A virtual season: the Madden and ESPN stories of the 2004 NY Jets

[famousmortimer]

I'm a jets fan also and running a franchise in three games for them (espn xbox, madden ps2 & xbox). The long short of it is that im enjoying espn the most, xbox-madden 2nd and ps2-madden 3rd. But i'm only on week 2 for all 3 franchises because i love online so much.

[seanmac]

Madden Week Four: Bills (1-2) at Jets (3-0)
Final Score- Bills 20 Jets 10

Bills Jets
14 First downs 7
292 Total yards 133
270 Passing 114
22 Rushing 19
33 Pass plays 23
18 Rush plays 11
1 Turnovers 2
12:27 Possession 7:33

The Jets continued their impersonation of the Al Groh 2000 team, getting out to another terrible start. Chad Pennington was picked off twice in the first half, while his counterpart Drew Bledsoe threw two touchdowns on his way to a 270 yard day. The Jets were down 17-3 at halftime. There was a brief moment during the third quarter when it seemed like the team could climb their way back into the game, as they closed to within 17-10, then picked off an errant Bledsoe pass. But in the end it was simply too much Bledsoe, who picked on David Barrett all game. A late bomb to Bobby Shaw set up another Bills score, and that was all she wrote.

Impressions:
It’s the quarter mark for the season, so I’ll post some of my stats to date. For starters, the AFC East standings:
Patriots 3-1
Jets 3-1
Bills 2-2
Dolphins 1-4

Pennington 62 of 115 for 630 yards 4 Tds and 3 Ints
Martin 53 for 145 yards 2.7 ypc 0 Tds
Chrebet 17 for 186 yards
McCareins 12 for 135 1 TD
Moss 7 for 118 2 Tds

D Abraham 2 INTs
Cowart 20 tackles
Four players tied with one sack each

I was going to talk about the Madden playbooks a bit, and talk about how they affect how I played the game. The stats make one thing incredibly clear- when it comes to Madden, I direct most of my throws towards the slot receiver. Yes, Moss has been injured for the first few games, but even so that’s a high number of balls to go in Chrebet’s direction. In both Madden and ESPN, the business end of the Jets playbook is their single back sets. But whereas in ESPN the plays encourage you to at least look vertical, the Madden playbooks are heavily crossing route oriented, and when you throw in the fact that I’m not yet comfortable going downfield against the Madden Dbs, you end up with a lot of passes headed Chrebet’s way, as well as Becht. Even once Moss was healthy, he made most of his yardage when I lined him up in the slot, as I couldn’t count on his getting separation, certainly not against the Dolphins corners. It’s also clear that I haven’t gotten the hang of the running game yet, although I feel like it’s coming. I can’t continue to have games where I’m calling twice as many pass plays, but as long as the pass feels so much more effective than the run, it’s easy to drift off that way.

The other thing that stands out to me is the paucity of sacks. Left to their own devices, the defensive line simply does not get pressure on the quarterback. Even against Miami or San Diego, where my defensive line outclassed the offensive line, they barely made a dent. I’ve started experimenting with ways to combine slants and shifts, and I’ve started getting much better pressure, although it hasn’t consistently turned into sacks yet. But hopefully, it’s right around the corner.

Week Four ESPN Bills (2-1) at Jets (3-0)
Final Score: Jets 48 Bills 21


Bills Jets
9 First downs 11
186 Total yards 436
158 Passing 273
28 Rushing 153
35 Pass plays 27
13 Rush plays 23
3 Turnovers 2
8:11 Possession 11:49

The Jets took advantage of an offensive explosion to down the Bills before a sold out home crowd. Buffalo took the early lead on a deep pass to rookie Lee Evans, when safety Jon McGraw went for a pick and missed and the Wisconsin star sprinted to the endzone. But the Jets went on a tear, as Chad Pennington and Curtis Martin both posted their best games of the season.

Impressions: Here’s the season to date (quick note on the game- the CPU ran a fake punt on me; didn’t work, but it was cool to see it pull a trick play out of the playbook):
AFC East
Jets 4-0
Bills 2-2
Dolphins 2-3
Patriots 1-3

Pennington: 48 of 88 for 789 yards 7 Tds 6 Ints
Martin: 67 for 364 yards 5.4 ypc 3 Tds
Moss: 18 for 397 5 Tds
McCareins: 14 for 232
Chrebet: 4 for 22 1 TD

Tongue- 20 tackles
Robertson- 4.5 sacks
Tongue- 2 INTs

The stats bear out pretty clearly the difference in how I can play with ESPN, as Pennington has significantly more yards in almost forty fewer attempts, Martin has a radically higher average, and Moss is far and away my favorite target, with an explosive 18 for 397 and 5 Tds. The Jets playbook has no fewer than eight single back sets, but unlike Madden most of them feature routes that attack the field vertically, and I’m able to get my personnel to execute well. I’d say it might be a little too easy to go deep, but I’m getting what strikes me as much more realistic separation with Moss. At the same time, he still suffers from physical limitations, and when I go to him too often, bigger corners can usually make a play, as Nate Clements did last game, picking off a ball on a corner route that Moss had run for a touchdown earlier in the game. Speaking of, I’m surprised that the interceptions are hovering so close to touchdowns, as I’m a pretty careful player, but I would chalk that up to not getting comfortable with all the game switching. The other stat that clearly stands out is the sack leader. Dts are probably a bit too dominant in ESPN, but I’ve also gotten good numbers from Ellis and Abraham, and that’s without my manually controlling them. The pass rush comes a lot quicker in ESPN, and without my needing to babysit it quite as much.

[seanmac]

It was just getting too time consuming to keep on doing the game by game logs, but I didn’t want to just leave the seasons hanging. I’ll give the scores of every game played, some end of season stats, and my final impressions about each of the games.

ESPN: Final record 13-6 Super Bowl Champions

Game One: Jets 21 Bengals 14
Game Two: Jets 20 Chargers 13
Game Three: Jets 7 Dolphins 3
Game Four: Jets 48 Bills 21
Game Five: 49ers 13 Jets 10
Game Six: Patriots 41 Jets 28
Game Seven: Dolphins 24 Jets 21
Game Eight: Jets 41 Bills 0
Game Nine: Ravens 17 Jets 14
Game Ten: Browns 19 Jets 17
Game Eleven: Jets 38 Cardinals 14
Game Twelve: Jets 27 Texans 14
Game Thirteen: Jets 13 Steelers 10
Game Fourteen: Jets 13 Seahawks 10
Game Fifteen: Patriots 20 Jets 13
Game Sixteen: Jets 35 Rams 24

AFC Wildcard Round: Jets 27 Texans 21
AFC Divisional Round: Jets 24 Raiders 0
AFC Championship Game: Jets 31 Ravens 7
Super Bowl: Jets 37 Packers 10


Season summary: A bit of an odd season. We won the first four, then lost five of the next six, then came back to win five of the final six games and secure the AFC East title, one game ahead of the Pats, who held the tiebreaker. That long swoon in the middle of the season was largely a result of two things- my Madden game getting in the way, and a rash of injuries at the receiver position. I had been doing a lot of practicing of my Madden passing game, and it completely threw off my timing for ESPN, a factor which I blame heavily for the number of interceptions I threw. I lost McCareins for the year about halfway through the season, and Moss was down for several games as well, so I was trotting out Ken Yon Rambo and Jerricho Crotchery at receiver and having a tough time of it. Fortunately we hit an easy patch in the schedule which allowed me to recover my confidence some and get on track in time for the playoffs. The playoffs themselves proved to be fairly easy to get through, as the Texans game was not as close as the final score indicates, and the other three games were blowouts. The Super Bowl was nicely done, with the teams running out of the helmets at the beginning, an air force flyover, and some nice postgame cuts. Let me put up the final regular season numbers for some of my team, then talk about the game itself.

Pennington: 77.2 RTG 204 of 380 for 2,973 yards 54% completions 7.8 YPA 25 Tds 22 INTs

Martin: 266 for 1,535 (3rd in NFL) 5.8 YPC 14 Tds

Moss: 65 for 1,122 17.3 YPR 14 Tds
Martin: 35 for 235 6.7 YPR 9 Tds
Chrebet: 35 for 487 13.9 YPR 5 Tds
McCareins: 17 for 269 15.8 YPR

Tongue: 58 tackles
J. Abraham: 17.5 sacks (3rd in NFL)
Tongue: 17 passes defended
Tongue/D. Abraham: 3 INTs

It’s an interesting set of numbers, and they kind of tell the story of the season. When my receivers started dropping left and right, I was forced to rely on the ground game and to direct a lot of my throws towards either Moss or the backs and tight ends, as I didn’t trust the receivers I had out on the field. I found that once I settled into a West Coast mindset, my completion percentage was going back up, and I was playing pretty good quarterback at the end of the season (just so long as I didn’t have to play the Pats). On the other hand, there are stats which clearly indicate some problem areas for the game. Martin’s YPC is pretty high at 5.8, the result of a fairly dominant outside running game. Part of that is schematic- the Jets offense is designed to do a lot of pulling and getting outside. Even so, that number looks dubious. Also, Abraham’s sacks, while looking about right in terms of the final number-he’s certainly good enough that he could put up that sack total if healthy-largely came in half a season, as I started experimenting with just playing the defensive line and using some of the available moves. They were, safe to say, overly effective. In two games against Jonathan Ogden, Abraham notched eight sacks, and the Super Bowl was the only game where he did not get at least one. Dewayne Robertson caused similar chaos on the interior line, as he registered 13.5 sacks. Another number that stands out is the low number of interceptions. Considering the amount of pressure I was consistently getting, I’d have expected more picks.

Game impressions: I’m going to go a little negative here, pointing out some of the flaws which make themselves apparent as you play through a full season (mixed with some online play in between). There are some fairly significant flaws here that can ruin the game to some extent. The most notable one is the overly effective quarterback scramble. Thanks to a combination of the spy assignment being broken and the defenders reacting very poorly once the quarterback crosses the line of scrimmage, a player so inclined can literally run all day if they want to. Just to try it out one game, I ran Chad Pennington thirty times and was rewarded with 312 yards and 4 touchdowns. Obviously a human player will react and counter better than the AI was able to, but even so the mechanics of the game make this much more difficult to defend than in Madden. The defensive swim move is probably a bit too effective as well, or at the least too effective against top offensive tackles. I doubt Jonathan Ogden has given up four sacks in a game in his career; he was two for two against John Abraham. Conversely, elite cornerbacks are not good enough against mediocre receivers when left in one on one situations. It’s fine for them to give up a reception or get beat from time to time, but an elite corner left out on an island is vulnerable against any fast receiver, regardless of that receiver’s ability. The defensive back play in general can be very frustrating. On the one hand, the game does a much better job of making ratings relevant. But it is difficult to see plays where safeties turn around and face the wrong way for several seconds at a time, or when Dbs that start off in position do these great looping motions to get themselves out of position. I would say that as much as the game succeeds in really nailing certain things, it has many more instances than Madden where something that looks clearly wrong happens. It’s pretty much up to each person to determine whether they want to tolerate the errors for the moments of greatness or not.