1. Finding the best offense in Madden
The first thing you're going to IMMEDIATELYneed to do is determine what the best offense is for YOU. For some people it may be a run heavy scheme, for others it may be pass heavy, and some like a balanced attack. But determining what the best offensive scheme is for you and mastering it is your best bet to make sure you're scoring touchdowns, and believe it or not; touchdowns = points, and you gotta score points to win games.
Without a solid offense, you're going to be scrambling each game trying to put up points. The best place to start is by finding a playbook you like, now in years past playbooks like the Las Vegas Raiders, Seattle Seahawks, New England Patriots, and even alternative playbooks like West Coast have been full of an abundance of really good plays to choose from, dominating both the ground and air game. After selecting your playbook of choice, you're gonna need to dig a little deeper, thankfully we have another article linked here that describes exactly how to create an unstoppable offensive gameplan, but if you still wanna know the other 6 secrets to winning more games, keep reading.
2. Finding the best defense in Madden
So, you probably should've expected this one to be honest. What football team wins games without a good defense!? Well, I can think of a few but nonetheless, the thought process behind finding a good defense is almost exactly the same as offense, but there's a few differences so don't look away yet!
Similar to the last section, we're gonna wanna determine what the meta is, but this time on offense. Are people running the ball a lot? Passing?Mimicking Throne's rollout corners? Once we determine exactly what it is that the majority of people are doing, we're gonna design our defense to stop it. Now I'll be honest, defense is typically much harder to design than offense, but that's okay because we're gonna make it simple for you. Find good run defense, find good pass defense, find a good blitz, and find a good max coverage play. Final thing? Know when to use em, if you're blitzing a lot and it's a super important situation, maybe switch it up and go full coverage, and vice versa. Have they been running a lot, but now it's 3rd and 17?You should probably play pass defense. Make sure you're constantly focused and thinking what the offense will do next. Want more info on how to play great defense? Look no further than right here.
3. Using The Correct X-Factors Will Win You More Games
For the past two Maddens', regardless if you play Ultimate Team or Regs, abilities have been GAMEchanging. There have been abilities that I've used that have taken me from winning 80-90% of my games, to putting them on and winning close to 99%of all my games, it's THATbig of a deal.
It's important to remember you want these abilities to compliment you're play style, not dictate it. For example, if you're the type of person who likes to sit in the pocket, survey the field, and deliver a dime over the middle like Tom Brady, you'll want to use abilities like Gunslinger and Protected to help compliment your play style, it's also important to remember that if you play like Tom Brady, but you're using Lamar Jackson that you don't have to go overboard trying to utilize his Escape Artist ability. Rather focus on mixing it into your own playstyle, and use it to help spice things up.
Another example: let's say you have a ton of issues stopping the run, well use some run stopping abilities! Abilities are great at amplifying strengths, but are also awesome at covering up weaknesses! When picking your team in regs, or building your team in MUT, abilities are arguably the most important thing to keep in mind as they play such a HUGEfactor over the course of a game!
4. Utilize the correct Personnel
Just like how utilizing the correct Abilities and X-Factors is important, so is making sure you're using your personnel the correct way too. Now contrary to X-Factors, you may have to adjust to your personnel a little bit more, meaning that if we are using Tom Brady but we love to roll out, you're gonna want to put more effort into sitting in the pocket. And let's say you love to blitz but you have Khalil Mack, well maybe go max coverage and let him go to work.
Now what's cool about Ultimate Team is that you're able to design your team's personnel exactly how you want it. Meaning, if you want to do a lot of rolling out of the pocket, you can get a more mobile quarterback like Dak Prescott or Lamar Jackson. You like playing a lot of man coverage?Go get yourself a lock down man corner to compliment that, and maybe even throw a couple abilities on em too.
5. Limit Mistakes
This is important for everybody, but is probably the biggest reason Isee people not able to take that "next step" in Madden. Just like in real football, you MUSTlimit your mistakes. Every play is so important in Madden, games are so short (usually 4 minute quarters in online play), so there's not many possessions. Every time you turn the ball over, your chances of winning diminish incredibly. This is also true on the defensive side of the ball where you must stay alert and aware of what the offense is doing, forcing someone to a 3rd and 24 means nothing if you give up a streak for a touchdown the very next play because you decided to text a girl who's probably talking to three other dudes anyways (I know the pain). You need to be locked in, you need to limit your mistakes.
6. Force Mistakes
You could have seen this coming, but it's still important we mention it here. You see, if you're able to force a turnover a game, and give up no turnovers a game, that'll increase your odds of winning drastically. You can have an inferior team, or straight up be an inferior overall player to your opponent, but if you're able to force turnovers, and in return not give up the ball unnecessarily, you'll be able to keep any game close.
Now the question comes, how do you force mistakes?Typically, this will be done while you're on the defensive side of the ball. Your goal should be to make your opponent uncomfortable while they're on offense. This can be accomplished by running unique formations on defense, well timed blitz's, or honestly sending constant heat and waiting for a mistake. Another great way to go about forcing a mistake by your opponent we're going to talk about in the next section.
7. Have a great user
A lot of you reading this probably don't know quite what I mean by this. Essentially, your user is the player who you decide to "user" on defense while the play is happening. If you user a defensive lineman, STOP. You MUSTbe usering either a linebacker or safety, usering in this fashion will allow to play areas of the field that a CPUwill NEVERbe able to play. You can go from usering a Drag to a Post to a Corner in a matter of a second. While this may not be considered realistic or "sim", it's the fact of the matter in the game we play, and it MUSTbe used in order to win more games in Madden 22.
