Posted by bhouska on 1/24/2013 9:17:00 AM (view original):
I also don't feel I was "criticizing" as much as voicing my opinion that I thought we had gone over this ad nauseum that most coaches preferred the ability to target certain receivers (ie. passing distribution) as opposed to "hoping" our good TE or WR gets the majority of looks. It was one thing that I believe was done right in 1.0 and failed miserably in 2.0 and thought we had all agreed to input it back into 3.0. I guess I was wrong.
What norbert is saying, from what I have been able to gather, is that its not as simple as picking one guy and giving him a high distribution number. If you do that, no matter what route he is running, you throw the ball to him. In the 3.0, that is too simplistic and they are giving us more control on the types of routes we want to run.
If you look at the playbook section on offensive formations (in this thread), for passing in an offensive formation, you have the ability to pick Very Short, Short, Medium, Long, and Deep pass plays. That is 5 categories of passing in each custom playbook. So, you can setup one playbook where you target your Tight End (By putting lots of percentage in short passes, then setting up the tight end to be in the short area of the field all the time. You can use this game plan as your normal gameplan.
But if you fall behind, you don't want to throw a bunch of short passes any more or necessarily target your TE. This means that in a different game plan (that you have picked to use while you are losing), where you have defined a "DeepWR" role and ranked your WRs in a way that very fast guys are ranked higher, you are not throwing to the tight end now, but instead throwing deeper passes to WRs who are best able to get open deep because of their SPD ratings, to try to get back in the game.
This not only gives you the ability to target your stud TE under normal circumstances, if that is what you want ... I also allows you to target your Fast, Good Hands, Elusive WR in different game situations.
Couple that with the ability to now have 18 different game planning categories (Main, Losing, Winning, Tied, Overtime, and 4 Optionals where you can define points and time for 9 ... Both on offense and defense .. which makes 18 total) and this gives us unprecedented control over who we want to throw passes to ... and to what spot on the field we want to throw them ... all based on game situation and time remaining.
I recommend everyone look at the
Player Roles/Depth Chart,
Formation/Playbooks, and
Game Plan threads and understand how they seem to work together.
You can create custom Roles that the game does not have in it under a give position (like Blocking FB and Receiving FB, Blocking TE and Receiving TE, etc.). You can then take a formation and create a custom Formation and insert these custom Player Roles. You would then create playbooks that use the formations. You then will use the playbooks to setup your game plans. This allows you to pick who runs the ball on short yardage or normal situations ... who you want to throw to when ahead or behind and whether to throw deep or short ... which back you want to run up the middle or to the outside. The possibilities are almost limitless and do not fall into candy cutter boxes ... if it works as planned, each coach can really set up a unique method to play both on offense and defense.