Well, imagine your off-line franchise, and all the options you have there, or would like to have there, like trading, salary cap management, drafting, progression, etc..etc... and now imagine that instead of you owning one team and the other 31 teams owned by the CPU, you own 1 team and the other 31 teams are owned by other real life people!
So, you kick the whole thing off with a fantasy draft where all 32 owners show up on-line and attend the draft. It's seriously a blast, we did this on the PS2 for the last 3 years, nothing comes close.
Anyway, you draft your team player by player, then you can do trades and what not, and when the season starts you show up and play your game against a real live opponent.
Usually you guys want to setup a forum somewhere to talk about the franchise, to put players on the trade block, talk sh1t, or whatever... you really get into it, its a lot of fun.
There's really no better feeling in Madden the fielding a team that you personally drafted from scratch... If that LG blows a key assignment and leads to a game losing sack for you, well.. you drafted him, tough sh1t
Unfortunately On-line franchise does not exist on the 360/ps3 version of the game, and we really should be getting it. NCAA implimented their version last year, so Madden is already one year behind.
Yes, I understand that the off-line franchise of the game sucks right now, and OBVIOUSLY that needs to be fixed before the on-line franchise aspect is implimented, but I don't think that hte on-line part is that big of a deal when it comes to the work involved.
I think that Off-line franchise is about 80% of the work, and porting it on-line is probably 20% more... where most of that is bug fixing and testing... I could be wrong however, but I don't think I'm far off.