I've been thinking about it for a lot longer than you have.... and after playing almost EVERY football game ever made from the 16-bit era up to today. I'm convinced that there is no way to make a perfect football game. If some game company could do it they would have done it a long time ago. Its just not posible to build a game engine with AI players that react and think just like real football players. For now, I'm done with playing football games. It can still be fun to play them but in my opinion, the way they develope games is all wrong. I'll explain in this post....
But yeah, its a waste of time to expect anything more than what EA has given us over the last 15 years. I don't know why people keep thinking that EA can do it, well, its been over a decade and we still haven't seen a perfect game. Why are they going to do it now? I would have to say because its just not posible and partially because the way they make the game is flawed. Honestly, the Madden that had the most realism was Madden 98 for the PSX and the Sega Genesis version was really tight also. I find the PSX version quite difficult to play though because of the uber realism in it. Which is another problem, if the game is too realistic it probably wouldn't be fun to play.
I'd have to disagree with that... maybe among the big three sports it might be the easiest but Tennis (and probably golf) is by far the easiest sport to make for several reasons. The AI really doesn't need to be that good, people will still buy it even if it has poor AI. And gamers don't expect a tennis game to be realistic. People want arcadey games when it comes to tennis, which makes the game even easier to make because developers don't have to worry about REAL tennis physics. All they have to do is make the graphics really good and throw the game together in a few months and it will sell.
I think Baseball is pretty tough to make also because of the pitcher/batter wars that take place. A baseball game needs good physics. Some hits need to be ground balls, some need to be line drives, some need to be bloop hits etc...etc... thats pretty hard to duplicate in a video game.
To me this is what makes the football games of today just really lame. Defenders stick to you like glue, the only passing routes that work are posts and corners. In my opinion, its not so much the AI that needs to be improved, its the physics!!! Players seem more like robots than humans.
I've mentioned this several times in here and I know some people disagree with it but i'm convinced that a football game must have some type of sliding effect. What I mean by this, is when a player is running at full speed (or even half speed) it should be pretty hard to just change direction. In fact, he should actually slide a little bit when he's trying to change direction, almost like he's wearing ice skates, but not that exagerrated. This would allow receivers to get some kind of seperation from the defender. It would also make it easier to avoid the blitz when you're in the pocket. We see people doing this "nano blitzing" and the way the game is designed the QB is stuck in an animation which the game has too many animations that bog down gameplay and this makes it a lot harder to move around when you're in the pocket.
Here's a good example of what I mean by sliding... here's a video clip of a new game comming out this year called College Lacrosse 2010. Its a budget game, so don't expect great graphics... i'm just using this as an example of what I mean by "sliding effect".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5tEOLDTmQQ
If you notice that players have a hard time changing direction in this game and it allows the guy with the ball to get some kind of seperation from the defender. A football game must have this too. Its just lame how defenders stick to you like glue. If a game had this it would make play calling a hell of a lot more important than it is right now. And sliding is actually realistic.... how often have we seen a QB dance around in the pocket and buy an extra second or two then deliver the pass?? I say get rid of the QB animations, put in some type of sliding effect and this would make playing with the slower QB's more appealing.
I'm sure i'm now going to hear... well killroy, that would also make playing with fast QBs too easy. The way to fix this is to give QB's TWO speed ratings, a roll out speed rating and a downhill speed rating. just make the roll out speed rating low and that would balance the game.