Operation Sports Newsletter #4 - Not Just Another Roster Update

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This newsletter will be about catching you up on any sports gaming news you missed from the past week and letting you know about hot topics on the OS forums. We’ll also be listening to your feedback to shape this newsletter even further from there. 

With that out of the way, let’s get to it.

Progression In Sports Games Is A Black Box Of Misery

If there’s one area in most every sports game that is problematic on a yearly basis, it’s player progression. Whether that’s a lack of progress, too much progress, simulation vs. real game progress, or a progression system that simply can’t handle going year to year without slowly breaking, sports games have not been able to solve how to create a realistic and fun progression system.

It’s also almost impossible to point to one thing that causes the issue. I’ll mainly use the two football games as examples here since it’s still football season, but let me be clear that they’re not the only culprits.

For EA Sports College Football 25, there’s various issues, but the overarching progression issue is that most teams get way better over time. The balance and variety to the rosters in the launch game is diminished over multiple seasons as more and more good players end up at all positions. The ironic thing here is this isn’t even a simulation vs. playing the games problem because the sim engine — a weakness in both football games likely because they use the same sim engine — leads to unrealistically low stats for multiple position groups. So even though players are not accruing tons of stats, we’re still getting more superteams.

In Madden 24, the sim engine struggles with various position groups, but while the sim engine overrates various QBs and other position groups in terms of accrued stats, things like playbooks seem to be a big issue for player progression. A team like the Chiefs will consistently have great tight ends no matter what, so losing Travis Kelce to retirement doesn’t end up really mattering much because the Chiefs playbook allows them to have great TE stats in simulated games.

Now, I will give credit to the community by saying there are some awesome folks out there who were able to tune XP sliders to get some good results for player progression, but roster building is integral to player progression as well, and Madden 24 still was a failure there if you didn’t control every team. There’s more than one reason why that happens, but I would say it ultimately comes back to the salary cap.

I spoke a ton about the salary cap in my deep dive of Madden 25’s franchise mode, so I’m not going to belabor that aspect too much beyond saying that the salary cap needs to matter. How you build a roster does not matter if you never have to worry about the salary cap.

EA doesn’t explicitly talk about the salary cap in their deep dive, but they do mention at multiple points how AI teams will prioritize building their roster, and they do mention player progression multiple times as well.

Whether or not EA is able to nail those two areas is TBD (to the highest degree), but significantly improving those two areas would undeniably be awesome for the longevity of our franchises. They mention wanting to get more Puka Nakua/Isiah Pacheco progression stories in place, which they’re focused on doing via Breakout Storylines, but on a basic level those scenarios were something you could mimic to a degree by modifying the aforementioned XP sliders last year.

On top of that, EA wants to make sure older players like Derrick Henry are not getting more speed in their age-31 seasons. I do have some confidence in them being able to pull these two examples off because we could mostly get there last year if we put in the work tuning our own settings. So if the “default” XP sliders are just close to what some on OS were already doing last year, that’s a good starting point for Madden 25’s XP system.

I’m less bullish on EA’s ability to pull off the roster building portion to this. Even if we avoid the situations where good players are rotting in free agency after a certain amount of years, here’s a couple things EA is saying will happen:

• We’ll start with Contract Re-Signing logic, where teams will now prioritize extending their core young talent with a better understanding of positional value, depth and potential.

• Once the future of the franchise is secure, veteran players and roster depth will be prioritized.

• This mindset will extend to Franchise Tag decisions, which have been rebalanced by position and become a last resort for teams when they need to hang on to players that they want to build around.

• As a result, the strategies behind Offseason Free Agency AI have shifted. A few prized talents will be highly coveted while the bulk of the signings will be made up of veterans as teams look to solidify their rosters.

• Then it’s on to the Draft, where teams will primarily focus on selecting long-term cornerstone players early on and then shift their focus to adding depth in the later rounds.

• Refined player progression ensures that older players regress physically as you would expect, while younger stars receive more opportunities to make an impact in the league early in their careers.

It all sounds great! And, to be clear, if it’s pulled off then these are the biggest additions to the quality of franchise mode in many years. However, I have almost no faith in the overall sim engine in EA’s football games. And, again, there’s no mention of the salary cap there.

The hope would be that because these teams are all prioritizing the same things, that talent will be paid the proper amount. If every team cares about the same key positions, they’ll be paid a proper AAV (average annual value) and make roster building elsewhere tougher. That still needs to line up with how the salary cap goes up year after year, but at least the AI teams would know what players matter.

Either way, I want to believe, but there’s no chance I’ll take EA’s word for this. I will have to see it to believe it.

Now, let’s get to the rest of the news from the past week.

Speaking Of Games With Suspect Progression Systems…

NBA 2K25 took the stage this week with its first gameplay trailer, and trailers have never been the issue for this series. The main highlights 2K focused on were a new dribbling engine, upgraded defensive mechanics for sliding your feet, tons of new animations, and more tweaks to shooting. OS has long been on the train that “green releases are bad” — they’re not going anywhere this year — but it was interesting to see this note:

Choosing "Low Risk-Reward" will provide more forgiving shot timing that emphasizes ratings, openness, and taking smart shots over the release of the button or stick. A mistimed shot could still go in but the green make window will be smaller, making it more difficult to consistently have excellent-timed releases.

This is a setting you pick for your own Shot Timing so it’s not something that’s going to be default or change everyone’s game, but it could be a step towards “no greens” in custom leagues if we all pick the same controller settings.

Some of the more nuanced changes that could have the biggest impact are saving and sharing playbooks, bigger courts with smaller players, and rewarding anticipation on D.

There were no major mentions about passing, which is a bummer, and it’s not clear if the graphical issues like lighting and the color scheme have been totally handled as of now.

Finally, 2K did give out a roadmap for previews in the coming weeks:

Everyone will have their eyes on that August 12 date for MyNBA news. (By the way, the progression problem in 2K has varied over the years, but my favorite one has been where the league gets very talent-deficient and most teams turn into the Washington Wizards.)

Elsewhere, if you missed our College Football 25 review, Kevin did a great job going through the highs and lows. We also got a small patch for CFB25 as we still wait for the bigger update in the coming weeks.

EA has also been releasing Madden 25 player ratings, and you can dig through who’s a 99 and all that business if you care about that stuff. We also got a little more context from EA for the new kickoff rules, and it does seem like it will be a big deal in the game as EA had HC Mike Tomlin consult with them on the tweaks.

Dynasties As Far As The Eye Can See

Some might be waiting to start their dynasty stories in CFB25 until after the patch hopefully smooths out some of the rough edges, but folks on the forums are already crushing it with lots of great dynasty mode write-ups of their own.

OS user 1908_Cubs has started a coaching story at University of Louisiana Monroe.

OS user Flex on them has headed to The Citadel with the idea of it being a slow burn and starting by rocking the Flexbone offense.

And we have OS user Deuce2223 who has started a journey as the OC at Boise St.

There are a ton of other dynasties you can scope out, and you can always start your own story if you’re feeling froggy. Plenty of people are happy to help answer questions if you’re curious about putting together graphics and so forth, and things like our in-house tables generator should still work if you don’t want to just grab screens of certain things from the games themselves.

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

-Chase