I read in another post that you can create players and put them in the offline franchise mode so that's good if true. At the very least, we can boost stats or lower them before going into offline franchise mode. That at least is a good thing. I was fearing that we couldn't be able to touch stats at all except through XP. So far from perfect, but better than what I expected. Wow...how sad is that? The deal breaker for me is no CPU vs. CPU in offline franchise. I know that's trivial to most, but that's been my thing. Playing the Watchmaker and letting the fun unfold.