The last time there was a genre definer in football, it was 2004. And before that game dropped, we could see it coming because there were previous games that were building something special from that same dev team.
I don't see anything they're doing with Madden today that equals such a prelude. What I see in Madden is a game that's still struggling with benchmarks that were cleared by other dev teams generations ago, and an insistence on experimenting with back-of-the-box features that don't address the core issues, it only masks them.
Considering that, there is no reason to have confidence that next year they will emerge with a genre-definer. That expectation is so far removed from reality at this point that it's almost like we're antagonizing them to reach it in the same way we'd antagonize a goldfish to jump out of its bowl and start flying.
This dev team has shown us over the course of the decade that--no matter who or how many they cut, bring in, and rearrange--greatness is not in the cards for them.