[anechoic]

Hey, I just started following this thread and I do appreciate you keeping EA in check as far as player ratings go. But I've been checking out the ratings, and they don't seem very universal so far. I'm a Packer fan so I've been checking out mostly Green Bay's player ratings, and there are a number that seem off. But I'm going to set those aside to comment on the larger issue here.

A lot of people want the ratings to be more dispersed - have a greater gap between the best and worst players. It sounds like a great idea, but I'm not really convinced that it is. It sort of starts to eliminate "competition." For instance, in Denver, Tim Tebow and Brady Quinn are in competition for the backup quarterback spot. In Madden 11, the two players are pretty much interchangeable so it's mostly personal preference. But if the ratings are stretched, perhaps Quinn would become a 70 and Tebow would drop to a 67 or something. Now, you'd be much more compelled to start Quinn over Tebow. And the truth about the NFL is that the competition is much closer than it is in college football. Even in the NFL, it's not too difficult for someone like Aaron Rodgers to scramble away from defensive ends but if the ratings varied more, that speed difference would show even more, which would make Rodgers look even slower. And when it comes to the discussion of "which player is better," almost no one can agree (like people constantly argue over whether Drew Brees or Peyton Manning is a better quarterback) so it's probably better to have the ratings closer in that case to show how close their skills really are.

Ok, I'm really not sure if all of that was coherent, but I thought I should get some of my opinions out here. Don't know if any of this helps at all.