Macbob - It's all good.
The thing is, I've never played Madden in my life. I've just studied the game and as I'm a historian, in football, there are trends that seem to work until they get countered.
"zombieslayer" wrote:
Zombie-I'm just being an a**hole with my Madden comments. I find your discussions intelligent (which is one reason I answer them as much as I do).
I'm not a run/run/run guy. I'm ok (especially with the rule set that they have now in the NFL) with a preponderence of passing.
Looking at the game (from a historical trends perspective), if your tendencies run too far in one direction or the other, it lets teams game plan against those tendencies, and then your offense starts struggling. There are exceptions (most of them from Warner-QB'd teams), but if you get too much above a 60-40 split, the w/l record seems to start dropping fast, and when you get close to a 70-30 split it start getting abysmal.
Weve had some discussions on what came first--runs at the end of the games by teams leading and passes at the end of games by teams losing skewing the ratios. The argument is basically that coaches (McCarthy) go run-crazy at the end of the games that their teams are leading, getting conservative to eat up clock and preserve the win. And that they go pass crazy when behind trying to catch up.
There IS undeniably a tendency to do that, but I think it has less of an impact on the stats than you might think, over the course of the season.
If it were true that McCarthy was running more when we were ahead, Id expect to see a higher pass/lower run ratio when ahead than when we were tied with the other team. But Im not seeing that (at least, this year with the Packers).
I haven't looked at the last couple of games, but prior to the last two McCarthy was running the ball at the exact same pass/run ratio when the Packers were tied as when ahead during games (based on the splits information available on ESPN, and it included removing ARs runs out of the mix, just looking at passes and RB carries).
McCarthy has done a reasonable job of keeping a balanced offense this year. But in those games where he hasnt, all 4 of those games have been losses. And Im at a loss to explain such a result without coming to the conclusion that statistically, there IS a correlation between pass/run ratios and wins/losses.
edit: I'm sure there are other correlations, too (team that turns the ball over less/forces opponent to turn over the ball more = wins is probably a pretty good correlation), but in each of those cases, you should strive to achieve the effects that correlate to a win.
And in this case, it means we should STRIVE for a more balanced attack, rather than a one-dimensional passing game.
end edit
Now, if I could just get you Maddenites to just realize that REAL football is more complex than a video game... lol. Here, let me fill in the emoticon for you... :ahole: