How EA Sports Fails to Simulate Football: Weekly Practice (and my suggestion for fixing it)

This is a follow-up to the previous topic, in which I talked about gameplanning, and Madden's general failure to simulate the process of gameplanning for an opponent. This time, I will be talking more about the procedural element of preparing for the next opponent, which is the various practice and preparatory tasks that coaches and players perform in the week leading up to a match. Weekly practice is something that Madden also currently fails to simulate. But it's also something that Madden (and other football games from other developers) has made multiple attempts at emulating in the past. Some of the previous solutions that EA came up with are, in my opinion, much better than what is available now.

Skill Trainer was good practice!

I will begin by actually ranting about something that I like in modern-ish Madden!

Up until a few years ago, Madden's Franchise Mode allowed the user to play Skill Trainer drills for offense and defense as your weekly practice. In general, I love the Skill Trainer in Madden! I genuinely think that it is one of the best features that has ever been included in any sports video game ever. In addition to acting as a series of gameplay tutorials, the Skill Trainer also makes an effort to teach some basic football concepts and strategies to gamers. The Skill Trainer teaches users things ranging from how blocking schemes work, to how to read the conflict defender on option plays, to how to read different route combinations against different defenses. And it also teaches some defensive concepts such as how to play as a force or cutback contain defender, and which defensive coverages are designed to stop which route combinations, and much more!

The fact that EA used to incorporate these tutorials into Franchise Mode was especially genius. Each week, you could choose one offensive and 1 defensive Skill Trainer drill to run. Depending on how well you performed in the drills, your team would get scaled ratings boost whenever you call the relevant plays in the upcoming match. This allows the player to take the role of a coach and choose specific concepts to practice and focus on in a given week, depending on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the opposing team. If that sounds a heck of a lot like how I described actual NFL gameplanning in the previous installment, then yeah! That's kind of the point! Madden used to do this, and do it fairly well, but it doesn't any more.

A few years ago, EA changed the Weekly Training feature in Franchise and removed the Skill Trainer. Now you choose very broad, vague concepts to practice, such as "defend inside run", or "throw the ball deep", instead of more specific concepts based on an individual team's scheme. Ironically, this new Weekly Training menu gives a more detailed scouting report of opponent tendencies, that would have worked better with the old training mode using the Skill Trainer. It actually shows which concepts the opponent runs most in different situations, which would have helped the user choose which Skill Trainer drills to run. Now, we have this extra information, but no Skill Trainer drills; and the more vague practice categories don't relate directly to the tendencies listed in the new scouting report.

This change came along with the new Progressive Fatigue mechanic, which has been a horribly unpopular mechanic that most Franchise players just turn off. Fatigue is trivially easy to manage for the human user by simply splitting your practice reps between starters and backups. CPU teams, however, have been completely incapable of managing Progressive Fatigue, which leads to CPU running backs being too tired to play late in the season and in the playoffs.

"I'm too tired to play in the SuperBowl, coach."
     - no NFL player, ever!

As if that weren't bad enough, Free Agents (who aren't even on a team and who are not practicing or playing in football games) also incur progressive fatigue throughout the season. This means that if you lose a starter to injury late in the year, and you need to sign a free agent replacement, that replacement won't be able to play either. He will be too fatigued to play for several weeks.

This Progressive Fatigue mechanic, by the way, is still in Madden 25, despite College Football 25 having introduced the much superior "Wear & Tear" system. Wear & Tear still has problems, such as players not being automatically subbed out when their Wear & Tear injury risk is high, and CPU teams being generally incapable of managing player Wear & Tear. But it's still a far better system in both concept and execution, and does a better job of modeling relatively minor aches, pains, and bruises that players accumulate during a match or over the course of a season, but which don't necessarily prevent the player from actually playing. And, it actually makes running out of bounds in order to avoid a big hit to a star receiver or scrambling QB become a much more viable and necessary tactic.

I will, however, say that I do like how Madden allows the user to set the intensity of practice, and how many practice reps to give to the starters and backups in each position group. This particular feature would actually work very well with Wear & Tear. In my opinion, both Madden 26 and College Football 26 should combine these 2 features into a single Wear & Tear system that allows users to modify practice reps and hold players out of practice if they have nagging injuries.

The Skill Trainer isn't the only attempt that Madden has historically made at simulating NFL practices. Back in the PS2 days, the game would select some of the upcoming opponent's favorite offensive and defensive plays and let you practice against them. You would have a limited number of reps, and would score points based on how you perform against the given opponent play. The better you perform in these practice drills, the better your team would perform when the opponent calls those plays in the upcoming match. And, it had the added benefit of actually letting the user practice against those plays, so that you, the user, would actually be better at recognizing the play when the opposing team calls it, and you would hopefully play better yourself too!

Again, that was a pretty solid attempt at emulating the way that real NFL teams will practice during the week, by actually requiring the user to practice against the opponent's common play calls.

Bad practice does not make perfect

Modern Madden, in contrast, has awful Weekly Training mechanics that are based more around simplistic arcade principles than on trying to simulate real NFL practice techniques and methodologies.

Instead of allowing users to play the Skill Trainer drills that both tutorialize the game's mechanics and also teach and reinforce real football concepts, modern Madden forces the user to choose a number of players to "focus train" by playing one of the game's mini-games. Very few of these Mini-Game drills resemble things that real football players do in actual practice, and none of them teach actual football concepts.

I feel like these drills are also far inferior to the way that drills used to work on the old PS2-era Madden games. I've already talked at length comparing the new mini-games to the old PS2 mini-games, so I won't repeat that whole thing here. But in summary, the old drills more closely resembled realistic football drills, and had an interesting risk/reward mechanic in which the user could risk the points you earned in a successful run of the drill in order to challenge a higher difficulty version of the drill. In modern Madden, you can just repeat these drills indefinitely until you get a gold medal and max experience, if you want. So they just feel like a grind, especially when compared to the PS2 drills or to the more recent Skill Trainer drills.

In the previous Skill Trainer practice drills in Franchise Mode, once you earned a Gold medal in a drill, you could simulate all future attempts at that drill and get the Gold medal experience and ratings boosts for your players. If you had already mastered the drill and concept, you don't have to keep grinding it, unless you actually want the practice as a refresher. In the newest Madden games, however, you have to grind out these drills every week, for every focus player, every time.

So in addition to doing a worse job of modeling real NFL football, it's also just worse game design!

Weekly Training, without the "week"

In real life, practice takes place over the course of the week leading up to a game, and each day, the teams do different drills and activities. Every football team runs its practice schedule a little differently, and there's no one right way to organize weekly practices. But there are general rules of thumb, and schedules are a lot more standardized due to rules instated by the Player's Association. For a typical week of practice, with a game on Sunday, NFL teams usually follow a schedule along the following lines:

On Monday, the team usually gathers to review yesterday's game film to identify things they did well in the game, and mistakes they made, so that those mistakes can be corrected in the upcoming week. Players may lift weights, or they will engage in other recovery and rehabilitation activities if they are injured. There may be a light practice as well to reinforce what was discussed in the film review.

On Tuesday, the players usually have the day off. I believe this is actually mandated by the NFL Player's Association. In the meantime, the scouts give the coaches a scouting report of the upcoming opponent, and the coaches spend the day reviewing the upcoming opponent's scouting report and game films in order to come up with a broad gameplan for the upcoming game. That gameplan will choose a subset of plays from the whole playbook that they will plan on calling in the upcoming match, and the coaches will likely design new plays and modify existing plays.

Wednesday and Thursday is where the real work begins. There will be a full day of practice for the whole team each day, in which coaches teach the new gameplan to the players, and they practice it on the field.

Friday will be a bit of a lighter day that will usually focus on things like special teams and other specialized game situations (such as the 2-minute drill, goalline, 3rd and 4th-down plays, and maybe any trick plays they might want to call in the upcoming game).

Saturday is usually a light morning walk-through and some final team-meetings to review the week of practice. If it's a road game, the teams will also hop on the plane or bus to travel. Otherwise, they get the afternoon off, but are usually still required to stay in a hotel and obey a strict curfew, so that nobody stays out late partying and being hung-over for tomorrow's game.

If the game is not on Sunday, then that schedule can change. A Monday night game gives an extra day for potential additional practice and gameplanning for this week, but also shortens next week. A Thursday game, however, cuts 3 whole days of preparation time! This will likely force coaches to put in overtime on Sunday night or Monday to get their gameplan early, and the players might not get Tuesday off, so that they can still have 2 full days of practice on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Madden does not model any of this. The scouting report is exceedingly simplistic, and there is no difference in your practice routine if you have an upcoming Thursday or Monday night game.

If you have a game on Thursday night, you'll likely get a storyline press conference asking if you want to give players a day off. This does not affect the actual Weekly Training at all, and all it does is affect team fatigue or morale based on whether you give the players a day off. Even if you have a Thursday night game, you still get all the same offensive and defensive buffs, and still get to do focus training for all your players, and you can still spend an unlimited amount of time playing Free Practice (if you want). And inversely, you get no additional benefits from extra preparation if you have a Monday night game.

ESPN NFL 2k5 did try to model weekly practice schedules, but it was all done through a spreadsheet of hour-by-hour activities. This is kind of overkill, in my opinion. It was very complicated, and most users probably just automated it all anyway. Further, none of the activities were actually playable, so there was nothing like the Madden Skill Trainer that would actually teach football concepts and let the user practice. So even though this might sound blasphemous, I don't think NFL 2k5 did weekly practice right either. In this case, I feel like the dedication to accuracy was actually to the detriment of the game. But hey, at least it tried, which is more than I can say for EA and Madden.

Putting the "Week" back in "Weekly Training"

Now comes the part where I give my recommendations for how I would like weekly game preparation to work in Madden. I would also like College Football to take a similar approach. In fact, having robust practice and gameplanning features might be even more important in College Football's Dynasty Mode, because college football players are young and still learning the game of football. Coaches mentoring those players and shaping them into the football players that they will become should be a major part of the game's design.

If I were in charge of designing Madden's Franchise mode, I would break the activities up into daily activities. Instead of advancing to the next week, the user would be able to advance to the next day.

Monday: opponent scouting or self-scouting

On Monday, the user should be given a detailed scouting report of the upcoming opponent. This scouting report should highlight star players on the opposing team, their injury report, and an overview of their offensive and defensive schemes and general play-calling tendencies (similar to what Madden already shows in the Weekly Training menus). It should also include a weather forecast for the upcoming match, which will be updated as the week progresses.

At this point, the user could be given the option to focus on either Opponent Scouting or Self-Scouting as your Monday activity. If you choose Opponent-Scouting, then all your players will receive a small boost to Awareness and Play Recognition, and your Scouting Report will become much more detailed. It will allow the user to see the play-by-play summary for that opponent's previous game (or games), specific plays that the opponent calls frequently, and how successful those plays have been against different defenses, and which offensive players are targeted the most for given situations, and if the opponent runs any trick plays. Defensively, it will highlight their common coverage and blitz packages for different scenarios. Importantly, the game should track all of these metrics for users as well, and these sorts of scouting reports should be available for online opponents in Online Franchise, Play Now, and Ultimate Team. There could maybe even be an option to watch "highlights" of opponent plays, if you want to go real deep into film study.

If you choose Self-Scouting, then you do not get the more detailed Scouting Report. Instead, you'll get a summary of your previous game, including a breakdown of all your play calls, and their success rates against the opponent's play calls, and which players committed mistakes such as committing penalties, blowing blocking assignments, missing tackles, or dropping passes. You can then choose a subset of position groups, and all players in that position group receive a temporary boost to relevant ratings, such as receivers getting a small boost to Route-Running, or defensive backs getting a boost to Pursuit and Coverage.

And if we also have a system similar to what I proposed in previous installments of this series, in which ratings for young players and for regressing veterans are hidden, then self-scouting could reveal some of these hidden ratings.

Regarding the aforementioned player mistakes, I have this vision that whenever the game's ratings logic triggers a bad die roll for a player that causes them to mess up in a significant way, the game would add that to a log. Self-Scouting would collate that log into a list for the user to review. If you Self-Scout after a game in which your team (or particular players) made a lot of mental errors, you would have the opportunity to select one (or more) of those types of mistakes to "correct" in this week's practice. Doing so would give a temporary ratings boost to the relevant player ratings, which will decrease the likelihood of that type of mistake happening again for the next few weeks. Coaches should have abilities that allow them to "correct" more than one mistake type per week, or cause the ratings boost to last longer, so that you don't have to keep re-correcting the same mistakes every few weeks.

On Monday, you can also be given the option to choose 1 player to perform a Combine drill to temporarily improve a relevant rating. Do a 40-yard dash to increase speed, bench press to increase strength, or a cone drill to increase agility. Successfully completing the drill would boost the relevant stat by 1 point for the upcoming match, but failure would cause a loss of fatigue or some Wear & Tear to the relevant body part(s). You can alternatively choose a player who has a "Week-to-week", or "Day-to-day" injury designation. Successfully completing the drill will accelerate the player's recovery, but doing poorly can extend the injury.

Tuesday: playbook customization and coaching

On Tuesday, it's time to create your gameplan! Here, you select which offensive and defensive concepts you wish to focus on. You can choose 2 each. This will determine which Skill Trainer drills will be available to you in the following days of practice. You will also have the option to customize your playbook and the playbook's Gameplan. Your Playbook Customization screen should show your base playbook, and should indicate which plays you included in previous weeks. You can now add or remove plays based on how you want to play against your opponent. The number of plays that you can keep in a weekly offensive or defensive playbook will be limited by the ratings and abilities of your offensive and defensive coordinators. Better, more experienced coordinators will be able to keep more plays in their weekly playbooks.

Got a game against a mobile QB like Jalen Hurts or Justin Fields? Add more QB Spy and QB Contain plays, and increase the frequency with which they'll be called!

Playing against a weak or depleted defensive line? Throw in some extra power running plays, and set them to be called more frequently on 1st and 2nd down!

You should still be able to choose any play from your full playbook in an actual match, but if you run a play that wasn't part of your weekly playbook, your players will suffer significant ratings penalties, and be more prone to penalties. This would, of course, require every team to have a wider selection and variety of plays available in their core playbooks, so that there are more options for the user to choose which plays to use for a given week. Every formation set would have to have plays that correspond to most concepts.

There should also be automation logic to automatically add and remove plays from your weekly playbook based on the concepts you choose to focus on, if you don't want to have to micro-manage this every week. And, of course, you can still change your playbook later in the week, if you realize that you don't like the plays that you initially selected. Though I'm also open to the idea of limiting the number of allowed changes based on the skill level of the coordinators. That would model the idea that these coaches have limited time to finalize these gameplans and teach them to the players.

And to piggy-back off of the previous installment, this is also where you should be able to set Coaching Adjustments to customize how your players behave. Know you're going up against an opponent that likes to throw the ball deep? Set your zone depths to be deeper, as part of the Weekly Preparation, rather than having to remember to do it after the match actually starts. Have an upcoming game in rain, and you're worried about ball security? Then set your ball-carrier behavior to be Conservative, in order to reduce the likelihood of fumbles.

In fact, I would like to see more coaching adjustments!

I want to be able to adjust the aggressiveness of my QB's passing to tell him whether to force the ball downfield or check-down.

I want to be able to tell my pass rushers to go for sack, or to hold their gaps and the edge.

I want to be able to tell my DBs to favor shading inside, outside, or over the top.

I want to be able to tell my punter to punt away from a dangerous returner.

I want to be able to tell my kicker to keep the dynamic kicker in the field of play so as not to give the opponent a free 5 or 10 yards of extra field position. Or to kick a line drive that should bounce in the field of play and be harder for the returner to field.

I want to be able to tell my kick and punters how conservatively to play fair catch situations, or whether they are allowed to run a return out of the endzone.

And, of course, you can change all of this within the actual match, just like you can in current Madden. This is one of the biggest things that's lacking in Madden's Franchise Mode, which is the ability to coach your players to play the way that you want them to play on the field (or the way that you, yourself would manually play them). This would be helpful for users who only simulate their actual matches, or who use Play The Moments, and who still want their players to play a specific way.

Once again, you can also choose to select a focus player to perform a training camp drill. But, since Tuesday is the NFLPA-mandated "day off", these workouts are "voluntary". You can only chose from a list of semi-random "volunteers" to do a drill. Who volunteers will be dependent on several factors unique to each player's personality and mood. Your volunteer pool will be randomly drawn from players who have high Motivation (meaning they're happy on the team), players who have high morale, and players with the High Motor or Team Player trait. This will help to make player motivations, morale, and traits a little more relevant to the week-to-week activities of the team.

Monday and Tuesday activities could also be combined into a single daily activity menu to make things simpler.

Wednesday and Thursday: practice drills

On Wednesday, you decide whether to practice in full-pads or half-pads, and whether to split your reps between starters and backups. You should also be able to choose to hold specific players out of practice entirely, if, for example, they have high Wear & Tear. Then you choose one of your focus concepts that you chose for offense and defense, and run the corresponding Skill Trainer drills. Your performance in the drill will grant scaling experience to all players involved, as well as passive ratings boosts when you run those plays in the upcoming match. These plays will also be given additional priority, and will be highlighted in the play-call menu during your match.

However, players will accumulate Wear & Tear while playing these drills.

You can also choose whether to perform your practices in an indoor facility, or an outdoor facility subject to weather. If your upcoming home game is expected to have rain, snow, or heavy wind, you can potentially practice out in the weather to prepare. If you practice in rainy, snowy, or windy conditions, then the practice should be subject to all the deleterious effects of playing in the rain; however, it will have the advantage of making your players more resilient to those effects in the actual match.

You can then chose 1 focus player to run a Mini-Game drill and gain bonus XP.

Thursday is similar to Wednesday. You just do the other Skill Trainer drills that you chose on Tuesday, but did not practice on Wednesday. Or, if you performed poorly in the Wednesday drills, you can choose to do those same drills again for a better score and ratings boosts, but at the expense of not being able to do the other drills. And again, you can chose 1 focus player to run a Mini-Camp drill for bonus XP.

Friday and Saturday

On Friday, you can perform 1 Special Teams Skill Trainer drill, and can choose to add 1 trick play to your Special Teams weekly playbook. If you have a special teams coordinator with a relevant ability, you can also choose a 2nd trick play for your special teams weekly playbook.

You can also have the option to have another full practice. If you choose to do so, you will choose 1 additional Skill Trainer drill, or can choose to replay a drill from Wednesday or Thursday. You'll get any relevant ratings boosts and XP for players, but players will also suffer additional Wear & Tear and will loose morale from being over-worked. Maybe there could even be a storyline event in which you get an angry phone call from an NFLPA union rep!

After that is done, you finalize your week of practice, get a review of the week, and hop on the bus or plane to the stadium. This review will highlight the concepts and players that you focused, the results of all drills, the experience gain and ratings boosts for all players, and an overview of injuries and Wear & Tear.

At this point, you'll also be able to do Free Practice. You can do as much Free Practice as you want, and it will have no effect on player ratings, injuries, fatigue, Wear & Tear, or morale. It's just optional free practice for your benefit, if you want more practice.

Shortened or extended weeks

Of course, this schedule will have to change for Thursday or Monday matchups.

For Thursday matchups, the week ends on Wednesday instead of Saturday. The week remains the same, except that you don't have the Thursday or Friday practice sessions. Instead, you get your weekly review on Thursday morning, and you can choose to have an additional full practice on Tuesday (with Skill Trainer drills), but at the risk of additional Wear & Tear and a drop in morale if you end up losing the game. Otherwise, you'll be going into the Thursday Night game with fewer practiced concepts, and so fewer types of plays that confer rating bonuses.

For Monday night games, the practice week stays the same, except you have the option for another full practice on Friday, and push the normal Friday/Saturday activities to Saturday/Sunday. Then, for the week after a Monday night game, everything is the same, except that you do not get the option to Self-Scout or Opponent-Scout and do not get the additional scouting report info and ratings boosts associated with those options.

For Saturday games during the playoffs and preseason, the week is the same, except there is no option for additional Skill Trainer drills on Friday, since you gotta get to the bus or plane.

We could also still have the storyline press conferences asking whether we're going to rest or do extra practice during a short week, and that just forces you to have to commit to whatever you choose in the press conference.

A more dynamic week

My suggestion might be a bit over-complicated in some ways. I'm sure some things could be simplified. Feel free to put your suggestions in the comments! But I believe this more involved Weekly Preparation mechanic would dramatically improve the sense of being a real coach, coming up with a gameplan and teaching it to your players. The division into different days that have to be progressed individually (or in pairs) also allows the user to make decisions based on how the previous days went. If a player suffers wear & tear or an injury during practice on Wednesday, then you still have an opportunity to change your strategy accordingly. You can give the backup some extra practice reps or focus drills, elevate someone from your practice squad, try to trade for a replacement, or sign a free agent mid-week, and then make a judgement call regarding whether the mid-week free agent signing has practiced well enough to be able to fill in for the injured starter.

Also, if practice early in the week reveals hidden ratings from players that shows that maybe that player is better than you thought, and you want to promote him to a starter, then you could see that early in the week, and then put him in with your starters for practices later in the week. You could also do some focus training on such a player later in the week, if you choose. This gives more options for users to dynamically build and develop your team, and shift your lineups and strategies due to dynamic events throughout the week of preparation.

And, of course, because I'm a firm believer in having lots of accessibility and difficulty options to custom-tailor the experience to user preferences, there should be options and sliders to adjust things like whether Wear & Tear affects Skill Trainer drills, and how strong that affect is, and so forth.

This suggestion would do a much closer job of modeling how real NFL coaches and teams prepare for a given matchup. Unlike NFL 2k5's approach, this suggestion keeps most of the activities playable and interactive, and provides the user with the opportunity to make meaningful decisions or judgement calls as the week progresses. It also makes the week between games more dynamic, as you would get updated injury reports from other teams over the course of the week, and would also know the results of earlier games while you're still preparing. And it makes much better use of the news story and social media feed features that are already present within Madden's Franchise Hub Menu, but which most users completely ignore.

The idea here is that users would be spending as much time (or maybe even more) managing and coaching their team, as they do actually playing the matches each week. This would be great for users who sim or spectate their actual matches, since they would actually have more meaningful decisions to make and activities to do on a weekly basis. But for users who are only concerned about actually playing football, then all of these activities should be able to be simulated.