My advice - go get madden 10. Madden 09 is not so great and the Madden IQ - the test thingy - is only really efficient after you've played about 50 games. The only way I was able to enjoy Madden 09 was to manually change the difficulty sliders (custom difficulty), it took a fair bit of tweaking. Madden 10 for the most part I am pretty happy with without changing the difficulty and just playing Pro to get used to it then moving up to All-Pro as I get better. Plus franchise is a lot better in 10, especially the drafting etc.
If you stick with Madden 09, my advice is to play a lot of zone defense and if you are going to try run the ball learn to use the lead block.