
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.
Skill Trainer drills used to be part of Franchise's Weekly Training feature.
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.
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0514cd00-46df-4662-a54d-675a04073edb|3|3.7
Tags:Madden, Madden NFL, Madden NFL 25, EA, EA Sports, Electronic Arts, football, simulation, sports, coaching, strategy, gameplan, playbook, practice, injury, mini-game, skills trainer

But before I get started, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that EA has actually partially addressed some of the issues that I've discussed in a previous installment of this essay series. Specifically, Madden 24, Madden 25, and College Football 25 have substantially improved player logic in loose-ball situations. Since I published the 5th essay, about loose-ball situations, EA has added a number of new animations of players diving or falling onto fumbled footballs. This has mitigated some of the frustrations that I expressed in that essay. Scooping-and-scoring does not happen nearly as often, and players are now also able to recover their own fumbles.
There are still problems with fumbles and loose ball logic, so I won't be rescinding the entire essay. Many of the criticisms are still valid. Most notably, fumble recovery animations often appear pre-determined and break the laws of physics and human anatomy. Awareness during loose-ball situations is also still hit-or-miss.
Nevertheless, EA did actually improve this area of the game, and I want to acknowledge that. As I've said before, I don't make this content simply to shit all over Madden and EA for the sake of it. I make this content because I love football, I love football video games, and I want EA to give us a better product. All my criticism is intended as constructive criticism that I hope is taken in good faith by anyone who watches. As such, I always want to give credit where credit is due.
This full essay is available in video format on YouTube.
In any case, I previously started talking about off-field strategy and team-building. Now, I want to talk more about what to do with that talent once they have been scouted, drafted, and evaluated. Today I'll be talking about another one of Franchise Mode's most glaring high-level flaws. It's finally time to talk about how Madden handles (or fails to handle) gameplanning and preparation.
At a very high level, Madden focuses its game strategy almost exclusively on what you like to do! Not off of what the opponent likes to do, nor even off of what you team is built to do. This is not really representative of how real NFL teams prepare for games. In real football, teams do not generally take their entire playbook into any given game. They install, tweak, and practice a different subsets of specific plays each week, based on what they think will work best about their upcoming opponent.
However, modifying your playbook for a given opponent has just never been a part of Madden. This is especially frustrating, because the game has a mechanism for doing this. There is a Custom Playbook and Gameplanning editor that was introduced in Madden 11, and which is still in the game after all these years. While Madden games from over a decade ago did encourage users to use this feature to customize your play-calling to your personal preferences, newer games have pushed this feature more and more into the background, in favor of EA pushing updates to the pre-set playbooks, based on the play calls from real-life teams as the real-life NFL season progresses.
This seems good on paper. Why wouldn't we want realistic playbooks based on the plays that real coaches are calling this season? Don't we want those plays and play-calling frequencies to change to more closely reflect how those coaches call plays in real life? After all, that more closely reflects how the real NFL season is unfolding, right? Sure. Those are great things for Play Now pick-up games and Ultimate Team matchups against randos. But it's not exactly ideal for playing in a simulation Franchise Mode, in which the user is ostensibly taking on the role of a head coach or general manager over the course of multiple seasons, and in which coaching decisions should be based on the events and situations within the Franchise Mode, and not on how things are happening in real-life. And that is where Madden's Franchise Mode falters.
Madden 11 introduced a gameplan editor along with its playbook editor 15 years ago.
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5e17bc1f-6fd7-45af-91f9-d45725f19e4e|1|5.0
Tags:Madden, Madden NFL, Madden NFL 25, EA, EA Sports, Electronic Arts, football, simulation, sports, fumble, coaching, strategy, gameplan, playbook

I felt like College Football 25 would be a real make-or-break title for EA Sports. Madden has been getting criticized for its focus on Ultimate Team, lack of attention to Franchise Mode, and myriad legacy issues that EA just refuse to address. The market has been jonesing for a licensed college football game -- in fact, it's been jonesing for any alternative to Madden. This is EA's chance to really put out a quality product that can earn it a lot of good faith to help carry it through the coming years of renewed football video game competition. I honestly expected that College Football 25 would hit a home run with its Dynasty Mode and feature set in order to earn back that trust and good faith -- especially after it was delayed a whole year from its original expected release.
Instead, I keep feeling disappointed and frustrated with College Football 25 at almost every turn. It feels, to me, like a pale shadow of its NCAA Football forebears. It's a mess of missing features, confounding control and interface issues, bad A.I. (especially on defense), and rosters that are muddled and obfuscated by the legal tightrope of name-and-likeness rights. It checks off almost all of the "must have" feature boxes (like adding the playoff and transfer portal), but this game seems to aggressively refuse to go above and beyond in any capacity.
Strap in and get comfortable. This is going to be a long review...
No-huddle gameplan
The launch version of College Football 25 is really friggin' hard! I started 0 for 7 against the CPU (on the All-American difficulty, with default sliders). I had to play a Boise State home match against lowly cupcake New Mexico in order to get my first victory. Since then, I've been doing a lot better, but victories do not typically come easily.
I have my share of responsibility in this. I don't know the playbooks yet, and I threw some facepalm-inducing interceptions. Linebackers seem to play a lot deeper in College Football 25 compared to Madden, and my QBs weren't putting enough touch on passes over the middle of the field. So Post and Dig routes that would be wide open in Madden were repeatedly being picked by lurking linebackers.
Lurking linebackers make a lot of interceptions between the hashes.
Despite my own mistakes, the designers of the game seem to have gone out of their way to make sure that the barrier to entry would be as high as it could possibly be. The game doesn't seem to want to teach its new features, mechanics, or controls, and it insists on changing things just for the sake of change -- screw my decade (or longer) of muscle memory! Many problems that have long frustrated me in Madden reared their ugly heads to conspire against me as well. I often felt like I could call out exactly how an upcoming play would unfold before the snap, because I've seen all of this so many times in Madden.
Sacks and interceptions tended to come in pairs or triplets.
My star receivers refused to catch open downfield passes, while the CPU receivers all had hands of glue.
Force defenders refused to do their job, and my defense in general refused to contain the edge or take viable pursuit angles. Even if I expected an outside run and spread my line or linebackers, they'd still all crash inside and get smothered by down-blocks.
CPU receivers would repeatedly beat my DBs on in-breaking routes and break free for huge gains or scores, even though I explicitly set inside shade before the snap.
Outside shade was basically an invitation for the CPU to score on a post or quick slant, even if I had a single-high safety or robber to supposedly stop those specific routes.
My blockers would absolutely refuse to block the single most important assignment on the play whenever I needed a run play to be successful, even with elite running teams (such as Michigan).
My own big plays would consistently be called back by penalties.
The CPU teams would go into un-beatable "turbo mode" as soon as the 2-minute warning hit.
And so on, and so on. You've heard or read all of this before if you've looked at any review of Madden in the past decade or so.
CPU-controlled defenders take horrible containment and pursuit angles.
There was even a patch, released a couple days before this review was published, which was supposed to have improved pursuit angles. But in my limited play since the patch, it seems to have actually made pursuit even worse, somehow! Not only do players continue to take horrible containment angles, but any defender that happens to be in the open field on the perimeter, and in a position to stop an outside run, now has an infuriating habit of just bouncing off the ball-carrier. So perimeter tackles that were being made a week ago, are now being missed after the patch, giving up even more big runs and scores to the outside.
I cannot understate how much these poor pursuit and containment angles are ruining my enjoyment of this game! So many of my losses can be directly traced to my defense just completely shitting the bed and giving up big run after big run because they are completely unwilling to defend the perimeter. And there is little-to-nothing that I can do about this, because I can only control a single player on the defense at a time. [More]
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Tags:EA Sports College Football, EA Sports College Football 25, EA, Electronic Arts, EA Sports, EA Orlando, Tiburon, football, college football, dynasty, name and likeness, recruiting, draft, transfer portal

I can't believe it's finally actually happening. EA Sports is finally releasing another college football game. After 10 years of having nothing but Madden, fans of video game football will finally have another big-budget, AAA football game to play. Yeah, sure, it's still from EA -- it's not like this is a new 2k football game or anything -- but it's something.
EA has released 2 trailers for EA Sports College Football 25. The first one was just a teaser, with a spokesperson talking about how excited they are to be back, and how much they love college football, how they've listened to feedback, and how committed they supposedly are to making the best game possible. I didn't talk about that initial trailer because there wasn't much to say about it. It was just a bunch of promises from a company that has not done anything in the past 20 years to make their promises mean anything.
The first teaser for EA Sports College Football did not show anything of substance.
Basically, my reaction to that initial teaser, and its promise to deliver "the game this sport deserves" was "Uh huh, sure. I'll believe it when I see it."
Well, now there is an actual gameplay trailer that shows us something of substance. And it's actually pretty good. Honestly, this trailer is better than I expected it to be. Much to my surprise, it did give me some nostalgic goosebumps.
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I'm going to change pace a little bit for this installment of "How Madden Fails To Simulate Football". Previously, I've focused on the rules of the game and on on-field gameplay. This time, I'm going to go off the field and start talking about team-building and coaching strategies, which are key to creating an engaging Franchise Mode experience.

This is a topic that was voted upon by my Patrons. If you would like to have voting power to influence the content that I create, then I encourage you to support my content creation through Patreon. Patron support helps offsets the cost of the server for my blog, the license for the software that I use to YouTube edit videos, and any research material that I buy.
The COVID years have been hard on a lot of people, and many of my Patrons had to discontinue their support due to financial hardships. I want to take a moment to wish all my former Patrons the best. I hope that 2022 treated you better, and that 2023 will be better yet. I'd also like to thank my current Patrons and those who stuck with me. To all my Patrons -- past, present, and future -- thank you for your support.
Now let's talk football! I'm writing drafted this essay in the month or 2 leading up to the 2023 NFL Draft, so this topic will actually be kind of relevant at the time that it is published.
The full video on YouTube contains additional commentary and examples.
One of the ways that Madden is most different from real life football is that in Madden, the exact skill level of every player in the league is known to everyone all the time. Because of the way that Madden implements player attributes and progression, users don't have to evaluate player talent at all. Ever. In the vast majority of cases, ordering your depth chart is a simple matter of sorting the players by their overall ratings. And if it's not the overall rating, then there's usually a single other attribute rating that determines who starts and who doesn't. It's usually speed. For example, I favor kick and punt returners with speed, and usually put my fastest reserve player as my starting returner, regardless of his overall rating. So yes, there are some edge cases where a user gets to make judgement calls about which player better fits your play style. But for the most part, it's all about that overall rating.
This means that there is no mystery or question about which players are actually good, which players aren't so good, and which players are outright busts. It also means that Madden doesn't have true position battles. One player is objectively better than the other in the vast, overwhelming majority of cases, even if it is just marginally so. It means there's no question whether a free agent or trade will be an upgrade over the players already on your roster. It means that there isn't much value in testing out rookies in the preseason because you already know exactly how good those players are, and whether they are deserving of a starting position or roster spot based on their overall rating.
All of the intrigue and "what ifs" that go into roster movements and decisions in NFL front offices are simply non-existent in Madden because so much of the game is based on these absolute numbers that are completely open and transparent to everybody.
photo credit: Pittsburgh Post Gazette
photo credit: John Jones / Icon Sportswire
Every year, there are questions about who is the best player in many teams' lineups.
Think of some of the big questions from early in the 2022 season: Is Mitch Trubisky better than the rookie Kenny Pickett? Should Devin Singletary get more carries than James Cook? How about Tony Pollard or Ezekiel Elliot? Should the Packers look to Allen Lazard or Sammy Watkins to replace the lost productivity of Devante Adams? Will Nakobe Dean play well enough as a rookie linebacker for the Eagles, or should they stick with their veteran starter from last year? Is Bailey Zappe better than Mac Jones? Is Trey Lance better than Jimmy Garoppolo?
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9f10d671-d80e-4d7a-9525-a0be037a7e58|19|2.8
Tags:Madden, Madden NFL, How Madden Fails to Simulate Football, EA, EA Sports, Electronic Arts, Tiburon, football, simulation, sports, YouTube, preseason, training camp, draft
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