Madden 26 Has Arrived: Let's Talk Pass-Run Ratios and Coach Suggestions

Forgive me in advance, one of my best buds is getting his doctorate this weekend, so I was out most of Thursday celebrating with him (which also involves a 2.5 hour drive each way). This means I didn’t get as much launch day time as I would have otherwise, but I did get a couple complete games of Madden 26 in on PS5 while rocking default All-Pro settings. The intent of these two games was not to try and scope out everything or make sweeping judgments about the game, rather I wanted to focus on what I think has the potential to be the biggest boom-bust aspects of ‘26: the refined playcalling (see: better coach suggestions) and added coach DNA system that EA is pushing to help make not just teams but coaches feel different.

Just a heads up that we started an OS Discord this week that y’all are free to join. I wrote about it in more depth in Wednesday’s newsletter. We’re still going to tweak it a bit as it grows but so far so good overall. I also chatted with the business folks and was able to get the 30-day FREE trial back up for the premium version of this newsletter that hits inboxes on Wednesdays. You can try it out for 30-days before potentially supporting my baby (see: newsletter) for $3.99 a month. As I say every time, if you enjoy the work I do for OS, it would mean the world to me if you subscribed because it directly helps to support this venture and me. You can also reach out as usual at [email protected] or even DM me now on the OS Discord.

By the way, for anyone who either had issues activating the EA Play trial on PS5 or couldn’t get the MVP bundle to work on Xbox — that’s a bummer and you’re not alone. I would suspect EA to hammer these issues out on Friday if they aren’t already worked out by the time you read this. We have a write-up on the Xbox issue and a potential solution since more Xbox folks seemed to be having problems than PS5 folks. But if you’re having issues with the PS5 trial version or it’s saying you don’t own the game, try this link (and use the PS App on your phone if you can because you can sync your phone to the PS5 in order to start downloads when away from the console). If the apps are not working, then you might just need to wait for EA to get it together since those are the best workaround solutions we’ve seen so far on each console.

If you’re just having server issues pop up from time to time while playing (which then kicks you from an ongoing game), turn the game off, turn your console to offline mode (you can do that in the settings of your console), and then boot the game back up because then Madden won’t ever check the servers because you were never online in the first place.

The Test: See If Teams Feel Different and AI Teams Run More In ‘26

I had a simple plan for this test, and it involved making the Ravens my “constant” for the two-game experiment.

• Ravens (me) vs. Lions (CPU) in a heavy snow Thursday Night primetime game

• Ravens (CPU) vs. Dolphins (me) in a perfect weather Monday Night primetime game

(The weather wasn’t really a factor that I thought would matter, I just really wanted to see the cool ass heavy snow in one game.)

Again, the point of this experiment was to test those two things — aim small, miss small. You can take your pick of movie reference for that one by the way, I’m going with the “aim small, miss small” of The Patriot variety rather than American Sniper. I really wanted to hone in on these two factors because they were hyped up quite a bit in pre-release, and they’re also issues a lot of us have been frustrated by for years in Madden.

…Buttttttttttt, since I still can’t completely control myself, I do want to provide a couple quick videos and thoughts that don’t relate to that test (at least not directly).

• The new team intros are very good, so don’t remove them in a couple years this time, please:

• Penalties aren’t going to be called enough as per usual. I did get a defensive PI in each game, and four holding calls in total over the two games (plus one roughing the kicker), but we’ll need to hope the sliders work as usual to try and beef those numbers up overall.

• I’m not going to do much football nerding out in this week’s newsletter, but I want to say my “pet” gameplay issues in Madden for years have been a lack of urgency by safeties/corners to get to their spots/attack balls in the air, and Madden not respecting leverage enough on either side of the ball. I don’t think either issue will be solved this year, but not because they don’t recognize the problems, I just don’t think they want outcomes to feel pre-determined even if I would argue they should be in many cases.

  • For example, holding the edge as a defensive end still has inconsistent results. Someone like Aidan Hutchinson terrorized me and was able to keep outside leverage/set the edge to blow up a lot of Stretch plays, but I think that has as much to do with his ratings being insane as anything else. I do think too often the issue will once again be that the “right” play isn’t rewarded enough (maybe in part because they don’t think it would be “fun” to have too many expected outcomes).

  • This translates to something like the lack of urgency on balls in the air. If I’m dropping guys into correct hook zones and the QB darts the ball into double coverage under the guise of “well, he did a good back-shoulder throw” I don’t love that. Making the right read in a football game, especially in an online competitive game, should be a bigger factor than some semblance of stick skills with the Placement & Accuracy controls. For me, that goes back to my defenders simply stopping the plays in front of them (see: urgency). In franchise mode, I think there’s a little more wiggle room where if you want your superstars to go up and make aggressive catches against double teams because you’re using elite talents like Jettas or Ja’Marr Chase, I totally get that as well and agree it should happen more in that “sim” franchise environment. Regardless, the point remains if there’s any sports games where decision making should outweigh stick skills, it should be a football game.

• The heavy snow is sick, it’s just sick. Let’s go through a heavy snow supercut to showcase some of what’s clearly one of the best additions in ‘26:

• 00:01 - You have a chance to make one cut most of the time and that’s it My kick returner basically falls over here after one sharp cut, and I couldn’t be happier about that. Also, get a kick out of the snow being so heavy you have no idea what the camera is even pointing at after the play ends (it’s Lamar behind all that snow).

• 00:11 - I have a good Stretch play going here, but the one-cut by Henry basically does me in as he slips down.

• 00:17 - This is a late throw by me, but look how ruined the CB gets here in the snow. I do think we’ll have some big “broken” plays in the snow because of this (which I’m all for). The CB gets completely turned around and slips around while my receiver gets cleanly out of his break and has nothing but space around him.

• 00:31 - Henry slips but is able to maintain his balance to make the cut to get the first down.

• 00:35 - The Lamar slide here looks SO GOOD as the snow puffs up around him. The only thing that would make it better is if the snow actually got stuck to Lamar on his slide and you could see more of the grass in his wake (or likely dirt of the field since it’s in Baltimore).

• Graphics, especially when factoring in the weather, are clearly beyond CFB. In Madden, I do think the pads are too beefy, their heads are weirdly a little tiny, and since the NFL sucks the pants are too long. Still, Madden is a much better graphical showpiece overall in comparison to CFB.

• The new throwing motions are awesome. Feeling the zip when flicking the ball out with Lamar is noticeable and feels very obviously different when compared to Tua (the two QBs I used).

• The Halftime Show is, uh, barely that:

• Look, I’ll always be understanding as someone who helped to craft an EA Halftime Show back in Madden 15 — this ish ain’t easy to do — but I don’t think I’m out of line in saying most of us assume a Halftime Show is going to at least show some highlights with VO on them. Now, I know an issue I had back in the day was that if there weren’t a lot of good plays or scores — and this was a low-scoring game on 6-minute quarters — it would lead to the halftime show being boring and barely worth the VO. Still, I don’t think this version is the way to go either even if this were considered the “lite” version of the halftime show for the instances where there aren’t a lot of plays to analyze. Plus, there can be more to a halftime show than just recapping the plays. You can talk stats and so on for this brief version and then do a “heavier” version when there are enough plays to do the full voice-over-played-over-highlights treatment.

  • Just to let you in on the “inside” of the Tiburon studio at the time of Madden 15, much like within the community itself there was always a general fight about how long to make this stuff. A lot of users (and even people working at the studio) just want to press X and skip presentation, so in some cases it was almost like you had to justify wanting to do XYZ thing since we had data that said “this percentage of people just skip all presentation.” That is a perfectly fair and good question to ask, and my point of view (and it was shared by plenty of others at the studio at the time) was that those people are going to press X anyway — nothing would be short enough. We’re making this stuff for people who want to watch it, so length really shouldn’t be a big deal. It doesn’t mean longer is inherently better, but a main concern should not be the halftime show running too long — and if it’s why this one with Scott Hanson was so brief, then I simply disagree with that choice.

The Results

Now, back to the test. I came in with a very clear goal, which was I was going to use Coach Suggestions every play to see what the CPU was calling for me. To me, this seemed like perfect way to see how much EA had improved Coach Suggestions/Ask Madden, a feature that has been appallingly bad for the better part of, well, forever.

I wanted to use the Ravens as a constant because they’re a unique team that should theoretically be easy to mimic. They run the ball a ton, and they use a lot more 12 personnel (2 WRs, 2 TEs, 1 RB) and even 13 personnel (1 RB, 3 TE) than most teams in the NFL. Ravens OC Todd Monken has helped the Ravens level up (along with the ever-improving play of Lamar), and it has been behind those “bigger” looks much of the time because they can bully teams while still keeping quality talent on the field that can still do things in the passing game.

The other reason I picked the Ravens should make sense to a lot of you veterans who play a lot of Madden. One of the top issues in Madden is that the AI does not run the ball enough. They just don’t do it. They just won’t do it. We knock around theories, and I do think a big reason does go back to playbooks, but the point is the run-pass ratios are all messed up. In real life, only the Eagles ran the ball on a higher percentage of their plays last year, and the Ravens ran for the most yards overall in 2024. For 2025, all the main players are back and all the main coaches are back so nothing changed there (we don’t have to think of them as being in a Lions situation where they’re replacing both coordinators). In addition, making a team run more should (in theory) be much easier to show in a smaller sample than almost any other thing from any other team.

I was not worried about Coach Suggestions on defense. Yes, I was keeping an eye on the suggestions and still picking them, but matching personnel isn’t always as big a deal so I wasn’t worried if they were giving me nickel looks against 2 TE sets at times.

I also want to say I usually play on All-Madden. However, I don’t like starting there because I don’t even think a lot of you guys who play every year necessarily like playing on that level. If I had more time, I would have run at least one more Ravens game on All-Madden while also having my safeties sit deeper and running Dime personnel a lot to invite runs — just to see if anything changed. I’m going to test stuff like that over the weekend in Play Now and franchise mode to see if anything is changing the pass-run ratios much.

That said, the results were mixed overall, but I want to be clear that I do not believe it is one of those “one step forward, two steps back” situations. I don’t think the playcalling has gone backwards in any way, but early returns are it doesn’t do as much as I hoped either, at least not for the CPU playcalling.

Game 1 (Ravens Lose 14-10)

Let’s pop the first team stats screen in to show off what the CPU Lions did along with my human Ravens before we contextualize the results:

• I LOVED the Coach Suggestions I was given as the Ravens. Full stop. I was offered tons of 12, 13, and even 22 (2 RBs, 2 TEs) personnel plays as the first suggestion. One critique is the first suggestion was consistently HB Stretch. I do think Stretch is going to be very meta and hard to handle online due to my general concerns about how often the edge gets properly set, but as you can see by the rushing totals, it wasn’t meta in this game in the snow. On top of that, I obviously didn’t need to pick the top suggestion if I didn’t want to, and there were plenty of other rushing plays offered up along with Stretch, so it’s not a huge deal either way that Harbaugh was spamming Stretch as a first choice.

• We didn’t do much with our runs as you can see by the stats, but you can see the ratios. It was 18 rushes (3 were Lamar scrambles) to 23 passes in a game where I was down the entire time. And, again, I picked the top suggestion every time so this is the ratio the AI playcalling gave me.

• Another critique would be that the game still doesn’t seem to know how to quite manage time and situation in two-minute drills with its suggestions. I didn’t mind getting a run play with under two minutes to go in the 4th while being down 14-10 because I had all three timeouts, but it was still calling more PA than expected in that same two-minute drill scenario, which is less defensible to me.

• On the bright side, the game finally doesn’t just offer up Four Verticals in any 4th down and somewhat long to go situation (especially in the two-minute drill where this would happen without fail most of the time). It’s not like it gives tons of options, but you can see even if you don’t go with the top pick, it’s some other vertical plays that aren’t just Four Verts:

• The Lions had an 18 passes to 6 rushes ratio, which is obviously a red flag. However, they could not run at all, so there is that to consider because you also don’t want the CPU just going 3 and out a lot by simply giving away first and second down with bad runs all game (even if they were leading by a small margin).

• I was bummed to not see the Lions do a single play I would consider a trick play. Even if Ben Johnson is in Chicago now, I would still consider “trickery” a big part of their DNA. They never had something even remotely close to a 4th and short so I didn’t get to see if Dan Campbell would risk it or not.

  • In the next game, the CPU Ravens do go for it on 4th down and 2 near midfield (and convert on a run) but don’t go for it on 4th and inches on their own 39 (as seen below). It’s worth noting, the playcalling suggestions in the game where I was the Ravens did tell me to go for it on 4th and 2 inside by own 40 in the third quarter.

Game Two (Ravens Lose 17-6)

Now, lets hop to the second game where it was the Dolphins (me) vs. those Ravens (CPU).

This was where I did get a gut punch. I’m going to run you through the entire first drive by the Ravens:

1. Pass (11 personnel — 1 RB, 1 TE, 3 WR): Short completion

2. Pass (11 personnel): 14-yard throw to Andrews with some YAC added on for 20 yards in total on the play

3. Pass (12 personnel): Lamar scrambles for big yardage — now in the red zone

4. Pass (11 personnel): Another scramble by Lamar, this time for 8 yards

5. Pass (11 personnel): Short completion to Flowers

6. Pass (11 personnel): Short completion for first down

7. Pass (22 personnel — 2 TEs, 2 RBs): Sack

8. Pass (11 personnel): incompletion

9. Pass (11 personnel): incompletion

10. Field goal

I can rationalize 9 designed pass plays to kick a game off, especially because you “script” things a lot more in the real NFL for the first chunk of plays so it could have been a choice to throw off a defense expecting a lot of runs. However, I can’t rationalize the personnel decisions. In comparison to the plays I was given for the same team (heavy sets, lots of runs), this is a complete 180. On this opening drive, there are seven plays in 11 personnel, and plays 4-9 are in the red zone, which usually would mean heavier sets by default in many instances

Again, I wanted to use the Ravens for this case study because it’s not just the running, it’s the personnel. There are two ways to “check EA’s work” here when playing against the Ravens, and EA failed the assignment on this opening drive. In general, I didn’t feel like I was going against the Ravens, which is the other issue. They played in a lot of 11 personnel throughout, and besides Lamar being a threat to run, I didn’t get a sense for their identity.

If there is some good to take from this small sample, it’s that the ratio wouldn’t stay quite as bad. By the end of the game, it would end at 24 passes to 7 designed runs (two of those designed runs were by Lamar), and the Ravens trailed from the mid-second quarter on. Overall, that’s around the same 3:1 ratio from the first game when the Lions were on the field, which isn’t great or even good, but it’s not 30 passes to 3 runs either.

The other upside is Lamar made maybe the coolest friggin’ play I’ve ever seen by a CPU QB. Like, look how money this is:

Lamar feels the pressure, scurries just enough in the pocket, does a JUMP THROW on the money, and Andrews does his thing to pick up nice yardage. This was me after that play:

And I do think that is a real tangible upside here. Lamar as an individual did feel like Lamar when the AI used him. You might know that in real life he loves to hold on to the ball a long time (only Hurts held the ball longer last year), and he did that a lot in this game — and usually to great effect.

On my end, like in the first game, I loved the Mike McDaniel playcall choices at my disposal as the Dolphins. It was more pass-heavy as expected (my ratio was 23 passes to 11 runs while using the “first” option playcall suggestion). I did have a one-score lead for most of the game, and in a perfect world I do think the Phins would run the ball more than some fans might expect, but it felt like the right mix. It was a little Achane between the tackles, a little of him outside the tackles, tons of motion, some TE screens and motion screens, a reverse to Waddle, and then some deep timed-up throws between the hashes and drags across the middle. My favorite play was this one to Tyreek:

Maybe Tyreek shouldn’t be muscling a defensive back with a stiff arm, but it felt great and shoving the one defender off only to watch Roquan Smith get caught in the crossfire and fall over his teammate was icing on the cake.

In both games, I also didn’t feel much of the “robo QB” that has been especially noticeable in CFB this year. I think the “robo QB” in CFB stems more from a lack of aggression (they just like to check it down a ton) than perfect accuracy, but while in both games the QBs were around 70 percent completion percentage, they both tested the middle of the field and the deep part of the field enough. I don’t think EA wants QBs spraying the ball so we won’t get tons of inaccurate throws without the help of sliders, which is why my check was more making sure the CPU QBs were not just dumping it off Brad Johnson style all game.

Overall, I think these two games show a tale of two halves. I feel very confident saying EA did improve playcalling and has made coaches/teams feel more unique, but only when I’m in control of that offense. The same seems to be true for the pass-run ratios, which ties back into those Coach Suggestions. I would even say EA has done a good job making individual players feel unique when being controlled by the user or CPU.

The problem is that the CPU playcalling doesn’t seem to be utilizing the same suggestions you’re offered. Thus the uniqueness of teams/coaches and the pass-run ratios are both still dicey.

If I’m looking for “hope” it’s coming from a couple areas:

• The first is that running was hard for the AI to do against me on default All-Pro. There are obviously sliders, All-Madden difficulty, and some other ways to make the CPU running game more dangerous. The thinking is that maybe with better results they’ll run more.

• The other major thing is it’s a small sample in close games run on 6-minute quarters. The game situations could have a wider band when I bump things up to “real” quarter lengths and we get more total plays, and perhaps then the pass-run ratio balances out more.

• But the biggest hope I would point to is EA clearly fixed this for users with the Coach Suggestions/Ask Madden feature update. You just need to look at that first Ravens game. It was tons of heavy personnel and runs — and they kept suggesting runs even after I got stuffed a bunch. That first game stands in such stark contrast to the second game where it starts with tons of 11 personnel and 9 straight pass plays by the CPU Ravens.

And, to be clear, I want this game to be good. I’m not looking for reasons to doubt the game on day one. I am dying for a good Madden. I’m having fun with CFB, but it’s been multiple years now where I’ve been waiting for Madden to hook me.

…Well, okay, I should be more clear and say “hook me” against the CPU. I did play a lot of “comp” Madden not in ‘24 but in ‘23.

In general, I think Madden has made quality strides the last couple years (and I do think it’s continuing this season), but I have not been able drive myself to stay invested over multiple months in recent memory because the playcalling is dodgy, the pass-to-run ratios are a hot mess, teams do not play differently enough from one another, and franchise mode is a slog. But today’s two games show me the playbooks are in a good spot, and even the playcall suggestions are really solid in most areas (outside of two-minute drills). The way the Coach Suggestions/Ask Madden had me using the Dolphins and the Ravens was night and day — and that’s how it should be.

EA now has to find a way to translate that to the CPU teams when they use those same playbooks. I’m hoping a larger sample and some tweaks here and there with some sliders will improve things further. But this also seems like something where if we make the right sort of noise it could be patched. It doesn’t feel like we’re a million miles away from something usable anymore, which is also why I didn’t think a patch would solve stuff like the pass-run ratios the last couple years. I struggle to understand how I could be offered such quality Coach Suggestions and EA couldn’t make the CPU head coaches follow a similar script.

Anyway, I think that’s enough detail (and takes to have after just two games), but my plan for one, if not both, newsletters next week is to probably deep dive specific parts of Madden since I didn’t get to do as much as I wanted to today due to (good) life stuff.

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

-Chase