Cool, I just did that. Here is what I saw and think.
Coach Clipboard - Wow, neat name for a menu system that I'll use throught the game. Color me terribly unimpressed.
Team Campuses - Probably 1 - 6 different models that all just have different skins applied to them to make them match your team. In no way will they resemble the actual campus of the team. Sounds like a graphically intense way to tell me if it is sunny, windy, raining, or snowing. Based on previous iterations of Madden, these conditions will be meaningless anyway.
Approval Rating - This is the point of the game. Get a high approval rating. Coach well and the CPO Owner will approve. Seems simple enough, though not really groundbreaking.
Career Starting Point - Again, this was in last years game. Wow, I can recreate the most recent draft. Nice feature I guess, but nothing new.
Active sideline - This sounds pretty neat. Little cutscenes for certain actions your coach will take. Only 300 though. Not a whole lot, and after seeing your kicker start to warm-up for the 10th time, you will probably skip it. Doesn't effect gameplay. Would be REALLY cool if this was just in Madden
In game Play Creator - Playbook editor that should have been in Madden already. The AI can't handle the little shifts that you make manually in the game already. I can only imagine the exploits that can be created with this.
Defining Moments - Fancy name for scoring certain parts of the game for your approval rating. Shouldn't the game do this anyway? If you always make a bonehead call with the game on the line, shouldn't your approval rating go down?
Bah, I got tired of listing all these, but you can see that most of them are just window dressing or fancy names that are a bullet point for something that should just be standard. There are a ton of off-season features (future draft pick trades, CPU Trades, Live bidding for free agents, expanded rosters, etc.)that people have been asking for in Madden for years that they included in this instead. Should have put them in Madden first.
In fact the NFLHC web site is polite enough to remind us that people have been asking for these features to be included in Madden forever, but put them here instead.
If you truly beleive that EA would rather do you a "favor" and sell you a game for $30 bucks, instead of making more money off it by selling it for $60 and offering the same integration with Madden, then you are truly the type of sucker that EA is looking to get to buy this version of the game.