How EA Sports Fails To Simulate Football: Gameplanning

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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.

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.

A rant about Custom Playbooks

Before I talk about game prep features in Franchise Mode, I first need to talk about that Custom Playbooks feature in modern Madden, because it is an absolute dumpster fire!

The playbook editor has remained largely unchanged for 15 years, other than adding new plays and some minor U.I. changes. It lists all the plays in the game, and you can choose to add and remove plays from your playbook. It also includes a list of situations, and you can rank how often you want to call a given play in any given situation. On the surface, it's a simple and effective tool for constructing a playbook that encourages the user to actually think about the strategy behind how each play will be used, and to hopefully create a playbook that has a consistent logic behind it. It's a good foundation!

But that's all it is: a foundation. EA has never really built on that foundation to make a structure that is genuinely solid and meaninful. If you've ever spent any extended amount of time in this Custom Playbook editor, and tried to make a good faith effort to construct a functional and sensical playbook and gameplan, then you know how frustratingly inconvenient it is to do anything in this editor.

First and foremost, the only way to sort through plays is by formation and sets. There are no additional sorting or filtering options for play types, concepts, or personnel packages (like the filtering options that exist in the actual play-calling screen in a match). I can't filter or search for all RPO Alert plays, all QB runs, all trap runs, all shovel passes, or all Cover 3 defensive plays, or all zone blitzes. Nor can I search for specific plays from a specific team or coach's playbooks. If a CPU or user opponent uses a play against me that I really like, and I want to add it to my own playbook, I would have to search through every single formation and set in the game to find it.

Plays are organized by formation and set, with no options for filtering or sorting.

There's also no filters for quickly finding plays that have specific features. You can't filter by which plays have a proper fullback, or that have built-in motion, or have pulling linemen, or which run Tight Ends on passing routes, or which defensive plays that cover the Hard Flats, or the plays that roll from one pre-snap coverage shell look into another coverage shell post-snap. Nor can you filter or sort by what opposing concepts a given play is designed to beat. You can't search or filter by all plays that target the holes in Cover 2 defense, or for all defensive plays that are supposed to be effective crossing routes.

If you're trying to decide whether a given play is worth adding to your playbook, there is no way to quickly jump into Practice Mode and run that play to see if it's any good. If you want to test out a play, you have to save your playbook, then exit the playbook editor, then go to Practice Mode, then select your team, then select your playbook, sit through a loading screen, find the play in your playbook, pick a play for the opposing team to run against your play, and finally run the damn play. And if you specifically want to test that play with your Franchise team's roster, then you have the added step of having to load you Franchise save file and going into Open Practice from the Franchise Weekly Training menu, because you can't edit playbooks from within the Franchise Mode.

You cannot select a custom playbook
as your coach's playbook in Franchise.

Oh, and of course, because Madden's different modes and customization features don't like to cooperate with one another, when you're in Franchise Mode, you cannot access the Custom Playbook menu. So if you want to swap some plays or play-calling priorities for a given matchup, you have to unload and exit your Franchise, and open the Custom Playbook from the game's main menu. Also, when you're in Franchise Mode, you can't select a custom playbook as your coach's playbook, which means you can't set custom formation subs with the playbook you actually created for use in Franchise.

And then, on top of all that, there appears to be a limited number of situations for which you can assign frequency stars in your playbook's gameplan. This means that if you put a lot of plays in your playbook, you won't be able to tell the game to actually call all of those plays. The game doesn't give any indication that there is a limited number of situations that can be given stars, nor does it show you how many you have left. The only way you will discover this is if you fill up your playbook, and try to assign stars to situations for every play. Eventually, you'll realize that the game just isn't saving your new stars unless you clear all the stars out of situations from other plays.

Then there's other little nagging problems. Like how the Custom Playbook screen doesn't specify which positions or players are part of the formation. Oh, this is a bunch TE formation? OK. So which one is the Tight End? And if it can't show the base personnel, it sure as heck won't show you all the package variants that you can run out of that formation. Want to make sure that you have formations that have packages in which your number 1 receiver is in a slot position? Nope. Can't see that here.

I love that there is a Custom Playbook feature in this game, and that it tries to make users think about situational play-calling strategies. It is just so cumbersome and annoying that I still consider it an utter "fail". If EA is actually going to try to take gameplanning and playbook customization seriously, then these complaints with the Custom Playbook and Gameplan editor need to be addressed!

Strategic Gameplanning Decisions

OK, since that particular long-standing frustration is now vented and out of the way, I wan to lay some additional groundwork for this topic by reviewing what kinds of strategic options and decisions Madden already makes available to the user.

Obviously, there's the Custom Playbooks that I already mentioned.

There's also this Coaching Strategy menu available from the play-call screen, that is largely used to adjust how conservative or aggressive you want your players to play. The CPU will even use this occasionally to make its own adjustments!

Then there are a robust set of audibles, hot routes, and other pre-play adjustments that allow you to change the whole play, or change a specific position group, or to change any individual player's assignment.

You can also assign Formation Subs and change the default auto-sub conditions in the Franchise Hub. And you can focus your team to improve certain aspects of their play on a week-by-week basis.

There's actually quite a lot that you can do, strategically. In fact, it can be so much, that it can easily be overwhelming for many more casual players. Things like pre-play coverage adjustments is one of the things that typically separates high-level players from more casual players.

To its credit, Madden does have a lot of strategic options.

But there's a common thread running through almost all of those strategic options and menus. Almost all of them are strategic decisions that you have to make in the middle of a match. But they are almost all also strategies and techniques that real-life football teams would put in place during the week of practice, as part of a carefully-constructed gameplan, rather than whilly-nilly decisions made in the heat of the game. Do teams change these strategies and techniques during a match? Sure, of course they do. So we should be able to change them mid-match. But we should also be able to set these strategies and adjustments prior to the match, as part of a gameplan.

Madden's failures at modeling gameplanning and scheming boil down to 4 general problems:

1. Play-calling does not consider many common real football situations that would alter play-calling strategies,
2. Play-calling does not consider the opponents' tendencies,
3. Play-calling does not attempt to specifically counter or neutralize an opponents' best players.
4. Gameplanning does not allow the user to make specific gameplanning adjustments prior to starting the match.

Let's go through each of the problems that I just outlined.

Play-calling based on down and distance

Offensively, Madden's gameplans are based entirely on down and distance, or on position on the field (such as 2-minute drill). These gameplans miss many common situations in an NFL match that might alter a team's play-calling preferences. Gameplans includes a situation for 2-minute offense, but not for a 4-minute or 5-minute offense -- let alone for being in "comeback mode" for the entire 2nd half or 4th quarter. Inversely, Madden includes a "Run out the clock" situation, but I don't think that comes into play until the 2-minute warning of the 4th quarter. There's no situation for taking the lead early in the game, and wanting to run the ball more in the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th quarters to control time of possession and limit the opponent's opportunities to possess the ball.

In CFB 25, players have a Composure meter
that affects how well they play in adverse situations.

Gameplans also miss more specific football situations, such as a "sudden change" situation after one team or the other turns the ball over. There's also no situations for dealing with your own team's mistakes or turnovers from earlier in the game. Did your quarterback throw an interception last possession? Do you want to come out with a safe, easy throw to help put him back in rhythm and regain some confidence? Or do you want to take the ball out of his hands and establish your running game in order to take pressure off of the QB? Or do you prefer to take a deep shot to keep the defense honest and show them you aren't afraid? You can't gameplan for any of these strategies. College Football 25 even has a Composure meter that affects how player react to adversity, so this sort of gameplan situation is far more relevant in that game, compared to Madden.

More fundamentally, these play-calling preferences are completely irrespective of how your opponent might play defense. Does your opponent play with 1 and 3-technique defensive tackles who would be more susceptible to inside power concepts like Trap and Counter? Or do they use an even front, with both tackles in a head-up technique? Or an odd front with a true Nose Tackle? Or a Bear front with a down defensive lineman lined up directly on each of your offensive linemen? These would affect what kind of run plays and pass protection schemes would be most effective, but the Playbook Gameplan doesn't consider it at all. Does the opposing defense stick to their base personnel on 3rd downs, or switch to nickel or dime? Heck, do they run nickel or dime as their base defense? Doesn't matter. As far as Madden is concerned, it doesn't matter what the defense is doing. You do you!

To Madden's credit, defensive play-selection preferences are a bit more opponent-oriented. But they only really care about the opposing offense's formation. There are base situations, and then situations for trips, bunch, empty, etc. And then there's preferences for things like 3rd down, goalline, and so forth. Ironically, at the time that a coach would be calling a defensive play, you wouldn't even know what the offense's formation is going to be yet.

Defensive gameplans are based on opponent formations,
with no consideration for what the opponent likes to do out of those formations.

Does your opponent use bunch formations to run route combinations that create natural picks or rubs? That might be best defended by zone match principles. Or do they use that bunch formation to compress the defensive formation and leave it vulnerable to wheel or corner routes? That might be best defended by dropping a nickel DB back deep to defend the perimeter. Or maybe they put a tight end in the bunch to lead block for receiver screens or even to crack block for outside run plays? That might be best defended by leaving linebackers on the field for the added strength and physicality. Again, Madden doesn't really care. A bunch is a bunch, I guess. Right?

Failure to represent tendencies

Identifying an opponent's tendencies is a big part of scouting and gameplanning against an opponent, but the down-and-distance tendencies in the Playbook Gameplan that I just discussed is basically the end-all-be-all of how Madden has modeled team tendencies for 15 years. However, real football tendencies go far beyond simple play calls based on down, distance, and remaining game clock. Real football also involves a lot of bluffing and baiting of opponents, in which one play call early in the game (or in a previous game) might be used to bait the opponent into playing a certain way, in order to expose a vulnerability for a later play call. Madden completely fails to represent the chess-like nature of real-life play-calling tendencies.

Because the A.I. in Madden doesn't recognize tendencies (or follow tendencies of their own), this idea of over-committing to stop a common play or scheme simply doesn't exist in Madden. You cannot effectively script plays or gameplans using a specific punch-counter-punch combination.

You can also run the exact same play over and over again in the same situation, and the opponent will never meaningful react to it.

If the defense shuts down your counter-punch, then a real football team can also react with a counter-counter-punch. But since Madden doesn't even bother to implement the idea of a punch-counter-punch, it definitely doesn't implement a counter-counter-punch.

This limitation of Madden is made especially frustrating because this very concept of using one play type to set up another play has been in EA Sports football games before. Before their cancellation, the NCAA Football games had "linked plays", in which success at one play (such as a zone run) would make the defense more susceptible to a different play (such as a play action pass off of that zone run). It was a simple, but good, idea that rewarded play-callers for actually following a play-calling script. Yet, I don't think this was ever ported to Madden.

NCAA Football 13 and 14 had a concept of "linked plays", that could be used to setup another specific play.

I could imagine a gameplanning engine that expands NCAA Football's concept of "linked plays" by allowing the user to select a subset of plays from your playbook that you want to emphasize in the upcoming matchup. Then, for each of those plays, you can also define counter-plays for if the opponent reacts in a certain way to stop your play-call. For example, you could highlight a particular running play to call multiple times early in the game. Then declare a play action pass or a reverse off that highlighted running play for use later in the game. This would probably require the default quarter length to be extended, so that there's actually enough time in a game to call a play more than once in order to set up another play later. Once again, this is an example of how quarter length and game pacing affects almost every aspect of Madden's design!

Failure to represent targets

But football tendencies go beyond simply what plays you call in what situations. It also includes who gets the ball, or has a specific responsibility in a given situation.

Just like a Madden user can effectively call the same play over and over again, they can also force passes to the same 90-overall receiver every single play, and the CPU would never meaningfully adapt to it. For years, issues like the "rocket catch" and the overpowered "aggressive catch" encouraged that very strategy of forcing corner routes to top-tier receivers like Larry Fitzgerald, Calvin Johnson, or Rob Gronkowski. Even other users who knew that it was coming couldn't effectively defend it. Madden doesn't include any features or mechanics for identifying which player will get the ball in a given situation.

For example, the 2018 Saints would preferentially target Alvin Kamara and Michael Thomas on third down. The Cowboys noticed this trend going into their matchup against the Saints that year, and responded by specifically putting in a formation and personnel package to neutralize those two players at the expense of the Saints' other offensive weapons. The Saints failed to adapt and use its other weapons to take advantage of Dallas' over-commitment, and they lost the game. The Cowboys defensive gameplan wasn't simply that the Saints like to run a specific route combination on third down, the Cowboys also identified who the Saints would give the ball to on those third down plays, and created entire defensive schemes to stop those 1 or 2 players!

Madden doesn't do this. Even if the Saints' Gameplan says to call a Wheel route on 3rd down, as they commonly did in 2018, the Madden Gameplan doesn't specify that the QB should preferentially target Thomas or Kamara in these situations. Yes, every pass play in Madden has a "primary" receiver (the one red route in the play), but QBs (both user and CPU) can completely ignore this primary read, and throw anywhere on the field.

PS2-era Madden games allowed DBs to
be matched up against specific receivers.

When it comes to actually defending this sort of tendency on the field, Madden gives few (if any) tools for dealing with an opponent's primary weapons. We can't assign specific DBs to cover specific receivers before the match, nor can we assign a safety or a linebacker to double-team and bracket a particular receiver or tight end. You can make these adjustments as Hot Routes before a play, but that would require you to do it before every single play!

Trying to gamble on focusing all your attention on 1 or 2 offensive players is also not really viable. Even if I assign a corner to cover Alvin Kamara on a route, or I make a pre-snap adjustment to double-team Michael Thomas, a CPU Drew Brees will be able to trivially throw accurately to a different target who is either un-covered or under-covered. This is the result of another problem that I have previously covered in another essay, Madden's lackluster modeling of QB progressions. In my opinion, the best solution that Madden has ever found for this particular problem was the QB Vision Cone, which actually made progressions relevant by forcing the QB to scan from one receiver to another before being able to accurately throw the ball.

There's no panic or frustration in modern Madden. You can't pressure a good QB into making bad reads or forcing passes by taking away his preferred targets.

On the other side of the ball, the user does not have many tools to identify particular threats on the defensive side of the ball. You can't pre-emptively set double-team blocking for an elite defensive lineman, or pre-emptively set your slide protection to a full slide towards a particularly blitz-happy outside linebacker or nickel back.

For an example of just how detailed football scouting and gameplanning can be, I want to share with you a fake punt that UNLV ran in the L.A. Bowl this year. This play works because UNLV's coaches reviewed Cal's previous game film, and recognized that this one particular corner on the return team is assigned to blocking the outside most gunner, and not to cover a wideout on any potential fake. This fake punt is viable regardless of the behavior of the corner, because even if the corner does cover the wideout, there's a good chance that he gets caught up in all the traffic of the blockers and gunners. But UNLV knew that Cal was particularly vulnerable to this particular type of fake, which is why they had the confidence to call this on a 4th and 7 from within their own 40 yard line. This was the play that completely swung the momentum of the game in UNLV's favor!

Do I expect Madden to include scouting and gameplanning that is this detailed? No. Of course not. But it would be nice if different teams had different ways of executing things like punts and punt returns, which could be exploited by a savvy opponent. Instead, every team in the game runs special teams plays exactly the same.

Madden also fails to represent role players. Maybe I have a particularly speedy receiver, but he's not a very good route-runner, so he's relegated to 3rd or 4th string. But I want to put him in for a specific Jet Sweep or WR Screen. I could accomplish this with formation subs, but I don't really want him in every play in these formations; I only want him in these very specific plays. But Madden's custom playbooks and Gameplanning features don't allow you to pre-plan specific personnel package variants for specific play calls or situations.

And if you happen to have your own defensive back who is a better pass-rusher than he is cover man, and you want to blitz him from a nickel or dime position on key passing situations, you can't really do that. You could use formation subs to put that player in the nickel or dime position for nickel and dime formations, but then he'll be at that position every time you call that nickel or dime formation, even if you are dropping that back into coverage and would prefer to have the default player there.

Axis Football shows a pop-up notification whenever players are automatically subbed in or out.

Oh, and Madden also doesn't bother to show the user which players are being subbed in for any given play. So if the opponent does have a particular trick play that they run with specific personnel, the game doesn't bother to tell you that player is coming onto the field. Axis Football has a nifty feature that shows which players are being auto-subbed in and out of the game.

If the Steelers run backup QB Justin Fields onto the field to run a Read Option on a short-yardage play, the game doesn't tell me that. So I have no clue to change my defensive strategy to focus on the QB on the Option, nor can I tell my defense (during weekly training) to specifically cover Justin Fields on options. But I can't plan or strategize for these sorts of things, because Madden doesn't bother to tell me who's on the field. Not that it matters, since, as we established previously, CPU Steelers won't sub Justin Fields on unless Russel Wilson is injured, because you can't add specific personnel packages to your Playbook's Gameplan.

Madden doesn't tell me if a specific role player (such as Justin Fields) is subbing in.

Failure to make game-wide adjustments

And that brings me to the next point, which is that Madden just doesn't have robust tools for making game-wide adjustments. It has lots of tools for making one-time adjustments before any given play. But if you want those same adjustments to apply for every play, or every play in a given situation, you have to manually make those adjustments every single time, for each individual play. Even for the Coaching Strategy menu, which does make game-long adjustments, you have to remember to do that during the match, instead of being able to plan it out in advance. And, of course, you can't do any of that stuff if you are simming or spectating your games instead of actually playing them. In those cases, you are completely at the mercy of the players' default behaviors.

Imagine having an interface in which you can go through all of an opponent's formations or sets, and be able to specify permanent defensive hot routes for each defensive play that you call against those formations or sets. So if you call a particular defensive play, and the offense lines up in one of those sets, your defense will automatically have those chosen hot routes assigned. No need to try to quickly switch to different defenders to make the hot routes manually, and hoping to get it all done before the opposing QB snaps the ball.

I should be able to pre-emptively set these Coaching Adjustment options during Weekly Training.

Imagine being able to set Coaching Strategy decisions from a menu in Weekly Training, so that you don't have to wait till your first defensive possession to remember to assign your preferred DB matchups, or whether to defend the dive back or QB on options, or to adjust my default zone depths if the Training menu tells me that the opposing team is effective at throwing deep down the field.

Imagine being able to assign a default coverage double team to bracket a specific receiver? Or to automatically double-team block a specific pass rusher, if an extra blocker is available? Or to automatically use half-slide against a 3-4 front that is likely to have a blitzing inside linebacker? Or to default to full slides to the back side against Nickel or Dime defenses if I know that the opponent likes to blitz nickel and dime backs off the edge?

I would also like to be able to gameplan for situational substitutions. Some coaches like to pull a running back out of a game if he fumbles. But I can't make that part of my weekly strategy or my general coaching profile. Why can't I decide, in advance, that I want to pull a QB from the game if he's playing poorly? Or to make mass subs if I'm winning or losing by a specific margin so that I don't risk injuries to starters in an uncompetitive match? Why can't I set how many plays or possessions or quarters I want my 1st, 2nd, and 3rd units to play in a preseason game? Heck, Madden doesn't even model a 3rd unit to begin with. The CPU auto subs the backups in preseason games, but then never subs deeper into its depth chart.

Why can't I decide, in advance, that I want to kick away from a dangerous return man, even if it means shorter, shallower punts, or risk of kickoff going out of bounds. Why can't I tell my kicker how I want him to handle the new Dynamic Kickoff? Should he kick it into the endzone and give the other team the ball on the 30, so that we don't risk a bigger return? Or am I confident in my kick coverage team, and I want him to kick it high to the goalline with the expectation that we'll tackle the returner short of the 20? Or would I prefer that he kick a line drive right at the return man in the hopes that he muffs or fumbles the return? And why can't I set who I want to play as kickoff return and punt gunners in the depth chart?!

I can't instruct my kicker or punter to kick away from dangerous returners.

And then there's other adjustments that the user could make, which are not part of the playbooks, gameplans, or any sort of coaching profile. For example, if prefer to shift my defensive line opposite of the side of the running back on shotgun plays, there is no way for me to tell the CPU to do that in SuperSim, or full simulation. Alternatively, if I want to shift the defense towards the side of the back against a QB who likes to keep the ball on Read Option plays, I can't make that automatic either.

Being able to make these sorts of decisions before the game even starts would dramatically improve the feeling of being an actual coach preparing for a game. And it also ensures that if you are letting the CPU play for you, then the CPU will make the decisions that you want it to make. Madden already has interfaces for doing almost all of this stuff, they just bury it within the actual match and make it hard to use, instead of exposing it during the Weekly Training and giving the user a reminder and opportunity to use it in advance. Making all these decisions during a match does a horrible job of simulating real football gameplanning, because in real football, all of these decisions would have been made in advance, before starting the match, no at-the-moment, within the match.

Conclusion / Outro

Now, you might be thinking "so what if the gameplan is simplistic and limited? The user can just override the suggested play-calls and call whatever play you want!". And that is true, if the user is actually playing the full game. But a lot of Franchise players don't explicitly play every play of every match on their schedule, every season. Many Franchise players prefer to role-play as GMs or coaches, and will just sim the matchups, spectate them, or play SuperSim / Play-the-Moments. If you aren't calling all your plays manually, then your team will play the plays suggested by your gameplan, without consideration for any more specific or detailed situations or playstyle preferences.

Most importantly, the CPU doesn't do any kind of gameplanning. The CPU doesn't change its play-selection based on my tendencies (or on other CPU teams' tendencies for CPU-vs-CPU matchups). It won't commit to double-teaming my star receiver. It won't double-team my tight end on 3rd down passing situations, knowing that I like to run drive and angle routes. It won't run a Bear front in goalline or short yardage situations, knowing that I like to run Fullback Dive.

Play-The-Moments is the default option for Franchise,
which doesn't allow any in-game user adjustments.

In Franchise Mode, I never feel like I'm out-coached in a loss. Usually, I loose because the CPU goes into a Turbo, Robo-QB mode, or the game scripts my players to keep screwing up. If I can't run the ball, it's because my blockers don't hold their blocks at the point of attack; not because the opposing defense schematically puts an un-blocked defender into the gap. The CPU never systematically take away the things I like to do, and they never force me out of my comfort zone, and make me have to dig deep into my playbook to find something they won't see coming, but which I probably don't have as much familiarity or muscle-memory to execute.

To be fair to Madden and EA, football is a complicated sport, and gameplanning is a difficult thing to do. That's why NFL and college coaches make millions of dollars a year. This is a team sport with a lot of moving parts and technical nuance. That's part of why I love the sport! It's a deep and strategically nuanced sport.

No football video game has ever come close to capturing all the strategic depth and nuance of real football playbook design and gameplanning. Honestly, I don't think it's fair to ever expect a video game to do those things. A video game can't model things as nuanced as tiny variations in alignments, stance, or technique for every single player in the NFL, for every conceivable situation.

But one of the things that frustrates me so much about Madden is that it does have a lot of tools for fine-tuning the execution of your players. It just buries these tools in places where many users don't even know they exist, and where it's easy to forget to utilize them when there is a prime opportunity to utilize them.

Even if you're a head-to-head or Ultimate Team player who never touches Franchise Mode, you could potentially benefit from such design changes. Imagine being given a scouting report before every online match that tells you a breakdown of your opponent's all-time and recent play-calling tendencies, and also of how frequently they make specific pre-play adjustments, and which combinations of pre-play adjustments they tend to make. And now imagine having a few minutes before the match starts for each user to quickly tweak your own playbooks, or make specific match-long adjustments such as assigning default double-team assignments, or a QB Spy, or for your DBs to default to a specific shade adjustment so that you don't have to make that same shade adjust before every single play.

User profiles should track user audibles, hot routes, and other adjustments.

So far, all of this has been focused on pre-game gameplanning. There's a whole other layer to strategy that involves how coaches and teams adjust those gameplans in real-time in order to adapt to changing circumstances throughout a game or the season, and how Madden fails to do that. But that will have to be the topic of a future essay! Hope to see you back!