I'm starting to think you're right about that. I looked closely at PM's sliders and when I see things like "Run Defense-5/90" it hints that in some respects, he's just using sliders to emulate something that would happen more naturally at a higher difficulty level. Makes me wonder what the "hard" differences are between the levels - meaning first of all, differences that sliders would have no effect on (like hypothetically, d-linemen being given speed advantages to pass rush and defend the run more easily on Heisman; etc.); or second, differences that are so great that sliders can't make up the difference (like if RB ability was so high on Heisman that slider at 0 still made their RB better than the same guy on AA with the slider at 100). I know from experience that these kind of differences to exist, but they seem to be often rather hidden and hard to quantify.