When NFL 2K5 was relevant and I was trying to convince my friends to play a franchise with me in that game rather than Madden 2005, the two things they noticed about 2K that were different from Madden was that "the players ran with sticks up their butts" and that they thought tapping A for sprinting was "really dumb" (not my opinion, for the record).
To the casual player, the specific details of how to play positional football (beyond the quarterback position) have by-and-large been lost upon them up to this point in football gaming's history because A - football is a very complex sport which is only truly understood by a small subset of its gigantic fan base, and B - every console football video game ever created has emphasized the mechanics of throwing and running moreso than any other facet of the game (blocking, tackling, playing coverage, running routes, etc. etc.). The specific details simply aren't as important as the mechanics of engaging the video game, whatever the video game may be.