Developing CBs quickly

[rws591]

Coverage skills are extremely expensive to upgrade and CBs, even SS, seem to get very little XP from gameplay. Because of this, I draft a CB every year with at least B/B cvg (look for an A in one or the other), A speed, C strength, and essentially hope that every couple of years I'll get a guy with 88+ coverage with the physicals to back it up.

CB is by far the toughest position to find and groom elite players, but there are plenty of good ones out there.

[secretbonus]

Because of the cost of development on skills being substantially more than others, it is wise to scout these high cost attributes develop the weaker ones if you plan to keep a player for awhile and stay in the league for awhile.
Another way to explain this is if you want a player with a "high ceiling", pay attention to physical attributes.
Alternatively, if you just want to fill a weaknes short term and want a CB good enough RIGHT NOW, you should not care about these hard to upgrade rankings as much.
Rankings like awareness, block shedding, tackling and pursuit are easy (cheap) to upgrade. However awareness is one of the most important traits for ALL players in terms of the weighting applied to the overall score. If by default you just upgrade awareness on all players, you can up their overall score quite quickly.
Speed is terribly expensive to upgrade, and thus very important for skill positions, even though upgrading it only makes an average increase in ability for an above average cost. Accelearation and speed are also pretty costly.
Unfortunately unlike other positions, CBs are very dependent on man coverage for rating and that is very expensive. In past maddens man coverage was of greater weighting than zone coverage by far in determining final score. To estimate these I created a custom player and see how many points from average I could upgrade after sliding a score to 99, then reset the score and repeat for each attribute. I think man coverage was as important or more than awareness... However, the cost to upgrade man coverage is much greater. So use scouting points well or scour the free agency for someone with a low awareness but decent rating or high man coverage. These players you can probably develop more quickly.
Press coverage is nice to have too, but fairly cheap. I can't remember if play recognition or press was the more important one, but I think it is press.

[secretbonus]

The others are right as well in that if you care more about gameplay you may want to run attributes specific to your style of play calling . If you only run zone, man isn't important even if overall score will be less, the zone Cb will play better for what you do. If you just want a super fast nickleback and just run cover 3 and have him either cover the flats or manually blitz him if RB stays to block, having very high speed attributes is good to get around the edge or between the tackle and guard.

Another interesting gameplay idea is have one CB with very high man coverage that you only sub in when you go to man cover 2 or something, but otherwise use a high zone coverage, and high speed,acceleration,tackle guy for blitzing plays.

[Godgers12]

Quote: Originally Posted by vrtkolman

I came to this thread to post the exact same thing, nice post. I don't think there is a need to draft a CB before the 5th round, maybe even the 6th round. One thing to look at besides A's in speed/accel/agility is strength. If their strength is a B or higher, then you have a superstar CB for the most part.

Except if you're in an online CFM, you better make sure to draft those studs with 5th round grades in the 1st round because odds are they will be gone by the end of round 1. You have to think that if you scouted a A mcv A spd B str SS dev CB projected as a 5th round pick, Then odds are half the franchise knows about him as well. In my online CFM I traded up to the 1st pick and took a CB who was 6-2 96 spd 88 mcv 88 zcv 82 str and 85 press and was SS dev. After his rookie year he was 99 spd 95 mcv 90 zcv 99 prc 95 prs 80 cth and 90 awr. He has an amazing year with 15 picks and 5 TD as a rookie.

[tru11]

dont waste points upgrading skills.

just get their confidence to 99 and they will get +6 boost for all important ratings of that position.

CBs will get +6 in man zone and press.

its cheaper to boost confidence then individually up those ratings by 6 each.

[purplerat]

I had a situation in my online CFM where I lost both starting CBs in the same year and had to draft two rookies to take their place. After 2 seasons they have both developed nicely from mid 70s to 90 overall.

First of all I had the Coach CB dev trait which I would recommend getting. I actually try to get any coach developmental traits for positions with multiple starters. Most teams heavily use at least 3 CBs so that's 3 players who benefit from the trait. This roughly doubles (depending on the players dev trait) the amount of game prep XP you get for CBs.

Second I upgraded them to play the ball aggressively if they didn't already have that. Why? Because CBs will rack up massive XP from getting picks.

After that I used all game prep XP and whatever they got from in game XP and upgraded them to SS. In my case one CB was normal dev and the other SLOW and both were Super Star in 1 season.

Having Superstar development is huge because as I mentioned before CBs get a ton of XP from getting interceptions and from Normal dev to Superstar is basically double the XP. Plus they will get more XP in game prep. But really if you have a Superstar CB who is getting a lot of interceptions you won't even need to game prep them.

Once you have Superstar development, Coach CB dev trait, Plays Ball Aggressively and are hopefully getting regular interceptions the XP will be pouring in. Depending on your team needs you can also hammer game prep for them. CBs cost 8 hrs so most weeks you can get 4x. In my case I get about 1400 XP per so X 4 that's ~5600 XP per week from game prep alone. If your CB gets a pick in the game that week you might easily get another 3000-5000 XP.

Keep in mind this is primarily for young CBs. Veterans will not get as much XP. But for a young player it's completely realistic that you are getting 10k XP in a given week and 100k+ in a season. So while those MCV and ZCV upgrades are expensive you will have plenty of XP to upgrade them at least up to the 85-90 (beyond that is REALLY expensive). Once you get those to 85+ the amount of XP you are getting will easily get all of the other intangibles jacked up to ~90 in no time.