Let's Make Lamar Jackson Actually Play Differently Than Michael Penix Jr.

Patrick Mahomes does not play QB like Trevor Lawrence who plays differently than Jaxson Dart who plays differently than Jared Goff who plays QB far differently than Jalen Hurts.

But do you play the QB position differently with each one of them?

Over the years, one obsession with sports gaming for me has changed quite a bit, and it’s my definition of what “simulation” really means. What I would have called simulation for many years was essentially a mimicking of “real” football.

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This means pursuing real playbooks, pass concepts, and the sort of “if this then that” statements of football that should mean you do X on offense when a defense does Y. In effect, one side punches and the other side must counter punch to succeed.

After all, football is unlike most other sports. You take these extended pauses to call plays, and then each side has a chance to disguise/guess/counter in relation to the look you come out in before play begins again.

I still care about all that, and I think football games have gotten much better at that through the years, but zeroing in on just the QB, there’s not just one way to play the position. And yet, I think in Madden or CFB or most football games, we by and large all play the game the same way (within reason).

In a perfect world, we read and react to what the defense is doing, and you’ll use the athleticism of a QB if he has it, but we don’t take the “true” strengths and weaknesses into account for most QBs because, well, I would say Madden and CFB do not really put the onus on us to do that.

However, in a football game that is also trying to mimic how real NFL and college players act on the field, I don’t think any of these games do enough to “force” us to make those sorts of qualitative choices about our personnel.

How a game would get us to make those choices in part comes down to stuff like traits, ratings, and animations being more diverse, but it also comes down to the simple nature of how a QB thinks the game.

We’re never going to personally think like professional QBs because 99.9 percent of us are, well, never going to be professional QBs. But that doesn’t mean video games themselves can’t help us to get inside the mind of a QB via gameplay choices that get us acting more like each real quarterback.

This is why gameplay variety is my obsession these days. It’s a big part of my refined definition of what “simulation” should really be about. I have had nice things to say about Madden’s new traits system this year because it’s one of the first things in years that has really helped players feel more like individuals, especially when the AI controls them (and especially at QB).

It’s stuff like Josh Allen looking to take a couple more hits rather than slide down, or Derrick Henry looking to lower his shoulder and go through you that seem to occur more often in Madden this year because these players are being tagged with traits that actually work.

You pair that more signature animations (another recent focus in Madden), and at least on a visual level everything starts to feel more true to life.

So today I want to talk about bringing that sort of QB variety to Madden by looking at every starting QB in the league right now and thinking of how we can help each one feel somewhat unique.

This doesn’t mean every QB gets his own entirely unique set of traits and gameplay mechanics, but I think we can start putting QBs into a bunch of groups with some layers to their games from there.

But first I want to start with an anecdote at another position to explain why I care about something like this so much these days, so let’s talk about Ed Reed vs. Troy Polamalu.

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