Madden NFL 09 Strategy Guide

A lot of this section is subjective on my part. This is what works for me, and if you find yourself losing using this advice, feel free to use what you  think works best.

Please note that most of this comes from my NCAA 09 guide, so some of it may sound weird, but I try to correct where I find it.
Golden Advice ————-

It’s just like basketball, baseball, and other sports, you can’t always play lights-out offense, but you can always show up and play shut-down defense.

If there is any part of your game to improve, it’s most likely defense. Sure you can’t win unless you score, but good defense is like good offense, and the  opposite is true as well. There are a million reasons to play bad offense, but not many for bad defense.

Before You Play —————

Know your team first, or at least know your key players. The players to know  about the most in order: QB, RB, WR, TE, MLB, FS, and SS. Notice that I’ve  changed these from NCAA, and I’ll explain now.

*NOTE: There are weapons, but I will not get into those because I hate  weapons, and so should you.*

QB – Mainly you need to know if this guy can run or not. QB’s like Vince  Young, Donovan McNabb, and Tarvaris Jackson are scramblers, while Peyton  Manning and Tom Brady and most others are pocket passers.

RB – You got big backs and small guys, and then there’s speed and power. For the NFL, LT, Peterson, Westbrook, and then a few more are impact RB’s, the  rest are not going to impact games. Most can catch, and that’s a good thing.

WR – More so than the college game, these guys are your QB’s best friend. If  in doubt, sometimes you can just chuck it up to these guys and hope for the  best, usually putting touch as high as you can so they can jump up for it. It’s really cool if you have a team with a deep WR corps as you can stretch the field.

TE – If you look at some plays where you threw a pick or made a bad pass, 70% of the time your TE was wide open over the middle. Lots of these guys can  outrun LB’s, so play actions and bootlegs are almost always open.

MLB – I put him up because if you play LB, you probably need to play this  guy, but it not then feel free to play one of the outside guys. If you play this guy, your job is to protect against the run, blitz, and cover guys over the middle. Your biggest weakness is when someone runs out in the flats. For this, I have added another defensive position…

FS/SS – For Madden I am playing safety, usually the one on the side of the  strongest WR. For it I make sure that no matter what, my guy is only tasked to drift back, usually a cover 1. So what I do is drift up to the line to protect against possible runs, but my main job is to protect against curl routes on the best WR. This is the money route for CPU’s, and if the WR curls I just jump the route. Of course if the WR keeps running, then it’s all up to your skills, which you should develop as you play.

*NOTE: Linemen are your only other option if you just suck at the other two positions. I say this because as a linemen you don’t really affect the play in either way, but as a good linemen you can possibly cause havoc and you’ll need to know your guy’s best moves. Never play corner unless you have some  massively wide screen TV, and even then, playing CB is tough enough.*