and only found partial solutions that didn't work for me. Apparently, this "glitch" has a couple different causes.

Most of the solutions that I had read online involved adjusting the user team's depth chart. In some cases, users said that the problem was caused by not having enough active players in a specific roster position. By signing a player at the necessary position, the problem was resolved, But this fix wasn't applicable to all users. I specifically encountered this bug in week four of my franchise's preseason. It happened right after installing the 1.04 update, and I feared that the update had hosed my save file. Fortunately, I found a resolution.

First, I tested the fix suggested above by ensuring that I had players at all roster positions and that all depth chart positions were filled, but didn't have immediate success. After a little bit of extra troubleshooting, I found that it was because I had too many players on my active roster. I had signed an extra player to replace an injured player. The injury was only for 3 weeks, so wasn't worth putting the guy on IR, but the new player put me over the roster cap. Since it was preseason, the game apparently doesn't enforce a roster limit, but I noticed that the Week 4 activities included "Cut 11 players". Usually in week 4, you're only supposed to cut 10 players. So I cut some dead weight (so that the activity now says "cut 10 players") and the training loaded...

One of the biggest side effects of EA's insistence of releasing its NCAA Football games more than a month ahead of the start of the season is that its rosters tend to be out of date. First off, no real names can be used due to NCAA rules, but EA provides a handy roster-share feature that allows fans to upload named rosters to share with other players. I usually get my roster from Operation Sports. But the great guys at Operation Sports can only do so much. Updating the rosters for big-name schools like Alabama, Florida, and LSU is pretty easy. The little schools are a bit more of a problem. So I've taken it upon myself to make some corrections to Operation Sports' rosters for my alma mater, UNLV.

First and foremost, I went through each position and made sure that the players listed match what is on the most up-to-date versions of the team's depth chart and roster. This required moving a few players around, since they've changed positions. Other players were renamed and completely revised since those players have since left the team. I also took the liberty of making spelling corrections on some players' names (such as Maika Mataele and Ron Scoggins), updating redshirt statuses that were incorrect, updating the High School and Home State of most players (using the names of the closest town whenever I couldn't find a match), and also updating the faces and equipment of starters.