The power of a good playcaller can’t be overstated at this point in football. Last year, the talk of the NFL season was about defenses striking back, in part by limiting explosive plays as much as possible with more defenses going to two-high safety looks and daring teams to run. With that in mind, when’s the last time you thought playcalling and playbook choices truly mattered in an EA football game?
If your answer is Madden 24, then I wouldn’t question it, but I do think if you talk to your average OSer, they probably would not say Madden 24. There’s so many different ways to talk about both playcalling and playbooks — where they come up short, what they impact in the game, and so on — so my challenge here is to try and avoid being bogged down covering every little aspect. With that in mind, I think the best way to go about talking about playbooks and playcalling is by talking about the AI’s POV and the user’s POV.
Starting with the AI, I’ll first point to what’s been one of the longer running threads on the Madden boards this year, which deals with the complaints about the AI’s desire to pass the ball vs. run the ball. In essence, at some point (it wasn’t at launch) something changed and the AI started to get closer to throwing the ball 65-70 percent of the time, regardless of situation. The NFL is a passing league, but that’s high. In 2023, six teams threw more than 60 percent of the time, none eclipsing 64 percent.
Why this became the case and stayed the case is up for debate. It could be the imbalance in most playbooks between pass and run plays. It could be that the AI doesn’t have enough tools at its disposal to check plays at the line. It could be some game-planning feature being bugged or not working right. Whatever the reason, the point is that it makes the game worse and there’s no perfect fix for it.
That there’s no ideal way to make the AI run more, is an indictment all its own, but it also talks to why playcalling and playbooks go hand in hand here. My thinking is that the AI is so ancient in terms of some of the tactics it relies on under the hood that it just does not have the wherewithal to check to certain looks enough of the time at the LOS. It does not come to the line enough times with enough “checks” to be reactive at the line. Beyond that, the playbooks are mostly weighted towards pass plays (more pass plays than run plays exist in the playbooks) and thus the AI just does not have as many options for runs.
I do think the AI is the more straightforward thing to fix vs. the user’s issues. It’s simple enough to say the “AI is kind of dumb” and you cover enough of the problems. It’s not really the most “helpful” way to talk about it, but we don’t have access to what is going on under the hood, so we have to just point to what it does wrong and guess why it does it.
If we turn to the user now, the issue here with playcalling and playbooks shows up more if you’re one of “those who know ball” so to speak. This isn’t me trying to say more casual folks or those who just want to have a good time can’t see the same issues, but users a little more in the weeds likely notice the shortcomings in more robust terms. On top of that, the focus here is more on pointing out the lack of organization at play. This is not me saying it’s not a problem we don’t have D-line stunts or stuff like adequate “bingo” coverage calls for stopping bunch, but that’s more something relating to adding depth to playbooks, which is another real issue but I don’t want to overwhelm folks with point after point.
So looking at playbook and playcalling organization, we don’t have great ways to script drives. We can’t get into the weeds of our opponent’s playcalls. If we target franchise mode, the weekly gameplanning tendencies are sometimes just inaccurate. Customizing formations, subs, and so on are buggy or inconsistent. These are all things that I’m sure a majority of users don’t use a ton, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t work or should not be expanded upon. If you do go down that road, it implies those sorts of things are not fun or interesting, and I just don’t buy that. I would instead argue that while many people may just want to Ask Madden, that means Ask Madden should be as smart as possible and do these things for you under the hood anyway.
I haven’t mentioned EA Sports College Football 25 yet, but I think it’s self-evident how these sorts of problems in the pro game could be exasperated to an extent in the college game. Even ignoring pass-to-run ratios, the issue with the pass-to-run ratio is not just that it’s off, it’s that every team ends up feeling the same when you play them. The college game is more diverse than the pro game, and if every team feels the same, that’s not a great outcome.
I would also argue that while Madden has done a solid job at times with adding new concepts and plays to playbooks, there’s a reason we have users trying to make custom tools for how to organize and utilize the playbooks. Even if the playbooks themselves are at times fun to dig through, we have inadequate tools to actually make use of them much of the time. It’s not about lacking a create-a-play in this case, it’s about lacking the tools to be an adequate coach on the sidelines calling the plays.
And that’s the thing I always have to point to here with football games. They are 100 percent unique in sports gaming. Half of the action on the field has nothing to do with the ball in play. You pick your pitch in baseball, you make playcalls on the court in NBA, but there are zero other sports where we’re going back to the huddle and it becomes a straight up strategy game play after play. Developers have never fully embraced that and recognized that half the game should be as fun and in-depth as the other half because it’s not going anywhere. You can SuperSim and whatever else to expedite defense or offense, but playcalling and playbooks remain. You should not be trying to sweep half your game under the rug because it then implies it’s not worth investing in or engaging in at any point. Why would you want to handcuff half the experience?
Ultimately, I want coaching to matter, and I think that’s what your average OSer wants to have happen to. What that means can go so many different directions, but playcalling and playbooks are the top two tools at our disposal to make that happen on the field. With two football games now being part of our lives again starting this summer, it seems like the perfect time to make playbooks and playcalling a top priority.
