"The reason that passing is better than running, of course, is because of the upside. But it’s still interesting to note how reliant on those top plays the passing game truly is to be the more efficient strategy."

A direct quote from the article but 4.6 all but removes long passing and chunk plays.....a major fault in 4.6

This article is also ancient as 2019 passing is nowhere near the 70% completion percentage as the standard in 2021.

Again, all you have to do is look at the season numbers for passing to see how off they are to the norm.

24 TD passes in elite in 4.6....when is the last year multiple QBs didn't have 30 let alone 40 or Patrick Mahomes 50

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_National_Football_League_annual_passing_touchdowns_leaders

Steve Young led the.league in 1992 with 25....that's how far back you have to go

For the millionth time, passing needs to be fixed. No-one disagrees on that.

Rushing and sacks are in line (with the odd outlier at both ends). Some teams are struggling to get 100 ypg - Infinity is a genius by no means is he an 'average Joe', is there a better MFN gamer than him? So hardly fair to base game mechanics on what he can do, is it? (or Smirt or yourself for that matter)

There are teams getting 4000 yards+ passing and averaging 260+ yards per game (not enough teams but that shows it's possible. Why not focus on those teams and see how they do it? Rather than berating the game for not being what you want. How much is play calling, player v player and roster strength playing a part. It's not just fastest player wins any more (though that is a big help).

What is the correlation between the best pass blocking Offensive Lines and yards per attempt/completion/game.


With regards long passes, a 30-40% completion rate seems in line with the NFL. There are plays where that is feasible if you pick and choose where and when to call it.

You're the one that posted an old article from PFF with no explanation, which we took as you defending your position about 4.6.

Also, I don't know where this data comes from, but this says the completion percentage for throws over 25 yards is 65% this year: https://www.statmuse.com/nfl/ask/qb-completion-percentage-on-throws-over-20-yards-in-2021

NFL next gen stats shows that the top QBs throwing over 20 yards were in the 30-50% range and all had positive TD:INT ratios: https://www.nfl.com/news/next-gen-stats-top-10-deep-passers-of-2020-aaron-rodgers-lands-at-no-4

Almost 0 TDs are thrown with long passes in MFN right now let alone a positive (or ridiculous 12:0 hello Aaron Rodgers) ratio. So it's not just sacks that are the problem.

The game is fundamentally flawed when it comes to throwing the ball long.

I also agree with Smirt to a certain extent (conspiracy theory alert) that the game engine has tripwires, designed to slow you down if you start the game well.

For example, you'll often see a QB complete 10, 12, 14 passes in a row in the first half for 130 yards and then barely throw the ball if the team is leading or if his team is losing you see his completion % float down the river with 4 of 10 for 25 yards in the second half.

Everyone assures me you can't make half time adjustments (unless you write specific rules) So is it just that the level of efficiency is unsustainable, are too many plays getting yellow flagged to stop a team in its tracks?

If half the penalty flags weren't thrown on completed passes would that have a big impact on improving pass statistics?

It would be good to be able to set the 'penalty calling' as an admin in the same way as the injury rate. Or at least get the level reduced. I think it's supposed to be triggered by poor discipline and intelligence but seems way too random and (if Smirt is right) tends to punish the better teams to keep games close.

Another inhibiting factor seems to be when you have a lead around 10-17 points in a game and suddenly, plays don't work, your head coach will just run the clock down. Get past 17 points and you generally go on to win easily. Otherwise, your gameplan gets bogged down regardless of the gap between the two teams.

If Smirt is right, some, maybe all of these inhibitors need to be removed.

I can’t say i am a terribly experienced sim player, I have dabbled in the madden franchise modes (a looong time ago) and a couple other websites before this one and I really liked the detail and layers this game seemed to deliver. I started the playing a league on 4.5 that was casually half full and won the title my 3rd season by devouring information on these threads (after practically ruining the initial roster with bad free agent moves and dead cap the first season).

Admiral invited me to try an opening in his full “beta” league, so I jumped at the challenge and continued with his latest dispersal draft team to try starting from scratch instead of inheriting someone else’s success or mess. I feel I have had more success than most adjusting to 4.6, but it no longer feels like an NFL simulator. I don’t think I would have called 4.5 realistic by professional standards either, but maybe a good college level try (the way speed trumped everything is very reminiscent of powerhouse university programs running rings over lower divisions). But if 4.5 was really more like college ball, then 4.6 has reverted to high school. Sure certain elements might have improved, but in doing so it ended up exposing bigger flaws. It’s a classic “cut off the nose to spite the face” situation. Or maybe 2 wrongs don’t make a right.

Whatever, it certainly isn’t working right now, but if adjustments are made on how defenders actually play zone and how the QB should read progressions then the passing game should come back to life. Each change would fundamentally change how playcalling and execution currently work, which is extremely overpowered in man2man coverages favor.

There is but it’s supposed to be out .

Also, I filter out accepted penalties in my data set unless they are after the play penalties.

Now you got my ears pricked...I'm guessing 80% of penalties are 80% illegal ?

More like 80% of penalties nullify the play, but the stats are still included in the game averages. I want to know the stats for plays that actually counted as plays on the field.

OK, I wasn't going to respond to this point, but I feel like I must. (I'm sure that I've answered this before when I've seen it come up, but here we go again.) There is a reason in the game logic why this happens and it's for three reasons:

1) Limited playbook
2) Defensive play overuse
3) Defensive keying

There are very few plays that work effectively, and by now, everyone has figured out what they are and they use them exclusively unless they are changing plays every week to adjust for what a defense is doing.

Using a limited set of passing plays, because they are the only plays that generate enough yards for your passing game to be called a passing game since there are no long passes that work at all and few medium plays worth calling, inevitably leads to play overuse.

It's a good reminder that overuse kicks in after the third time you run an offensive play, so the defense gets a bonus against that play every other time throughout the game. The only time that "overuse" appears in the play-by-play text is when the overuse directly results in the outcome of the play. (The key example here being when the Hitch turns into an INT factory after the third time it is called.)

Defensive overuse is only called against blitz plays -- that is plays with "blitz" in the card which is why the 46 Prevent that is all zone but listed as Blitz 2 gets hammered with overuse, but the 3-4 Cover 1 that is a blitz play that is listed as zone in will never be called for overuse.

So good defensive game planners find the base defenses that are adequate at defending the pass and spam those in passing downs since they will never get called for overuse. The Flat Zone being the best example of this (and the fact that since vertical routes **** you can't throw over the M2M CBs all day long while the safeties are playing in the box).

So, now, we're seeing the double advantage to base defenses in this case. You use a play more than three times the defense gets a bonus, and the defense doesn't have to switch out of its base defense because you can't beat it over the top.

And that brings us to the third point. After the third time you call a play, the defense automatically keys that play, which means for passing plays coverage tightens, the safeties play "back" (scare quotes here because the safeties play hilariously shallow all the time), and the defense doesn't bit on PA Fakes (so that 203 PA FB and 212 PA FB play stop working). Advantage defense.

So the reason your QBs start falling apart midway through a game is because they have thrown enough passes by that point that they are starting to hit the overuse zone. The defense is keying the passes (for what it's worth I just pass key everything anymore since I haven't seen a detriment to pass keying a run play). The defense is getting a bonus, and it doesn't have to leave its base set. Triple advantage defense.

[Here's where I could make a point about the play matrix being broken and choosing to throw one pass 10 times and not throwing other passes or how it throws the same pass three times to start a game putting you in overuse at the start, but we already know how badly broken the play matrix is.]

All of the above was a problem in 4.3 - 4.5. In 4.3, there was a wider variety of plays that worked including the QB throwing the TE seam on the Flare Medium which prevented teams from going straight man all game with no safety back. I had 1,000 yard TEs with 15 yards per catch just by focusing on the TE seam routes as a way of breaking blitz 2 and CB blitz defenses that were common. In 4.5, this really started to get noticeable as the play selection got more limited with QBs throwing nothing but dump offs and short routes and never pushing the vertical ball (and all long passes getting sacked unless they threw to an RB).

But in 4.6, this is really a problem.

Since QB YPA has dropped significantly and there are even fewer plays that work in 4.6, you need to run even more plays to move the ball let alone score. This puts you into the overuse zone faster, coverage has been "tightened" so CBs don't fall down anymore (which is a good thing), defenders react immediately when a pass in the air and sprint to where the ball is going to be (which is illogical and unrealistic because defenders tract the eyes of a WR and don't turn their heads until the time the ball is there or they would get ABSOLUTELY TORCHED BY ANY PROFESSIONAL WR [seriously who thought this was a good addition to the game]), the velocity on the pass is slower than the defenders running to defend it always, and since you can only throw short passes you have a log jam of defenders in the passing lane. All of this is happening while your opponent's now insanely fast DEs because of the flattening of the parabolic speed curve (which is a concept that I still dislike because very few owners actually understand how it works) are able to get to the QB faster than the WR can get downfield because your defender's B&R skill slows WRs to a crawl.

So it's not some conspiracy. It's all of the game mechanics working as design. The problem is that the design doesn't meet the expectation because the people that pointed out all of these problems were ignored.