In Super Bowl 50, football fans watched the Denver Broncos win a championship with arguably the deepest and deadliest defense to play in the NFL's current Penalty Flag Era (TM). But in Madden NFL 16, gamers won't be able to generate consistent pressure on quarterbacks or shutdown opponents' top receivers using Gary Kubiak's dominant defensive unit (I call them Kubiak's defense, because Madden still doesn't include any coordinators or assistant coaches).

Drive Out, Four Verticals, Inside Zone, Fullback Dive –- those four plays are all it takes to consistently move the chains in Madden NFL 16, even on the hardest difficulty setting (All-Madden), against the highest-rated defenses in the game:
 

While Electronic Arts' Tiburon studio keeps creating new mechanics to help offenses throw, catch, and run the ball more effectively, defenses haven't gotten much help in recent Maddens, apart from an over-the-shoulder camera angle that most competitive players don't use, and an overpowered timing minigame that turns 300-pound offensive linemen into 20-pound turnstiles.

Going as far back as Madden 64, Tiburon has a long history of making "advanced defensive AI" one of their most recycled marketing bullet points, but there've been 18 editions of Madden since “Liquid AI” debuted, and the outside cornerback still won't jump a doggone out route after throwing to the same receiver from the same formation 20 times in one game.
 

Madden NFL 16's representation of man defense is so pitiful that cornerbacks with 90-plus coverage ratings can't even contain basic one-cut routes like slants, drags, and outs without surrendering two to four steps of separation. Zones don't function much better, with defenders shuffling their feet inside a small predetermined circle, showing little awareness of what's happening around them, and making no real attempt to disrupt the routes of receivers who're passing through their area.

How can Madden solve these long-running defensive issues? The developers should start by making some of Madden NFL 16's existing tools more accessible. Formation-specific substitutions should be possible from a pre-game and in-game pause menu, not just from inside the huddle. This way, users won't have to waste the first offensive and defensive possession of every game trying to set up all their subs and make sure that their top pass rushers and pass coverers are on the field during nickel, dime, and quarters formations. All special teams situations also need to be included in the formation subs pause menu, just like they were back on the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox. Users shouldn't have to risk injuries and drain stamina from their starters on kickoffs and punt returns if they don't want to -- this should be a strategic option that's available to users, not forced upon them.
 

Small playbook sizes also limit Madden's strategic potential. All-Pro Football 2K8 let users fit all 6,442 of the game's plays into a single playbook, and that was the first iteration of a product built for 11-year-old hardware. Madden NFL 16, by comparison, limits users to a mere 500 plays for each side of the ball, despite being the third iteration of a product built for 3-year-old hardware. Madden's defenses would have a much easier time stopping offenses if they simply had more formations/sets to pick from that weren't so bland and predictable.

Defensive assignments is another feature from All-Pro Football 2K8 that should have made its way into Madden by now. Users should be able to manually assign a defender to each skill-position player, preferably, from a pre-game and in-game pause menu. This way, Rob Gronkowski will consistently get guarded by the other team's best defender, instead of getting a random linebacker or safety assigned to him in man coverage. From this same defensive assignment menu, users should also get to pick one offensive player to gravitate their coverage towards (Madden calls this "spotlighting"), so that defenses don't have to keep clicking Gronk's name every single passing down before the ball is snapped.
 

It was great to see Madden NFL 15 finally adding several different shading techniques to its pre-snap secondary commands, but again, this is something that should be assignable from a pre-game and in-game pause menu, not something that requires several clicks every single down. Take a cue from NBA 2K16 and give users a menu where they can determine how their secondary plays defense at a global and individual level. Include options for shading technique, pre-snap cushion, double team priority, tackling style, and defensive pressure. High pressure settings should naturally cause more holding and interference penalties, unless your secondary has high discipline ratings. Also let users save different defensive settings and switch between them from inside the huddle, so that it only takes two or three button presses to go into your predetermined "two minute defense" that has outside shading, a 10-yard cushion, conservative tackling, and low pressure assigned to every defender.
 

Three more features from the 2K football series that would improve Madden's defense are manual line stunts, automated blitz creep-ups, and coverage shells. 14 years ago, NFL 2K3 let users call stunts and twists independent from the back-seven's coverage assignments. Yet all of Madden NFL 16's defensive plays are still tied together, with 95 percent of them telling the entire defensive line to rush straight ahead into the offensive line. The game's pre-snap adjustments won't let users call anything but a basic crash left/right/middle, which means athletic interior linemen like Ndamukong Suh cannot be utilized to their full potential. The effectiveness of Madden's blitz plays is also hurt by the pass rushers not creeping up to the line of scrimmage as the snap nears. The original NFL 2K on the SEGA Dreamcast was able to replicate this real-life tendency in any blitz that was called. But Madden NFL 16 only has creep-up animations included in a tiny percentage of its prebuilt plays, and the "show blitz" pre-snap command moves the entire defense around instead of threatening only the players who're about to rush the passer. One of the main reasons that Madden's blitzers struggle to reach the quarterback in time is because they're starting their runs too far behind the line of scrimmage with no forward momentum built up.
 

Last year's Madden included several plays with prebuilt coverage shells, but these disguises need to work with any defensive play call, not just in a small percentage of preassigned plays. All-Pro Football 2K8's system of having multiple coverage shells available as a pre-snap command was certainly better than what's in Madden right now, but I think the best way to handle this situation is to let users pick two plays in the huddle, have their defense line up in the first play, then automatically shift into the second play after the ball is snapped. If users want to break out of the shell at any time before the snap, all they'd have to do is click the "man align" command. The "two playcalls at once" system would be great for hiding blitzes, since you could show an overload blitz off the right edge, with your right outside linebacker and nickelback automatically creeping up towards the line of scrimmage, then at the snap, those two players would drop back into coverage while the left outside linebacker and strong safety blitzed through the opposite side of the line. It's still too easy to read exactly what the defense is doing before the ball is snapped in Madden NFL 16, and a better coverage shell or bluff play system is needed to make defenses harder to decipher.
 

Unless Madden NFL 17 suddenly decides to bring back Online Team Play and let people control every position on the field, the gigantic discrepancy between the abilities of a human-controlled player and the abilities of a computer-controlled player must be reduced. Two years after its debut, “True Step Locomotion” only applies to user-controlled running backs, instead of impacting all 22 active players. “Pass Block Steering” was added to Madden NFL 15 as a means of improving the series' ugly, misshapen and incorrectly formed passing pocket, but this mechanic also only applies to user-controlled pass rushers. On the defensive line, your AI teammates and CPU opponents rarely use power moves or finesse moves while rushing the passer, preferring to play patty cake and hand fight with blockers. When your AI pass rushers inevitably fail to reach the quarterback, they won't jump up or even raise their hands to swat the ball. On the rare occasions when a CPU-controlled pass rusher does get a free path to the quarterback (usually, because a blocker glitched out), the AI won't hit the sprint button or the dive button while pursuing, making it too easy for the quarterback to escape.

Basically, the only way to get anything done on defense in Madden NFL 16 is to do everything yourself, because the AI isn't programmed to utilize many of the tactical adjustments or special moves that users have at their disposal. And until Madden's CPU-controlled defense looks this lethal, the NFL will continue being something I watch as a spectator, not something I play as a gamer: