The “lots of passes” thing comes from playing humans.
The most effective defensive tactic against humans is to blitz a lot. Their eyes are usually focused on their primary receiver’s route, and they may not check to see who’s coming in and where they’re coming from, especially the first few times you blitz unexpectedly.
(if you don’t get there, though, high scoring games result)
The side effect of the vastly increased blitzing is increased first line run pressure – if they’ve got guys in the backfield before the handoff, running is going to suck. SEADAWG was also doing a lot of edge blitzing…and that’s where I normally like to run. Which made for lots of fun to watch two yard losses.
(outside running seems to get more medium+big gains than inside running.)
So passing looks better in comparison, and that’s before considering the biggest factor in playing human on human – human players are usually their worst enemy. Humans take more aggressive lines to tackler, dive more frequently, go for picks with no backup more frequently, and hit the wrong button on brain freeze more often. If you get a receiver the ball in the open field, your chances of making one or two DBs miss and outracing everyone to the endzone go way up when you’re playing a human. You’ve got to get to that open field on a run yourself, but on a pass, you may already be there. The value of an average pass goes way up.
What happened particularly here is I was blitzing a bunch, but Philly’s DBs were playing good man defense and getting deflections, so SEADAWG would go three and out. Then I’d get McNabb, and throw while running backwards or sideways, and the throw would miss by three yards each time, and I’d punt back. And the whole sequence would take up 45 seconds or so, which gave us plenty of time for fruitless drives under the two minute warning.