Another year, Another spreadsheet.
This years madden has had some serious overhauling of the playbooks. A lot of these changes are for the better, though they have come at a cost. Some things of note before you start working on custom playbooks.
The good...
- Sets are more properly named
- Alignments are more consistent with their real life counterparts
- Many of the 10 personnel sets have been changed to 11 as they should be
- Many of the repeated and seemingly useless sets have been replaced with new sets more in line with real life counterparts.
The bad...
- The playbook creation system has been stripped of many things
- You can no longer create custom books using the generic playbooks(IE: Run heavy, west coast, run and shoot books)
- There are formations and sets in the default playbooks that do not show up in the creation list. If you want to use one of these "team specific" sets, you have to use their playbook.
- While the sets make more sense overall, there are far less of them, giving you far less options when it comes to creating a playbook.
- The spread and trio sets out of shotgun seemed to have disappeared from the creation list after the last update.
(If anyone happens to have info on this, perhaps why it happened, please let me know. I'm guessing it has something to do with the "hail marry" plays being their own formations, but I'm not entirely sure what happened.)
A note on formation subs* - Similar to last year, formation subs only show the playbook you choose in your scheme, so anything changed in the book will not show up. My suggestion is to find a book that has formations and sets you like by default. You can change plays, but leave the formations and sets the same.
With all that being said, I do believe that this is a step in the right direction when it comes to playbooks. They are cleaner, more organized, and more realistic than we've seen in a long time. With any luck this overhaul is step one, and not just a one time time thing. Below is a link to the Madden 18 version of the spreadsheet, as well as a link to the madden 17 thread for those who are still playing.
Madden 18 Playbook Sets and Lineups Spreadsheet
Madden 17 version
As usual, you are free to use this spreadsheet in any way. I cannot make it editable(for obvious reasons), but you are free to download or copy it, and edit it however you please. If you notice any errors, please let me know, otherwise any feedback is welcome.