Most of the game examples I give are in NCAA 14 on default Heisman difficulty at slow game speed. We went to slow game speed in our NCAA 13 online dynasty to make the rushing smoother, and it ends up feeling more similar to Madden. On Madden games, I generally just play on default All-Madden difficulty. Our online dynasties use slightly harder sliders, but it doesn't really make that much of a difference if you are reading the action right.
In case you're wondering about the Coachstradamus stuff in the video clips, I have the xp in the offline dynasty I use to record footage invested into getting the Coachstradamus unlocked so the video records what the CPU called on the previous play - useful for figuring out what the defense was trying to do and what was supposed to be the right read.
Becoming a better football fan through Video Games
As a longtime football fan of both the college and pro games, i've always wanted to know more about the action I watch on TV each week. I am not very athletic and never played any organized football growing up, so understanding the strategies and techniques the teams on the field are using were completely foreign to me. Playing console football video games was a way to learn these things through direct application:
Baylor coach Art Briles abandoned the playbook several years ago, and he and his assistants teach their players the fast-paced spread offense through countless repetitions in practice and by watching hours of film.
"When I was at Houston, the first thing everybody wanted was the playbook," said Briles, who coached the Cougars from 2003 to '07. "A guy's not going to read or study it. Kids play video games, so we show them the plays on video. Everything is on an iPad, and we label it and number them. A playbook is something we don't do.
"I'm a visual learner, and people learn differently. If you can see something, you remember it. If you read it and try to interpret it, it's a little different. We do a lot of repetition on the field so guys can learn it."
That's really what's going on when you play these games and call the same play against different teams and different defenses in different situations: many repetitions to see what works and what doesn't through experimentation. As the video games get more sophisticated, they are better able to replicate how actual football plays work:
Somewhere along the way, I learned to mix up my defenses. I recalled the basic difference between a cover two and a cover three and got better at recognizing when to employ which zone defense. On the other side of the ball, I developed a better sense of how to flip through an offensive progression, how to keep an eye out for blitzing defenders, and where to dump the ball when I was under pressure.
I've watched hundreds of football games on television and in person. But I've never learned as much about how the game works as I did on Saturday afternoon. When you watch a game live, the big plays usually seem inexplicable and mysterious. When you participate in a big play in Madden, the success is not a mystery. Rather, it's the logical outcome of well-timed manipulation and execution.
I originally began playing the NCAA Football franchise in 2009 on the NCAA 08 PS2 version because it was cheap, and quickly moved to the PS2 version of NCAA 09. Since buying an XBox 360 in 2010, i've bought each of the new releases in the franchise at launch. Now that the NCAA franchise is being discontinued, I am migrating to Madden 25 and future releases of that game. The visual angles and feel in some of the in-game physics are a little different, but the underlying football is the same. I've found that the football fundamentals learned in NCAA are pretty directly transferable to Madden as well as to watching your favorite team at the stadium or on TV.
My Coaching Tree
The first real research I ever did into learning about real football was to look at the Hawaii Run and Shoot offense being used by June Jones since I grew up as a Hawaii college football fan. I managed to find a copy of Tiger Ellison's book at the campus library and wrote myself a long summary of its contents in graduate school. Looking back at the fundamentals in Ellison's original Run and Shoot, I can see where a lot of my own preferences come from:
Starting with the classic I Formation and the obvious Power, Counter, and Iso plays that are the bread and butter of gap blocking schemes eventually led to exploration of zone blocking. It turns out that NCAA 12, 13, and 14 do not do a good job of adequately modeling what happens in gap blocking schemes, but it is fantastic at modeling zone blocking. Another thing it turns out to be really good at is preventing bad plays.
When Norm Chow was hired at Hawaii, he brought with him a pro style attack that happened to have all of the I Formation and Single Back formations I had been working with for more than a year in the Wisconsin playbook. The system I run out of this Hawaii playbook is a blend that looks a lot like the old Dennis Erickson single back spread.
So what I ended up with is a short passing game that relies heavily on presnap reads and attacks weaknesses in the defensive scheme. This is okay because NCAA and Madden are not sophisticated enough to have the kinds of disguised packages you see these days out of high end college and pro defenses. Obviously, there is a whole additional level of complexity in how real football is being drawn up now, but we can leave that to the real football coaches. Instead of Bill Walsh style progression reads, I go much simpler by installing only a few pass route combinations and attack specific players on the field I can identify as the weak spot in the defense. Like the quote from Gibbs on the running game above, the idea is to have plays and audibles that can deal with any defense it is presented with and drill those plays over and over to win through execution.
The idea of running a "limited number of plays to perfection" is more common than would seem with all the supposed complexity in modern offenses. Mouse Davis' Silver Stretch offense the Detroit Lions ran in the early 1990s with Barry Sanders:
So for any players who want to play "football" in NCAA and Madden instead of rocket catching and finding money plays, I hope you find this blog helpful.
The Gangster series is basically a flood passing series. One slotback comes in motion to overload the frontside, setting up a two on one situation. Most of the plays are designed to place the frontside linebacker in a hard position, having to choose between covering a wideout or covering a slotback. Either way, one will be open. Many of the strongside rollout pass plays in modern football are very similar to this package.
One feature that will be common to all of the play series is the Automatic Pass. Ellison describes situations where a wide receiver feels he has man coverage with a DB who is out of position. He can signal to the QB to automatically throw the ball to him on a quick one step drop instead of running the called play. This is in line with the principle of outflanking the defense and attacking it where it's most vulnerable.
Passes in the Gangster series are all directed to the flooded frontside except the uncalled automatic passes. If the defense tries to overcompensate and cheat extra men over to the frontside, there are predesigned throwback passes that attack the backside and a hitch pass in the package to attack soft corner coverage.The offense looked to make big gains on any pass play, tried to stretch the defense horizontally, and looked to identify the defense's strength and attack away from that strength. Back in 2009, I was playing the June Jones Run and Shoot but eventually wanted to know more about running the ball. That led to a conversion around NCAA 12 to the Wisconsin playbook and I Formation power football. While the Run and Shoot and other pass happy offenses like it are great for learning pass coverages and route combinations to attack them with, you don't end up learning much about blocking.
Starting with the classic I Formation and the obvious Power, Counter, and Iso plays that are the bread and butter of gap blocking schemes eventually led to exploration of zone blocking. It turns out that NCAA 12, 13, and 14 do not do a good job of adequately modeling what happens in gap blocking schemes, but it is fantastic at modeling zone blocking. Another thing it turns out to be really good at is preventing bad plays.
First, the data seems to indicate that odds of getting stuffed drop with a zone scheme. This makes sense, since in a zone one-cut scheme the running back chooses the hole instead of sticking with the play's pre-selected gap.The motion of the line in zone blocking is very simple - everyone moves together in the same direction and blocks whatever is their assigned area. This stops defenders from getting into the backfield to disrupt the play, and nothing quite infuriated me while running the ball like getting negative yardage on what was supposed to be a "safe" play call.
WE WANT NO NEGATIVES! We look at pass as yes/ no, big/ little, big plays and zero plays (w/ negatives). Out of a certain number of passes, we expect a certain number of failures. That is the nature of the passing game.
But the run game the exact opposite. We want NO negatives. We do not want to run plays that are big/ little, even at the expense of big plays, we do not want it. We want the system where even the "bad" play gains something. The entire objective is to stay out of 3rd and long. We throw out the run plays with which we cannot consistently avoid negatives.
Screw averages. We want medians. The back might average 7 yards per carry, but how often did he get stuffed and put us in 3rd and 10, causing a turnover.
And we do this by eliminating penetration and running a limited number of plays to perfection.Zone blocking on running plays are also much simpler to follow for someone without specialized football training because everything is flowing in the same direction. Most of the personnel challenges of running a zone blocking scheme are transferred onto the player in NCAA and Madden: gap/angle blocking depends on having size and strength up front with good measurables in the video games that weaker programs will just not have. Zone blocking relies on correct reads and can get by with smaller linemen like the kind I could get at a weak program like Hawaii or Maryland (the other program I would regularly use).
When Norm Chow was hired at Hawaii, he brought with him a pro style attack that happened to have all of the I Formation and Single Back formations I had been working with for more than a year in the Wisconsin playbook. The system I run out of this Hawaii playbook is a blend that looks a lot like the old Dennis Erickson single back spread.
An Offense built around the video game player
So what I ended up with is a short passing game that relies heavily on presnap reads and attacks weaknesses in the defensive scheme. This is okay because NCAA and Madden are not sophisticated enough to have the kinds of disguised packages you see these days out of high end college and pro defenses. Obviously, there is a whole additional level of complexity in how real football is being drawn up now, but we can leave that to the real football coaches. Instead of Bill Walsh style progression reads, I go much simpler by installing only a few pass route combinations and attack specific players on the field I can identify as the weak spot in the defense. Like the quote from Gibbs on the running game above, the idea is to have plays and audibles that can deal with any defense it is presented with and drill those plays over and over to win through execution.
The idea of running a "limited number of plays to perfection" is more common than would seem with all the supposed complexity in modern offenses. Mouse Davis' Silver Stretch offense the Detroit Lions ran in the early 1990s with Barry Sanders:
"This is an offense that continues to evolve," he goes on. "The questions people ask help me make it clearer. I know it looks like sandlot football, but in fact it takes more discipline than any other offense. The receivers and the quarterback have to make the same reads or you've got a hodgepodge." There are only eight plays in Davis's Silver Stretch attack, but each of them has dozens of options, depending on what the defense does.The K-Gun offense that Jim Kelly ran with the Buffalo Bills kept things streamlined and relied on Kelly reading the defense to determine what would work:
In Buffalo, Marchibroda sped up the process by paring down the offense each week until he was left with 20 or fewer plays for Kelly to call. The Colts, as mentioned before, sped things up by giving Manning a limited number of choices to make on a play-by-play basis.
But whatever the specific methodology may be, the watchword of the no-huddle is simplicity. When you start to establish something offensively, a coach’s first instinct always seems to be to add more bells and whistles to the system, but for a no-huddle offense that’s the kiss of death. When Bresnahan started calling plays from the sideline as the Bills’ OC, he did so because he wanted to expand the number of plays and personnel groupings the offense could use. However, all he succeeded in doing was increasing the number of things that could go wrong, and the K-Gun began to lose its potency. Complexity also doomed Schonert when he tried to bring the no-huddle back to Buffalo in 2009; the word at the time was that he was fired because he refused to simplify his no-huddle system enough to make it effective.Even the old BYU offense that Norm Chow used to run under LaVell Edwards had this quality:
One reason for the success of this version of the offense was in its simplicity. Norm Chow said the offenses had around 12 basic pass plays and 5 basic run plays which were run from a variety of formations, with only some plays tagged for extra versatility, so that the players knew the offense by the second day of practice.We're talking about practice. I see a lot more while watching football these days. And while I may not get all of the cool wrinkles or see things right away, once the window dressing of the misdirection and pre-snap motion is peeled away you really do have the same basics going on.
So for any players who want to play "football" in NCAA and Madden instead of rocket catching and finding money plays, I hope you find this blog helpful.
