{"id":76486,"date":"2026-08-14T22:16:45","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T14:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=76486"},"modified":"2026-08-14T22:16:45","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T14:16:45","slug":"a-franchise-mode-with-some-football-on-the-side","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/?p=76486","title":{"rendered":"A Franchise Mode With Some Football on the Side"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

After a torrid affair with the NCAA during my college years, I only really started following the NFL a few years ago when I was conscripted into my family\u2019s fantasy football league. Upon claiming back-to-back championships in 2022 and 2023, I felt like it was safe to say I was \u201cpretty into football.\u201d I willingly, sometimes even eagerly, watch entire games without having to be at a bar. If that\u2019s not fandom, I don\u2019t know what is.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/section>\n

<\/p>\n

As a professional video game enjoyer, perhaps I\u2019ve coasted too long on the assumption that sports games were not for \u201cpeople like me.\u201d So with the launch of Madden NFL 27<\/em> just around the corner, I couldn\u2019t help but wonder: Is there a place for a weeby Final Fantasy enthusiast among the stats-savoring armchair quarterbacks? Could I be a sports-game person?<\/p>\n

After a couple hours, my answer to this question would have been \u201coh heavens no.\u201d The experience of playing Madden 27<\/em> often feels like information overload. At any given moment, you are utterly snowed in with too many options, too many statistics, too much data. In many ways, this is an unruly and hostile experience. Yet I keep coming back. That\u2019s mostly because Madden is effectively the only <\/em>NFL game, and I am simultaneously resigned and determined to make it work \u2014 even if that means playing it in a way that largely runs counter to the developers\u2019 intentions.<\/p>\n

The experience immediately opens on a bum note. Booting up Madden 27<\/em> as a newbie feels like getting onboarded to Salesforce during your first week at a new job. You will be asked to agree to impossibly long terms of service in four-point font. You will be prompted, in an unnecessarily hostile way, to enter EA account login credentials that are not strictly necessary to proceed, but you are automatically assumed to have.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"Madden\n <\/picture>Image: EA<\/small><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

That deeply corporate onboarding experience gives way to a sin that no Final Fantasy game would ever dare attempt: assuming the majority of its audience has played most \u2014 if not all \u2014 previous installments of the series and therefore does not need even the barest refresher on the various modes or gameplay basics. The logical part of your brain knows that all of this will become familiar and routine in a short time. The emotional part of your brain tells you it\u2019s time to jump out the nearest window and run shrieking for the hills, Simpsons<\/em> style.<\/p>\n

I venture a peek into the settings menu, my first port of call when starting any new game. The UI is a never-ending Russian nesting doll of small white text. There are 12 submenus within the settings menu, so many that a single screen cannot contain them all. Within the penalties submenu alone are seven sliders for items like offensive holding and false start, on a scale of 0-99. This is followed by an additional seven on-off toggles for stuff like \u201ckick catch interference\u201d and \u201crunning into the kicker.\u201d And this isn\u2019t even the most granular of the 12 submenus: the Coach Adjustments menu alone features submenus within submenus, with dozens upon dozens of inscrutable options like \u201cCover 4: Quarters Check: 1 Rec Tight,\u201d which itself has four possible selections.<\/p>\n

All of this leaves me feeling as though I unintentionally stumbled upon evidence of a new boyfriend\u2019s toggle and slider fetish. Oh brother, I don\u2019t wanna see this! I realize all of these options are the product of painstaking developer work and a sincere love for the sport, but it\u2019s all so cluttered and imposing, just begging for more approachable curation to help new and casual players find their footing.<\/p>\n

Madden 27<\/em>\u2019s Ultimate Team Mode requires an online connection and hence would require me to make an EA account, to which I say a hearty \u201cno thank you, I\u2019m good\u201d in light of recent events. So I set up a Franchise Mode save file, customizing my coach down to his Air Max 90s.<\/p>\n

The immersive quarterback experience is the centerpiece of the Madden franchise, and there\u2019s an evident reluctance to deviate too much from that. But Franchise Mode purports to offer more of what I\u2019m looking for in a football video game \u2014 managing a roster of players, working within the salary cap, negotiating contracts, and calling plays in the heat of the moment. I\u2019m far less interested in an intricate on-field sim than I am a front-office management sim, so this all sounds great to me.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s time to be brutally honest: I want a football game where I don\u2019t actually have to play that much football. Could I make Madden NFL 27<\/em> feel more like Umamusume: Pretty Derby<\/em>? Turns out, you kind of can.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"madden\n <\/picture>Image: EA<\/small><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Things started off strong as I sunk into setting up Franchise Mode. \u201cMr. Brightside\u201d by The Killers began to play, a clean, fast pitch down the middle of the elder millennial strike zone. Things are improving! I want to enjoy this! I will<\/em> learn valuable player insights that will prevent me from being suckered into drafting Christian McCaffrey for a third straight year in fantasy football because of his high ADP score!<\/p>\n

I chose the Los Angeles Rams as my team, betraying my Bay Area roots because the Rams currently have Madden\u2019s highest OVR score, I enjoy their QB Matthew Stafford, and frankly I wanted to make things easier on myself. As I tinker, I notice that the words \u201csmoke,\u201d \u201cdrag\u201d and \u201cdress\u201d are omitted from Madden 27<\/em>\u2019s version of \u201cMr. Brightside.\u201d If you\u2019re familiar with the song, you\u2019ll understand these are pretty load-bearing nouns. And just like that, I\u2019m back to being annoyed.<\/p>\n

Thankfully, it\u2019s short-lived. As I begin the pre-season, several members of my squad want to renegotiate their contracts. New for Madden 27<\/em> is the Persona Engine, which gives every player a distinct personality profile, pulling from a pool of more than 65 traits. It aims to replace older scripted scenarios to make player reactions and contract negotiations feel more realistic. My first time trying it out, I committed a colossal boner and lowballed star wideout Puka Nacua so egregiously that he stormed out of the negotiation, never to return. (I deserved it.) I do wish the game gave you more context for whether you\u2019re offering a player a good or bad deal, or at least made \u201cnegotiation insight\u201d one of its 10,000 toggleable options. Instead, as in so many areas of the Madden 27<\/em> experience, you\u2019re bombarded with an overwhelming amount of information and just expected to know what to do with it, because all people who enjoy football just know<\/em> this stuff, I guess.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"M27_Event_CrosbyTradeBlock_WeeklyHub_Screen\n <\/picture>Image: EA<\/small><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

A few weeks after blowing it with Puka, I successfully locked in an extension for another big-ticket Rams receiver, Davante Adams. I ended up doing a lot of these negotiations over the course of a couple seasons, and to my delight and surprise, they never felt quite the same. At the start of the discussion, you\u2019re able to set the contract length, annual salary, bonus, and guaranteed years. From there, you as the coach will have five possible counters \u2014 maybe you offer more cash, more bonus, another guaranteed year, or stick to your guns. There\u2019s no voice acting or anything, but the team behind this section of the game have done an admirable job giving personality and variety to these text-based exchanges. There are players who are all about up-front money, others want long-term stability, and some have insatiable egos. Some are willing to drag out the conversation over several rounds, others will get angry and leave after just one or two exchanges. And if you don\u2019t care about any of this stuff, or a specific player, you can just automate the negotiations. Neat!<\/p>\n

The Persona Engine additions aren\u2019t solely limited to contract negotiations. Sometimes a player will approach you seeking extra training, or a second-stringer will ask for a role in the starting lineup. After a rough 2-4 start to one season, a star player came to me to vent his frustration. I promised him we\u2019d win nine games by the end of the season, even though I didn\u2019t really believe it. We won eight and he left during the offseason. These emergent events add a lot of flavor to the off-field play, and I wish there were even more scenarios for them.<\/p>\n

I suppose, at some point, I should talk about the actual football of it all. For many of my games, I used Franchise Mode\u2019s Play The Moment setting, a condensed experience which drops you into the on-field action during crucial drives and defensive plays. (You also have options to play the full game, offense only, or defense only.) On offense, you\u2019ll select a pass or a run from three options \u2014 there are, of course, dozens more play-calling options another button press away, should you want them. The core mechanics here are basically unchanged from decades-old Madden iterations, something the developers probably don\u2019t want you to notice, but I actually mean as a compliment. Once you get past all the noise and fiddle with some settings, it\u2019s intuitive and exciting. For a passing play, you\u2019ll drop back as your receivers scramble into position, each with a button indicator over their head, and you\u2019ll have a couple seconds to choose a target and throw the ball. For a run, you\u2019ll hand off the ball to the receiver and weave your way through the defense.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\"madden\n <\/picture>Image: EA<\/small><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Between moments though, you\u2019re basically just watching the field with a series of lines overlaid on it to indicate play progression, which doesn\u2019t effectively convey the story that\u2019s happening on the field. Play the Moment does indeed serve up some exciting moments, but I found myself longing for a purely button-mashy, arcade-style mode to accompany the business side of Franchise Mode. Madden 27<\/em>\u2019s returning arcade mode difficulty setting purports to do this, and it is indeed far more approachable for newbies than the default simulation mode. Still, I wish Play the Moment and arcade mode leaned harder into the potential for big dumb fun and skewed more NFL Blitz<\/em> than Madden Lite.<\/p>\n

At the end of it all, I did have a better time with Madden 27<\/em> than I expected. But clearly, by stripping away much of the immersive quarterback sim elements, I\u2019m playing it in a way it was not intended to be played. I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s even fair to judge it by that standard. But then again, EA has a monopoly on NFL games and a bottomless pile of money. Is it so much to ask that in addition to giving players a granular sim in the vein of Gran Turismo or Forza Motorsport that they also offer more of an easy-breezy Mario Kart riff on football as part of the package? I really don\u2019t think so. In a game with hundreds upon hundreds of options, what\u2019s one more?<\/p>\n