Wednesday, July 25th, 2007...7:02 pm...by Jared
NCAA Passing (interception issues…)
I’ve been playing NCAA when I’ve had a chance, trying to figure out the big problem: the large number of interceptions (see this post for an example). Here are a handful of reasons as to why this happens:
1) The single play that I’ve seen the most interceptions is when the wide receiver is on a slant or crossing route. This happens too frequently when the receiver has a few steps on the defender. In these situations, the corner gets in front of the receiver and gets the pick. These seems to happen for the following reasons:
a) When the quarterback throws the ball a little behind. This is actually somewhat welcome, as the passing game has been far too accurate in EA football games for a while. Unfortunately, this is combined with a few other things that increase the rate of interceptions.
b) Wide receivers don’t use their body to shield the corner on these routes. If the ball is underthrown
c) Defensive backs don’t drop passes. With default AA sliders, I haven’t seen any drops by defensive backs on catchable balls. The game needs to tone down defensive catching ability.
2) Linebackers have much better awareness, and along with excellent hands, will get picks more often than in real life.
3) They’ve changed the responsiveness of the pass button, making it much more difficult to throw a ball with touch. This makes it very difficult to try and drop the ball in the seams of a zone, often leading to the ball being either thrown at a low trajectory and picked by a linebacker, or having too much loft and picked by a safety.
4) (This one has to do with CPU picks.) The computer is much smarter when it has time, but is more likely to “panic” under pressure and make a bad pass. This could be a great addition, modeling the difficulty in making a smart pass under blitz pressure. It’s difficult to tell if this is balanced or not, considering the other problems that lead to increased interceptions listed above.
I’m not sure what will fix this. Dropping interceptions to 0 helps a little, but I’m still getting 3+ interceptions per game. I really don’t like changing awareness ratings, but this may be the way to go.
1 Comment
July 26th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Nice breakdown, Jared. One thing I’ve noticed is that defenders have superhuman, 360º awareness and this also causes a lot of problems with interceptions.
One play that happened to me was from a slot formation,where I had the outside receiver running a go pattern, and the slot man running a deep out. Well, the safety on this play came down and to the middle, so I saw the outside receiver’s CB get beat, and he turned his back to the line of scrimmage and tried to chase and catch up with his man. So, I threw a ball to the slot man on the out, timed perfectly with his cut, and this completely beat his man who was playing him soft. But what happened was the CB covering the flanker, who’s back was turned and who was sprinting trying to catch up with his man because he was well beaten, somehow ‘knew’ the pass was on its way, and immediately upon release of the ball, he skated back towards the line of scrimmage, then turned his body to face the ball, and made the easy pick by cutting underneath the intended receiver.
This kind of problem truly threatens to ruin the passing game in NCAA for me. There is simply no excuse to have that kind of 360º awareness for defenders, and even though this guy was an ‘impact player,’ this play was just absurd.
Superhuman awareness and anticipation on the thrown ball combines with the incredible reach and leaping ability to allows defenders to cover more than one man at once, and that’s a big problem. I do hope these things are better implemented in Madden.
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