ORLANDO, Fla. — During the NFL’s annual meetings in Orlando in March, local EA Sports officials met with the league’s head coaches to take 3D scans of their heads for use in the next game, an annual procedure , when an unexpected question arose.
“What are you going to do if the kickoff rule is changed?” a trainer asked the scanning employee, who didn’t know the answer.
Madden 25 was already in the alpha stage, meaning the core features were complete and the game had moved on to fixing bugs ahead of the August 16 release. When the NFL competition committee approved the change in kickoff rules at those owners meetings, EA Sports had to adapt.
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“This is the most significant change in professional football in 25 years,” said Clint Oldenburg, director of American football production at EA Sports. “My initial thought was that there was no way we could release the game without it.”
The new starting format will be in Madden 25, but it is being actively tweaked and updated ahead of launch. As part of the new rule, kickoffs will still be taken from the 35-yard line, but the rest of the kickoff team will line up at the receiving team’s 40-yard line, while the receiving team’s blockers will line up at their own yards 35 and 30. -yard lines. No player may move until the ball hits the ground or is caught by a returner.
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Oldenburg, a former NFL offensive lineman from 2007 to 2010, leads the football details seen in the game. He had to get the development team back into the game to add the new kickoff. The XFL tested a similar version of the rule in 2020 and used it again in 2023 with a returner. The game is supposed to emulate real NFL Football, and many NFL fans may not know the rule until they play Madden before the start of preseason games in August.
“By launch day, it has to work,” Oldenburg said of Madden’s plans for the rule. “So how can we improve or implement ways to teach our fans how this works? Whether it’s commentary lines or in-game indicators, we can bring people in before the season starts.”
The Madden 25 demo that a select group of journalists and I tested last month included the new start, but options were limited. Implementing the new rule simply won’t move a few players. NFL teams are still figuring out how they will approach the change. It could be blocked more like a running play than a kick return.
Pittsburgh Steelers running back Jaylen Warren’s comments on a podcast that the team had listed Justin Fields as a kick return option led the quarterback to put that rumor to rest in late May. The Kansas City Chiefs have considered taking Harrison Butker off kickoffs because kickers will have to tackle more. New England Patriots head coach Jerod Mayo said a better option might be to kick across the end zone for a touchback, allowing the next drive to begin at the 30-yard line.
How can the video game prepare for this unknown? Oldenburg said he and the EA Sports staff have held weekly calls with an active NFL coach (Oldenburg did not reveal the coach’s name) to talk strategy.
“We’re having calls with him to understand how the NFL is going to handle this,” Oldenburg said. “It gives us a unique opportunity to lead. We are going to play football and we will start before the NFL. I hope you see us do things with kickoff that you might never have thought of before, and the NFL will follow. That excites me”.
Help goes both ways. Since coaches have limited time with players, Oldenburg said the anonymous coach has been able to use Madden to simulate kickoff strategy.
“I’ve never seen him on an NFL field with NFL players before,” Oldenburg said. “He told me, ‘I bet Madden is working on this.’ We wonder what they are going to do with this. “We just developed a codependent relationship and every week we build it.”
In the XFL version of the rule, teams blocked single-player formations with schemes similar to a running play, including trap, inside zone, and outside zone. The XFL tried double-backs and put-backs, but they didn’t happen in games. However, with the NFL’s option to use two returners, there are more possibilities.
There are also more ways in which something unexpected can happen. The NFL experimented with delaying the extra point attempt in the 2014 preseason before adopting it for the 2015 season. There is no experiment with this change and the NFL rule has some differences from the XFL rule that could lead to greater exploitation.
All this affects the video game. Should users have more control over where the ball is kicked, like a line? The game encourages action; That’s why the NFL has more touchbacks in real life than in Madden. It’s up to Oldenburg and his team to make sure it’s usable and fun.
For decades, video game starter manuals were simple and limited to a handful of options. Now Madden’s team has to create completely new formation plays. Figuring out how to handle extra point penalties on kickoff is a coding problem, and onside kicks will be limited to the fourth quarter in real life.
There’s a pretty big change coming to football strategy and Madden is at the forefront of executing it.
“I can’t say yet how far we’ll go for launch,” Oldenburg said, “but we’ll keep building to do really interesting things.”
(Justin Tucker Photo: Robin Alam/ISI Photos//Keynote USA/Getty Images)
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