[adembroski]

Within the Madden community (of which the NCAA community is a subset), there are several sort of "neighborhoods"... groups of folks who play essentially the same way. You have the tournament crowd, the freestyle crowd, and the sim crowd.

The tournament crowd is just that... they play in live tournaments. They tend to dislike the freestyle crowd even though they play about the same way. Freestyle is mostly at home online players who play the game to win, damn "sim" football.

The sim community is almost as arrogant as the tournament crowd, but far more articulate. Where as most tourny players are borderline incomprehensible due to their belief that, despite all evidence to the contrary, they are indeed Trick Daddy with Stick Skills (or Skillz, as they are want to say).

The sim community play their games "straight", or as cheese free as possible. Cheese is the primary attribute of the Freestyle or Tournament crowd. They will gleefully perform rocket catches and taunt you for not being "good enough" to stop something that's literally unstoppable due to the way the game works.

Sim players generally agree on an even playing field. Glitch plays are not permitted, you call as an NFL/NCAA coach would call (more leeway in NCAA, clearly). You don't go for it on 4th down every time, you don't run the same damn sweep every play, you mix it up, approach the game with a coaches mentality, looking to emulate, or simulate real life football as closely as possible.

For the record, The tourny and freestyle crowds generally look at sim players as unskilled, thus the need for agreed upon ground rules, while sim players see tourny and freestylers as unskilled, thus the need for cheese.

There is another group, despised by all of the above; glitchers. Rocket catch is one thing, and most sim style players can play some freestyle if given motivation too, but QB Walk and WR Direct Snap type glitches are considered BS by all legit Madden communities and such players would be hung and flayed if we knew where they lived.