[ambill10]

I find it hard to believe that any rating is completely meaningless. I don't think EA sits around coming up with "fluff" ratings that do not factor into the engine's algorithms at all. It seems probable that in any given interactions that the algorithm is only using certain ratings for that specific interactions though.

I am mildly intrigued by how the game works, but I don't think it is possible to reverse engineer the NCAA physics engine. It would be more plausible to reverse engineer the sim engine probably and try to find correlations between statistics and ratings on a macro level, but that would still be difficult and prone to data contamination across positions (teammates impact on individual performance).

At the end of the day, sometimes a small, weak guy will catch a big guy off balance and knock him over. It shouldn't happen often, but it should happen on occasion. I don't know that there is a sound way to collect enough gameplay data to "prove" what ratings impact outcomes how much. I have to give EA the benefit of the doubt that all of the ratings play into the algorithms in their own situations.