Lessons I learned from Nick Saban

[ggsimmonds]

Guys come on. If you want to play stupid football troll fan then go to the college football board.

It is always great to have threads discussing real strategies and how to implement them into Madden

[Senator Palmer]

Quote: Originally Posted by tanchl

Jones is not your typical 3rd stringer. Imagine if the AZ Cardinals could get 1% the production out of their 3rd stringer.

Don't take the bait, homie. Dude is obviously looking for attention. Post has nothing to do with this thread. As if one game invalidates 4 national titles. All responding is going to do is derail a really valuable thread.

[kehlis]

Let's get this back to the original topic please.

Like ggsimmonds said we have a college football forum if you want to talk about it.

[HEF51]

It was just a joke people. Don't get your jimmies all rustled up now.

[tanchl]

Quote: Originally Posted by Senator Palmer

Don't take the bait, homie. Dude is obviously looking for attention. Post has nothing to do with this thread. As if one game invalidates 4 national titles. All responding is going to do is derail a really valuable thread.

You know how many drafts I composed to address that? In fact, I was going to ignore, but after the second one I decided instead of addressing it, try diverting it. I wasn't trying to derail anything, I was let down seeing a comment like that because of the genuine nature of this thread subject.

Enough of that, back to talking real football.

[NoleFan]

Man... Used these Saban strategies for my last 2 CFM games and my D seems almost too good now. They were already really good before but I feel like I make smarter adjustments now. Shoot, I wasn't even making adjustments before trying to let "suggestions" be my D coordinator.

[PGaither84]

I haven't posted here in something like two years or so.

If you want to learn more, then here are some fantastic links:

Nick Saban: Middle of the Field Safety Coverage Principles (Part I)

Nick Saban: Middle of the Field Safety Coverage Principles (Part II - Cover 3)

Nick Saban: Middle of the Field Safety Coverage Principles (part III - Cover 1)


Nick Saban: Cover 3 Adaptation (Rip/Liz) To The Spread

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What does this have to do with Madden? I am still playing Madden 25 for my xbox 360. I haven't bought into the next gen consoles, and can't justify purchasing one "just for Madden." In a couple of years, I'll probably get one, once enough quality games come out for them, but not now.

Also, in all honesty, Madden is still Madden. I have seen game play videos on youtube of next gen Madden. it is better, but not worlds better. It is not some hyper realistic NFL simulator by any stretch of the imagination. It is pretty much the exact same game I am playing now. Madden is still more like High School football than professional football, and even that is a stretch.

Knowing about real football and applying it to Madden works like a bell curve. The more you know can help you get better and better at he video game until you reach a plateau, where real life pricipals no longer apply because of the limitations of the game, you will only find yourself frustrated and disapointed with its inadequacies.

When I went to Community Day for Madden 11, I helped them address some problems with pass protection against blitzes. For example, if the defense send an overload to one side and the offense doesn't leave anyone to block the overload, the AI will unrealistically send the guard or tackle from the opposite side of the offensive line to slide over and pick up the free rusher. Overnight they were able to put in a band-aid patch that put an invisible wall or sorts up preventing the lineman from doing this, though they still looked silly trying to do it. That made it to launch without any further fixes, and remained part of the game until one of their title updates, which removed this fix for some unknown reason.. though I have my suspensions. Anyway, there was a short time that default overload blitzes worked much closer to real life. Now they don't, and haven't for years. As a result, 90% of stock blitzes don't "work" like they should against 5 man pass protections. Calling them is a waste of time. That is why my custom defensive playbook is super simplified and streamlined. I have the few stock overloads that actually work and the default coverages that work as drawn up and intended.

Man coverage in Madden is pretty much a scale chart of how psychic any one given defender is, which is adjusted by the difficulty slider and his individual ratings. if you have the coverage slider adjusted high enough, you simply cannot get anyone open against man coverage because the AI jumps all routes. If you have it low enough, and they reaction delay on cuts is so long that even scrub WRs can shake DBs out of their shoes. If you want the illusion of realistic man coverage, you have to do a lot of testing and look for that "sweet spot" in the sliders where elite DBs blanket WRs, yet elite route runners can get separation.

I don't claim to have ever found that, as one of the additional problems is that Donny "The Ratings Czar" Moore poops on LB coverage ratings. I don't know about M15, but Ihave written about this in the past in prior games and confronted him face to face at CD and did not get a satisfactory answer. In real life, linebackers are the link between the defensve line and the secondary. Linebackers pretty much have four jobs: 1) Fill gaps and stop the run (Pursuit & Block Shedding). 2) Blitz the QB on passing downs (Power/Finesse Moves). 3) Play Zone Coverage. 4) Play Man Coverage. These are their jobs, and they have to be good at them to be in the NFL. In one of my old blogs, I talked about how the highest zone coverage rating for a Line backer rated by Donny Moore was Brian Urlacher at around 88ZCV. The second highest was like 84 or so (from memory). After that there was a drop off where the third of fourth highest was something like 81 or 79 zone coverage. The same was true, but worse for man coverage. This is such a crying shame. I took it upon myself to go into the roster, save a separate file and increase all zone and man coverages by a generic 10 points across the board. That took a long time, but was well worth it. It had a significant positive improvement on game play for me in Madden 12 and Madden 25. I could play against the computer and not just blow it out even on all Madden... but they weren't stiflingly difficult either. You really had to earn everything you did.

The unofficial company policy at EA is to keep the game too easy and unrealsitic for casuals. They are afraid of making the game too realistic and too difficult for the average gamer. I tried the best I could to convince them that that is what difficulty settings are for. That you can make the game realistic and give the players more realistic ratings, but make the difficulty sliders and settings more powerful, so that on rookie and Pro difficulties, that the intenral numbers are slanted in the favor of the user significantly in order to improve they chances of success. As they increase the difficult,y those internal number get closer and closer to a more realistic algorithm, forcing the player to be more skilled and knowledgeable about the game. instead, they are more interested in trying to "go after that Call of Duty Dollar." Literally. That is a quote. They really do care... and they don't care. It is really strange.

So, when I see these kinds of thread, I do applaud the effort. However, I have gotten so synical over the years towards Madden that it is difficult for me to care anymore.

I was just working on an offensive playbook this week and that led me to coming here and finding this post. I can post all about that process later if anyone is interested. For now, I have already written a wall of text I doubt very many people will read all the way through.

[PSUEagle]

This is a pretty solid post. I don't agree with every single conclusion (IMO you can absolutely play split safety coverages vs trips and be sound, whether video game or real life), but these are principles I've applied myself whenever I've played this game (not since Madden 12).

It also goes back to something I've been preaching for years: defenses need more coverage options along with the ability for users to automatically set adjustments by gameplan so you don't have to manually hot route everything. For instance, I want to be able to set up a default way for my players to align/play 2X2, 3X1, 3X2, and others (like two back sets) for every coverage I call. For trips, I may want to lock the backside corner in man automatically anytime I play Cover 6, for instance. Or the opposite if I'm playing someone I know doesn't throw to #1 strong in trips: lock that dude up in man and play quarters everywhere else, etc.

I know I'm just pissing in the wind at this point, but it's amazing that it's 2015 and zone defenders still drop to spots and cover air. The thing is, it really wouldn't be that difficult to program pattern reading IMO: every defender in a specific coverage would have a decision tree based on receiver release that would dictate how well they play and what they should do. Ultimately, that's the way to ensure that guys who aren't athletic freaks in real life that are awesome (like Luke Keuchly) play better in Madden than some random dude with 90 speed.