It sounds good when you say words like realistic, but it's really painfully frustrating in practice. I had a guy let me shoot threes with no one on me, and I didn't hit anymore threes then if he played real d. He would take the guy who's guarding the guy with the ball and just run him down low, leaving the guy wide open. I wound up playing the guy twice, hit 39% in one and 44% in the other. I'm guessing a real NBA team would hit closer to 70. Being a video game I would like to see it closer to 80. The only reason I didn't hit more was because the game goes out of its way to keep % realistic. How is that a good thing? What reason does he have to not play D like a donkey? As far as bad passes go, its also completely out of your control. I'm running up the middle, the guy is running up the sideline, both at a slow, controlled pace, and the pass sails out of bounds due to nothing I could control. If you have any competitive spirit, you'd see how this is a bad thing. You play a bunch of games, win some, lose some, with 80% of the decisions being about randomness and not about skill. What's the point of playing? I don't feel good when I win, I don't feel like I need to get better when I lose. I just start another and see what happens. Like a spectator.
Same thing could happen with penalties in Madden. You happen to get 8 PI calls all at crucial times, he gets 2 and he wins the game based on that. Again, how is that good, and what is the point of playing if the outcome is out of your hands? Or what if you're playing a guy, close game, 16-14, you kick a fg to win, but there's a holding call moving you out of fg range and you lose. So the game just decided the outcome for you because it hasn't called an arbitrary penalty in a while. Maybe you think that's cool because it's realistic. My vote is that it takes away the reason to play: to see who's better.
All that being said, that's just my opinion about competitive modes. I agree with everyone else saying the Tiburon team needs to step their game up. No reason to not have all the options for offline modes. Penalty on/offs, sliders, ratings sliders, ability to create/edit people in the middle of a franchise. No excuse for not having options.