Operation Sports Forums - Making Quarterback Awareness Mean Something

When controlling a player in Madden, their Awareness rating is irrelevant. This is especially troubling for the player we control most often - the Quarterback. Madden tried to remedy this a few years back with the Cone o' Vision, with little success.

I've thought up a way to make this rating actually mean something on the field. While I never expect Madden to implement it, as it's pretty radical, it would cause gamers to completely re-think the way they choose their Quarterbacks in franch, er, connected careers.

For this change, we need to think of Awareness not as their ability to see what's going on on the field, but as a player's mental approach to the game. For a Quarterback this will be their knowledge of the playbook and their ability to execute said plays on the field.

As in real life, some players are going to have higher inherent Awareness ratings than others coming out of college. Some will start higher and their progress through what I'm about to outline will be faster than others. I'm going to lay out the concepts of this idea, followed by the implementation into Madden.

The first place this new system comes into play is mastery of the playbook. Whether it's a rookie coming out of college, or a free agent signed off the street, it is going to take them time to grasp the full offense. Some players (those with high Awareness scores) the coach can throw much of the playbook at them right off the bat. Others need it in small, digestible chunks.

The second part is their comfort level with these plays on the field. Think of the way NCAA football has Quarterbacks get "rattled" in hostile environments, and they don't know the routes their receivers are running.

The third part is history with a coach. If a player has played with a coach on a previous team, the terminology and schemes are (usually) the same, and their learning curve of the offense is significantly less.

For how this system makes its way into Madden, I'm going to use the Bills as my real-life example. If you're not aware, Buffalo went into the preseason with 3 quarterbacks - Fitz, Young and Thigpen - but traded for Tavaris Jackson after the 3rd game and cut Vince Young. They had planned on only having 2 Quarterbacks this season, but because Tavaris needs time to learn the offense, they kept Thigpen as well.

So, in Madden, you're the Bills and you make this move. I'm not in front of my console, so I don't know what Tavaris' awareness rating in Madden is, but I don't believe it to be particularly high. This means that it will take weeks for him to learn the entire playbook. I would like EA to implement a risk/reward system for this.

As the coach, you can dictate how much of the playbook to give him. There's a screen that shows a list of percentages of the playbook with the likelihood, based on his Awareness rating, that he will grasp it. Maybe 98% likelihood he can grasp 10% of the playbook in one week. 75% he can grasp 20%, 50% he can grasp 30%, etc.

Whatever you choose, on gameday, if Tavaris is on the field, you are limited to that percentage of the playbook when calling plays. If you gave him 30% of the playbook, since he only had a 50% chance of learning it, there is a chance that he will not be familiar with half of the plays you call. If one of the unfamiliar plays is called, either one of two things can happen. The pre-snap routes will not display and Tavaris is throwing blind. Or the pre-snap routes will display, but they will not be correct. He may think Stevie Johnson is running a curl, but Stevie might actually be running a fly pattern.

Also, based on the awareness score and percentage of playbook learned, that Quarterback's ability to call audibles may be stripped.

If the Quarterback has played with the coach previously, depending on his Awareness rating, he'll come to the team already grasping a certain amount of the playbook, so his learning curve will be lessened.

I think this would completely re-vamp the way people build their Quarterback depth in connected careers and make pre-season much more meaningful. Users would need to implement a smart strategy when selecting their quarterbacks - or run the risk of heading into gameday with a limited playbook, or worse...

Again, Madden will never implement this as casual gamers would straight up revolt if the QB they picked up midseason had no idea what routes his receivers were running. But I would think it was awesome.