Top Madden! Its season 5 and as a CM group we have voted and will be implementing a temporary rule change that will help us gather good feedback to potentially full time implement this in-game mechanic.
The New Rule
Through Week 6, we will be implementing the play call limit mechanic that limits each individual play in your playbook to being called a certain number of times in a game. The number we have set will be 3. This will affect both the offense and defensive sides of the ball. After Week 6 we will review and determine if we will keep this restriction moving forward.
Purpose
We want to create a competitive environment where playcalling strategy impacts the game more than people relying on the same run or pass play multiple times in a game. We want to see if this mechanic opens peoples playbooks where in the mid-game they aren’t falling back on their faithful plays but rather, implementing unique plays so that they have to save their go-to plays for key situations.
Some Concerns
- The first concern is that the issue is hot routes and not the play call itself. This is valid and something that we may seek to test in the future. I think as a CM group we do feel that there is some hot route abuse or reliance across the league. The hard part is enforcing a hot route rule without asking the CM group to review every game. But make no mistake, we will. So if you like your hot routes, police yourself. To be clear, the specific hot routes that have raised alarm is drags and to those with hot route abilities for various players, spamming the same routes for those players.
- Will this also hurt defensive playcalling? As of now we don’t have any real issues with defensive playcalling. We believe that while 3 is a low number, remember that we allows Customs on defense so you can add in more formations and run certain plays more.
