[tg88forHOF]

Quote: Originally Posted by Aestis

Yeah, and the same person who is throwing it hyper-aggressively 20+ yds in the air into tight windows on 75% of throws leading to 4 INT games they blame on unrealistic coverage, is often the same guy who can speak with reasonable intelligence about football strategy while relaxed & watching an NFL game. And because they DO have some football knowledge, they assume their in-game decisions reflect NFL decision-making, and are often hard to convince otherwise. But the uncomfortable truth is that knowing something and having that knowledge inform your decision-making in the fast-moving heat of the moment are far from the same thing. That's the complexity of it--often you are NOT talking about football imbeciles who don't know crap about the game. You are talking about people who do know some football or occasionally even a LOT about football. Our league has multiple IRL HS coaches. At least one has probably forgotten more about OL/DL technique in the past year than I'll ever know. But he's one of the least realistic decision-makers in the league and I gave up trying to reason with him in that regard a long time ago.

Or the people who do know more than the casual fan, but don't realize how outdated their information is.

This is all over the place, not just Madden....national media, broadcast announcers, actual "analysts" who write football analysis for a living. But a lot of those people are former players or coaches, who played or coached in the 70s, 80s, or 90s...and the game has changed radically since then. I think people underestimate the influence repeating those misconceptions or outdated information for 3 hours at a time on Sunday can have on the general football consciousness.

I was so thrilled when Dan Fouts got let go and not rehired by another network...the dude was just plain not competent to call a modern game.

We see it here when people see season completion percentages in the high 60%-low 70% range and call it unrealistic. Or when announcers talk about "setting up play action with the running game", or about how team X will win if they get RB Y an arbitrary number of carries, or about how rain or snow means the passing game is off the table.

Or, in this case, how people think running a 4-3 or 3-4 scheme means most of your plays will be run out of a 4-3 or 3-4, and nickel and dime packages are rare exotics, instead of what you should be running 70% of the time.

It doesn't help that, again, Madden plays into this. Default defensive playbooks still have a higher number of plays out of base packages than any individual sub package. Hell, as I was typing the above, I realized that the Skills Trainer basically gives the same information as your average TV broadcaster....great info if it were still 1995.

This is a fun ranty tangent