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.
My biggest complaint about playing is how the game is really bad at bothering to distinguish between defenses aside from which personnel is out there. Conceivably, if they’re in Dime you should be able to have some success running on that, but for the game, just having 4 linemen and a linebacker there means you’re probably all bottled up! Same thing in that an all-out blitz is pretty much the same as an all-out run stuff. And don’t even waste your time with draws or screens, seriously.
Weird. I never play against humans, yet I still blitz 75% of the time, and pass 85% of the time.
I guess I just gotta be me.
I find that unless your CB’s are reatrdedly fast like Will Allen, blitzing can be a really bad idea.
The only time I can run the ball against another human is out of the goal line set, and that’s only when I’m going for a 3yd / carry average to hopefully grind down the clock.
But a WR screen out of the shotgun is scarily effective against human players, since (a) as Cubs was saying, they blitz a lot anyways and (b) even if they’re not blitzing, running from the gun usually has the psychological effect of forcing them to play a lineman and take at least one player completely out of the play. It’s a thing of beauty when it works.
(I’ve learnt the hard way to just play the line on D, put pressure on, and hope to hell my CBs force enough incompletions to get a stop. It’s not anything dramatic, but it’s usually enough.)
Blitzing a corner can work pretty good against mobile QBs, mainly because of the tendency people have to start scrambling the second there’s even a hint of pressure on them. With a guy like Trent Green, if nobody’s open and someone’s coming at you, you’re pretty much limited to taking the sack, throwing it up, or just throwing it away (if you’re a sissy girl). Hopefully Madden 2006 will incorporate Trent’s shadow-like evasiveness. But these guys that play Vick all the time, it’s like they all want to run around and avoid the sack. And if they CAN avoid it, someone usually gets open downfield in the meantime.
But if you send a corner from one side, then control your defensive end on the opposite side and get some pressure, at the very least you can shorten the QB’s room to move away from the blitz and get him to throw a bad pass on the run like Cubs was describing. Or if you can brush past the offensive lineman and get really good pressure, you could get the QB to run towards the blitz before he sees it.