I wanted to start this thread before we all started making dots for next season. There is definitely a "standard" way to build dots, and it sort of makes the game boring when everyone is doing things the same way. LE keeps talking about trying some top secret "crazy build" next season, and I am actually curious what people have attempted in the past. If you're worried about divulging build secrets, then I'd just be curious about your crappy, failed experiments. ;p I'm actually especially curious about SAs people use.
I'll start:
The past two seasons I've been experimenting with extremely-high agility-based players. Last season, I used agility-equipment on my entire defensive besides the DLine. Basically, I was sick of screens toasting me in the beginning of the season because my players would overrun it, so I made speed my #1 attribute still, but put my equip in Agility to help balance it out early season. It actually worked pretty well, so I wouldn't dissuade anyone from doing the same. I mean, there are definitely drawbacks, but it helped overcome how noticeable low agility is in the start of the season.
But this season, I took it a step further and I built my linebackers entirely with agility as the #1 and agility equipment. [I would not recommend this. They got toasted. Especially with the change to dline pressure, QBs were able to hold onto the ball longer and my LBs simply weren't able to keep up with guys that long. Furthermore, they still exhibited the same bad coverage behavior, where they kept running away from the receiver after the pass was thrown instead of locking onto the guy. I scrapped the experiment mid season and have been put my equipment upgrades into speed, among other changes.
Furthermore, I played around with high (2nd cap + eq) agility WRs, thinking that this would make the overrunning coverage even more pronounced. This hasn't really been the case. In fact, they seem to exhibit even less of it than other players (such as speed TEs.)
From this experiment, I believe:
Agility doesn't really do much when it comes to coverage overrunning. I actually think it's primarily based on speed and vision for the defensive player. I think speed comes into play because, if a defender is slower, I think they try and get out in front of the receiver (so they don't get burned deep.) And then vision causes the delay in the reaction to the ball. Anyone find out anything differently?
I'll start:
The past two seasons I've been experimenting with extremely-high agility-based players. Last season, I used agility-equipment on my entire defensive besides the DLine. Basically, I was sick of screens toasting me in the beginning of the season because my players would overrun it, so I made speed my #1 attribute still, but put my equip in Agility to help balance it out early season. It actually worked pretty well, so I wouldn't dissuade anyone from doing the same. I mean, there are definitely drawbacks, but it helped overcome how noticeable low agility is in the start of the season.
But this season, I took it a step further and I built my linebackers entirely with agility as the #1 and agility equipment. [I would not recommend this. They got toasted. Especially with the change to dline pressure, QBs were able to hold onto the ball longer and my LBs simply weren't able to keep up with guys that long. Furthermore, they still exhibited the same bad coverage behavior, where they kept running away from the receiver after the pass was thrown instead of locking onto the guy. I scrapped the experiment mid season and have been put my equipment upgrades into speed, among other changes.
Furthermore, I played around with high (2nd cap + eq) agility WRs, thinking that this would make the overrunning coverage even more pronounced. This hasn't really been the case. In fact, they seem to exhibit even less of it than other players (such as speed TEs.)
From this experiment, I believe:
Agility doesn't really do much when it comes to coverage overrunning. I actually think it's primarily based on speed and vision for the defensive player. I think speed comes into play because, if a defender is slower, I think they try and get out in front of the receiver (so they don't get burned deep.) And then vision causes the delay in the reaction to the ball. Anyone find out anything differently?
