Perfecting Your Defense "A strong Defense, is a good Offense."

I'm pretty new to Madden-School but I'm pretty fond of Madden Games. I've put in the past 2 years in learning and enjoying Madden games, after all - it's the only football game we have that's current.

Anyways, the first step in perfecting your "D" is finding your favorite Team's weakness and stick to playing with that particular team. If your team is having trouble guarding deep, then go to practice mode and I DO MEAN PRACTICE THEM. That's the only way to get good. I recently just labbed in Practice mode myself for 2 hours setting up ONLY 5 DEFENSIVE AUDIBLES! I studied the tendencies of the QB similar to what a human may do 80% of the time [Difficulty All-Pro & Remove Weapons].

Here's what you do for your audibles after you find your weakness.

Ex. You have a blitzing team, and have no trouble guarding deep, but those slants and Power backs are killing you because your players are either Lightweight or simply have a low Tackle Rating. We'll use the Oakland Raiders for this example. Any who, you can get great pressure at times but maybe that O-Line is stopping you close to the QB. What can you do to fix this? This is where you've found your weakness. Because the majority of the time a Blitz from Oakland will involve at least one CB who will get to the QB first, but maybe not able to take him down all the time.

This is when you keep your corners for Coverage (Speed will pick off alot of people), and Blitz your LB's instead, if You have 6 Guy's putting pressure on the QB with a few hitting the outside, your opponent is more susceptible to the PICK6, or he will face a Sack the majority of the time.

THE SET UP!!!
Your audibles should consist of the following: (YOU WILL HAVE TO LAB TO SET THESE UP CORRECTLY!)
2 Zone Blitzes (Must be Effective & from 2 different formations)
1 Cover 4 (Not too much should be needed to set this up; BnR coverage is optional, DO NOT USE IF YOU HAVE TROUBLE GUARDING DEEP UNLESS YOU TAKE CONTROL OF A SAFETY!)
1 Nano (You can find nano's and more information on them around here.)
1 F@G play (You get the idea, FOR er's )

You should go to PRACTICE MODE BEFORE YOU SET YOUR AUDIBLES, but have in mind what you want to practice, a few of each play. Also, don't just practice this against one offensive play. Try Screens, Slants, Deep Routes with a few Drags or Slants in it, etc...

THIS SAME THREAD APPLIES TO OFFENSE, just backwards.

Also, if you're feeling nice and appreciative a few of these wouldn't hurt.

nice effin post man, especially for the new guy. Nice to see a few of you makin good stuff

nice contribution

nice post i will have to try this

Yo I found that one good defense is pick cover 3 out of the 3-4 Normal and man up all the receivers and change that other zones to fit the situation. i can usually do good against the pass and run also i play with the raiders and come out and audible a certain way that gets me tons of speed on the field, it usually works great but thats jus me, of course i change things if they arent working but overall that strategy seems to work

Nice info bro,thanks-RiP

this is one great post man. keep it up

this post is really informative specially for a guy who hasnt gotten his audible set in the first play (cough me) i dnt see the need for since u have formations aubibles like cover 2 3 man only thing i wish i had was cover 4 but maybe ill fix my audibles..who knows but great post thanks man

great post, i just started setting my audibles this year and at the end of the madden season at that.. i only had them set for about a month and a half that i was actually playing madden.. i will keep this in mind for madden 10 tho and see what results i get when i set my audibles in madden 10.

Yo i found that another good d is wall slide out of the 46 bear, put the DEnext to DT in flat zone (LDE) and put left DT in buzz zone still get three guys rushing and hard to pass on

Appreciate the feedback. Thanks.

i have some trouble on defence sometimes...and i think this could help me out

Don't rely simply on the play, all though some plays can help you out left alone.

i agree with this post to a certain extent....any team can blitz really and pressure burst pipes.. the key to playing D is playing attention to the oppenents tendencies...dont rely on certain plays....my self for example ill run something basic like cover 3 on ur first drive to give me a basic understanding of what you like to do while not giving up a huge play and then ill adjust accordingly............also you have to know the weaknesses in your D plays and how u can hide them or minimize the big play.............an example would be in cover 3 u shade the deep zones to the inside with the right analog stick so u dont get a TE streak on u.......alot of people dont use the shade deepzone feature with the right analog.. some dont even know wat it is... u basically can shift ur deep blue zones whichever way.......u also have to know wat formations to use on wat O, ive seen guys try and use 46(not the speed package) on 4 wrs with lbs trying to guard Wrs... 4wrs = u bring in more DBs......you could also come out in say dime or quarter and audible down to ur 46 play that would so work.. another thing ive noticed playing online is if u got a guy in a long situation and he comes out in like 2 wrs or so... dont go back to playing ur basic D (46,3-4,4-3) because you know that person has to pass..........so u come out in quarter or dime something like that and pass commit

alsoooooooooooooo, use your teams strengths on D...........the packers CBs for example are extremely good with the bump and run, so its great to take advantage of that... guys like ed reed and troy p are great in coverage so u might wanna move them around.... maybe use troy on some blitzes every now and then

as far as audibles most of mine are 1 cover 4 play,the rest are plays that guard all sorts of different areas of the field (mostly 3-4 D plays) that i dont pick when im actually picking a play because sometimes u get different looks on offense than u expect (ie. shotgun packages that look like normal i form or single back) so you have to have something you could change into.

also pressure takes away alot of throws and forces that person to think faster whic causes turnovers and sometimes they are so scared they miss a wide open man....ive had a couple people tell they missed an open man because they was staring at my pass rush.
for example if you have guys who seem to love Deep passes that take a while to develop you could **** him up with pressure.

another good thing to take advantage of is man zone defense, if you have a guy that is constantly beating your zone plays, throw something new like this at him.
What i usually do is live the Corners in man, and audible some lbs and D-lineman around to take away some of the obvious weaknesses in man to man coverage... you should always keep some type of rush tho.. maybe blitz some lbs in place of the D-lineman u dropped in coverage, alot of guys dont really expect this type of D so it confuses the s*** out of them.. so i would do this on guys who are constantly beating ur zone plays.

vs RC i dunno what to tell you... im too stubborn to actually guard it because i hate having the right D and 3 people get caught on.. so ill usually just give you that play and depending on how many times u go to it i usually dont feel like playing anymore lol

use contains....to stop out the pocketers AND it helps against the outside runs (chris johnson users)................also mix contain with blitz.. so you dont get scrambled on

[STARS] Swag2Real wrote:

u also have to know wat formations to use on wat O, ive seen guys try and use 46(not the speed package) on 4 wrs with lbs trying to guard Wrs... 4wrs = u bring in more DBs......you could also come out in say dime or quarter and audible down to ur 46 play that would so work.. another thing ive noticed playing online is if u got a guy in a long situation and he comes out in like 2 wrs or so... dont go back to playing ur basic D (46,3-4,4-3) because you know that person has to pass..........so u come out in quarter or dime something like that and pass commit

good stuff Swag! i like that statement about knowing what formations to use against certain offensive sets and not switching back to your base D. that "use" to throw me off a while back. but now...i have my "Dirty Black-Birds" flying all over the place blowing cats up! can't wait for madden10 to drop. good post!