Or the people who do know more than the casual fan, but don't realize how outdated their information is.
This is all over the place, not just Madden....national media, broadcast announcers, actual "analysts" who write football analysis for a living. But a lot of those people are former players or coaches, who played or coached in the 70s, 80s, or 90s...and the game has changed
radically since then. I think people underestimate the influence repeating those misconceptions or outdated information for 3 hours at a time on Sunday can have on the general football consciousness.
I was so thrilled when Dan Fouts got let go and not rehired by another network...the dude was just plain not competent to call a modern game.
We see it here when people see season completion percentages in the high 60%-low 70% range and call it unrealistic. Or when announcers talk about "setting up play action with the running game", or about how team X will win if they get RB Y an arbitrary number of carries, or about how rain or snow means the passing game is off the table.
Or, in this case, how people think running a 4-3 or 3-4 scheme means most of your plays will be run out of a 4-3 or 3-4, and nickel and dime packages are rare exotics, instead of what you should be running 70% of the time.
It doesn't help that, again, Madden plays into this. Default defensive playbooks
still have a higher number of plays out of base packages than any individual sub package. Hell, as I was typing the above, I realized that the Skills Trainer basically gives the same information as your average TV broadcaster....great info if it were still 1995.
This is a fun ranty tangent