ok Josh, here's my feedback: I drove my Bengals to the 2021 playoffs. I have strong defense, much stronger then the OVr says, a young talented strong arm QB, an excellent young OL, Mixon is becoming a top HB and AJ Green is still a threat.
- wild card vs the Jets: they have Bradford as QB, leaving Darnold in the bench after a 2020 so and so. Poor running backs and poor OL resulted in 2,8 YPC. Result: I blew them out as expected.
- division vs. Texans: they have a rookie QB after Watson went to the Colts. He's a balanced QB who did great in the regular season, but played pretty much as a rookie. The running game was so and so, 3,8 YPC including Qb, under a decent OL for M19 standards (that are extremely low). Easy win.
- championship vs. jags: unfortunately for them Fournette got injuried first period. They could still run for 4,5 YPC including a couple of 15+ from Bortles. I really disliked the fact they were still running every second play in the third down 3 scores: much better then previous Madden versions, but still poor clock management from the CPU.
- superbowl vs. Giants. Now Barkley is 98 OVR and can do pretty much everything. Giants also had a big young QB 90+ OVR in all archetypes with excellent receiving weapons.
Barkley ran 5,2 YPC with a monster td run of 15 YDS breaking like 4 tackles and avoiding another couple of dmen. it wasn't enough as the QB didn't perform well.
Now, the problem with whole the thing are my INTs: 15 in the playoffs, only 2 user. INTs and sacks are traditionally unrealistic in Madden by design, you can see it from the goals the DBs have: 7 INTs per season per DB makes no sense.
But this year is much worse as I wrote before because they introduced new animations: I don't want WR DBs.
Luckily I remembered to create a savepoint beginning of the playoffs, so I can replay exactly the same games anytime.
I know you won't agree, but I'm gonna try a 30 INT on user as honestly this way is really not funny and I don't wanna build a poor secondary just because I'm afraid of picking the QB too often... In the end we should still have fun, shouldn't we? :-)
Oh... the game was obviously better before patch
lol