Five Plays Still Missing From Madden 26

Coming off Wednesday’s newsletter where I went over some things you should not do when recruiting in College Football 26, we now turn our sights to Madden and some play types Madden does not give us this year.

I’ve enlisted the help of long-time OS writer Kevin Scott for this Friday’s newsletter, and he’ll be running through five types of plays he’d like to see in Madden. Let’s jump into that below.

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As the sport of football has evolved over the years, the Madden series has tried, with varying degrees of success, to keep up with the changing philosophies and innovations on the offensive side of the ball.

While times have changed, we've seen the incorporation of the Run & Shoot offense, Wildcat formation, and all sorts of Run Pass Options (or RPOs if you're hip to them) that have become the norm.

To prove that developers are continuing to stay attuned to what's happening around the league, Madden 26 even got a new patch in November that included 1,000+ new plays that have been featured in real-life offenses this season.

So even with little doubt then that there are an overwhelming number of options at your disposal on every given snap, it's somewhat surprising that there are still a handful of plays that you'll see during a modern NFL game that won't be found in any playbooks in Madden 26.

Here's a look at the plays that remain missing in this year's game, how they can prove to be effective in real life, and some speculation as to why they might be excluded from being part of Madden 26.

The Tush Push

Let's just go ahead and address the elephant in the room right off the jump. It's been criticized for its competitive advantage, ridiculed for its lack of excitement and even nearly banned by the league but, at least for the near future, the tush push is not going anywhere. That's why it's such a surprise the play has yet to be added to Madden at a time when EA is touting more than ever that if it's in the game, it's in the game.

Obviously, the reason for its effectiveness is fairly simple, even if it seems the Eagles are better than everyone else at it. It's essentially a quarterback sneak on steroids, in which the QB is assisted in moving forward a yard or two by some force — as the play's name suggests — pushing directly into his backside. With a running back or tight end adding some extra leverage, it's nearly impossible to prevent some sort of surge ahead.

The reason for its absence in Madden 26 might be more practical than anything else. When you consider the fact that developers still struggle with gang tackling, it's entirely plausible that it's harder than you might expect to add the animations and AI logic necessary for players to start propelling a ball-carrier forward rather than trying to drag them to the ground.

The Offsides Fake-Out

In recent seasons, it's become almost customary for NFL teams to try to steal five yards to convert a 3rd or 4th down by way of getting the defense to jump offsides whenever a golden opportunity presents itself.

This would include heading into the end of a quarter, the two-minute warning, and when the offense is near midfield and doesn't care about getting a delay of game penalty. While Madden 26 allows you to give a hard count and orchestrate all sorts of motion at the line, the game doesn't quite capture all of the creative wrinkles that accompany such a situation.

In a game earlier this season, Patrick Mahomes changed everything when he announced to the defense during one of these blatant offsides gambits that "this play never works" (with some slightly more colorful language thrown in) and started walking away from the line in defeat. But then he quickly went back under center and ended up snapping the ball and handing it off to a running back.

Could they capture something like this in Madden? On one hand, they would just need to add an animation of the quarterback walking around in the backfield (and some choice chatter at the line of scrimmage). But on the other hand, they would also need to make this animation so commonplace that opponents wouldn't be able to see it coming at all when you decide to break it out.

There is also the tricky aspect of you having little control over this event on defense. Either your AI defenders jump or they don’t, but we already have “built in” false starts and encroachments that probably bother some folks, and this would just be another way to provoke those outcomes.

The Flea Flicker

It's always baffling how some plays will be included in Madden one year only to suddenly vanish in the next — and then disappear for years. In the case of the flea flicker, it's especially head-scratching since it was just in Madden 25 and yet now finds itself extinct again.

The appealing part of a flea flicker is how it starts as a running play until a twist worthy of M. Night Shyamalan in which the running back turns around near the line of scrimmage and tosses the ball back to the quarterback for a pass downfield. The hope is that the defensive backs commit to the run bait just enough for a receiver to be running wide open by the time the ball makes it back to the quarterback's hands.

It's bound to be a tricky play for developers to accurately recreate because if you routinely have defenders biting on the run and leaving receivers open, its almost certainly going to be spammed by the community.

However, the flea flicker is in CFB 26, so it’s a little confusing why it’s not in both games.

The Reverse & Double Reverse

If you're looking to run on the outside with your wide receivers, you'll be able to find a variety of jet touch passes and end arounds in Madden 26 to add to your playbook. But what's missing is the ability to add some unpredictable wrinkles to these plays and create even more variety in your play-calling.

A proper reverse differs just slightly from the jet touch pass and end around in that it allows you to create some space by tossing the ball back to a wide receiver crossing behind the quarterback rather than tossing the ball forward or handing it off as in those other plays.

In the NFL though, you'll often see teams take this concept one step further by having a handoff to the running back turn into a reverse when that running back flips it backwards to a receiver headed in the opposite direction. This can really make defenses pay should they over-pursue in the initial direction of the play. You end up with a lack of defenders on the backside when the play abruptly heads to the other side of the field.

It's a little unclear as to why plays like these can't be added to Madden, especially considering how ubiquitous they are around the league — and again, because most of these things are in CFB 26.

Design Your Own Play

I’m cheating here for the last one and including “all play types not listed” because it’s one of the most requested features every year.

Many Madden players want the chance to unlock their inner Coach Klein by drawing up the X's and O's for plays from their own imagination. Madden 26 gives you free rein to attack defenses with a wide array of concepts, but you still remain confined to only the plays they've brought to the table.

To quote the legendary coach Bill Parcells: “If they want you to cook the dinner, at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries."

With the implementation of some sort of play design suite, Madden would open Pandora's box to a whole slew of new schemes and styles of play, for better or worse. Considering how football is largely about matching wits with your opponent's coach and dialing up the perfect call at the right time, it would bring a whole new level of control to put you at the whiteboard moving the chess pieces around.

After all, what backyard football player hasn't fancied himself an overlooked genius while drawing up a winning play in the dirt?

Of course, such an endeavor would require quite a large undertaking from developers to ensure that a play design feature worked as intended (this is why the old play creator was eventually removed, after all). Aside from the obvious concerns about how AI defenders could be manipulated by created plays, there's also just basic stuff to consider like players lining up in legal formations and behaving the way you want without the benefit of being able to coach them up yourself.

Still, playcalling is so central to football that it feels like it should be a thing — bugs and exploits be damned.

Thanks goes out to Kevin once again for his work here.

Until next time y’all. And, as always, thanks for reading.

-Chase