Madden NFL 15 - Connected Franchise Mode - Team Management Guide

Contact

Author: Aurabolt10

Email: auraboltgaming@gmail.com

Introduction

This guide started off as a bunch of notes scribbled on a notebook for myself, as reminders. So I have compiled most of those thoughts into this document. These aren't "official" recommendations, but just what I've decided through experience playing CFM. Sorry if I repeat myself throughout the guide. Feel free to email me if you have feedback, corrections, or more information to add!

Version History

2015 December 14: Renamed this guide from "Coach Mode Guide" to "Team Management Guide" Changed NFL Draft and Scouting strategy to focus on Intangible instead of Development. Added tips to Re-Signing strategy Added Draft Scenario Examples section Added Weekly Procedure section Updated Development Trait Levels section to display information in a table Added and modified many points throughout the guide. Scroll through and check them out! Some changes/additions are noted with UPDATE , but not every single one.

2014 December 19: Added a proper document title, cleaned up subtitles

2014 December 18: This is the first version, it's a little unstructured, but I wanted to get the information out there because there are no guides for Madden 15 yet! Shout out to /r/madden!



My Settings

I thought I'd put these here so you could get an idea of how I play Connected Franchise Mode (CFM):

I play on PS4, I got Ultimate Edition. I played Ultimate Team for a while but really got hooked on CFM.

Started with real updated rosters, Buffalo Bills

Coach Mode with New Coach - Strategist (helps with player development, which this guide focuses heavily on)

10 minute quarters

15 second Minimum Play Clock Time

All Madden with default sliders (although I felt it was more fair and realistic on All Pro, it was a little too easy)

Online CFM against CPU (you want to choose Online CFM if possible, because simulation goes faster. Otherwise, Offline is the same.)

Salary Cap ON

Trade Deadline ON

Injuries and Pre-Existing Injuries OFF (Although this is a little less realistic, I enjoy the feeling of constantly progressing my team forward and always getting better, and not suddenly worse just because of some bad luck. Just my preference though)

Player Progression: every week

Salary Cap Penalties: ON

Scheme: All positions set to "Balanced". (You can customize these to suit your needs/wants, and it will affect the OVR of players in CFM. Call me old fashioned, but Balanced gives me the most familiar OVR that I'm used to seeing from older Madden games.)

Playbooks: Offense: SF Defense: 4-3

I usually simulate most regular season games and play all playoff games

I play a pseudo-Offensive-Coordinator role during games: I play all offensive plays and usually Super Sim all defense to Change of Possession.

UPDATE: Coach Firing: OFF (I will choose when I want to give up, thanks... If you have a bad record, you risk being fired at the end of the season, eliminating all your hard work!)

Coach Firing: OFF (I will choose when I want to give up, thanks... If you have a bad record, you risk being fired at the end of the season, eliminating all your hard work!) UPDATE: Game Play Tuning: Yes (Ability to use Sliders)

CPU Settings

Fill Roster: OFF

Re-Sign Players: OFF

Progress Players: OFF

Sign Offseason Free Agents: OFF

Simulate Game Prep Activities: ON (This will allow you to Delegate Game Prep after you've used most of your points, but want to use up the remaining couple).

General Suggestions

AGE IS KING. Always think long term. "How much performance can I get out of this player over the course of his remaining career?" Young players are infinitely more valuable than old players. Youngest possible player in the game is 20, and I start considering players "old" at 30-31, which is about when their stats start degressing. I should note however, that sometimes players don't start degressing until they are older, like 33 or 34. There might be a stat that determines this, but I'm not aware of it.

I have never had a player ask or demand to restructure their contract before it expired, as they did in previous Maddens. Because of this, you almost always want to hold on to players as long as you can and offer long contracts. Just don't commit and get stuck with them over age 31 unless it's on a one-year contract basis.

Your Coach's Retire Influence definitely also affects the age at which players on your team retire. If you "buy" the stat for your coach, the players at that position on your team will stay on your team longer before retiring. However, you probably want to replace a guy who's 30-31 if their OVR starts declining.

Committing to a young player - find or upgrade someone with Superstar development, and sign them to a maximum length contract as soon as possible. You can easily get someone with Superstar to 90+ OVR within their first year if they are starting and you spend your Game Prep on them. My franchise QB was drafted at age 20 with Average development. I immediately committed by making him a starter, upgraded my coach to improve QB Game Prep, got him to Superstar by Week 2 of regular season, used all Game Prep time every week on him, and by the end of the season he was 90+ OVR. He was 99 OVR in his second year and is now 34 in my CFM. You can also just pick a mediocre/bad young player on your team (maybe 70 OVR at 25 years old or something), re-sign him to 6 years on the cheap, and immediately start upgrading them. That way you can get them up to 90+ OVR within a year or two, and then you have 6 years of a really cheap all-star!

Always avoid "Sim To..." options because the CPU will do some really stupid stuff if you let it Sim. Example: sign really expensive free agents, re-sign players that you didn't expect, release players you wanted to keep... (I made this mistake when I chose "Sim to Next Season" or "Sim to Playoffs") I don't think your CPU Settings for turning off CPU Re-Signing or Fill Roster are considered if you "Sim To...", because your team needs to function, and the CPU will do whatever it needs to in order to Sim To the destination.

Free Agents from the menu are always signed to 1-year contracts. Free Agents contracts are negotiated in the offseason.

All rookie contracts (that means every player you draft) get 4-year contracts by default.

You do not need to worry about saving cap room to sign draft picks. That is always reserved (if you look under Salaries, it's called "Rookie Reserve")

The new thing this year is "Confidence" which is temporary stat boosts/nerfs depending on a player's "mood". Personally I have completely ignored this while playing, or at least I don't change how I play. Obviously it's a little unfortunate if your team keeps losing, your players will play a little worse, but it's nothing to dwell on. And you get free boosts if you're doing well! You can see the impact of a player's Confidence by Viewing the Roster. Green up arrows and red down arrows are the indicators for Confidence impact.



Weekly Procedure

This is the general checklist/procedure for most weeks in the season:

Game Prep - Start Game Prep When you don't have enough Hours to progress your focused players, choose Delegate Game Prep and the CPU will use up the rest for you so they aren't wasted. You need Simulate Game Prep Activities ON for this to work

See Game Prep section for details View or ignore Weekly Goal Results. You'll get the points whether you click them to Dismiss, or ignore them. Progress Players - Manually Progress Players Players are sorted by XP, with the most at the top

Press Triangle on any player with Superstar Development. (You can develop stats manually if you desire)

For players without Superstar development or over ~28 years old: wait for a player to have enough XP to purchase the next Development level. Do not spend any XP yet.

See Player Progression section for details Play or simulate this week's game Advance Week

Re-Signing Players

Re-sign starters immediately after preseason (at the start of Week 1 Regular Season). The higher their OVR, the more money they want, and if you know you've already committed to a player, you might as well re-sign them as soon as possible, before they progress during the season. I guess you could just wait to progress them until later in the season, but then you'd be handicapping that player and your team's performance for this season.

You only get ONE CHANCE to offer a player a contract if you wait until the off-season to do it. Re-sign your players during the season!! I believe Week 17 is your last chance before the Offseason.

Salary Cap: Although it's a very basic and rough estimate, the yearly value of someone's contract is approximately how much Cap Room that player will take up each year. More accurately, contracts are back-loaded in Madden 15, which means as a player's contract gets to the later years, they will take up a little more Cap Room. Similarly, they will be a little "cheaper" in their early years. For the most part, I just do rough calculations based on the yearly value.

Contracts: calculate how much they are asking for per year by doing the math (Total requested divided by years). Then you can offer based on that number. For example: If a guy wants $20m/5yr, that means they want $4m/year. So if you only want them for 2 years, you would offer them something that totalled around $8m. This strategy has seemed to prove accurate because I use it in all my negotiations. UPDATE: The above strategy works fine, but I found an easier way to do this, with less math. First, match the contract they desire. Then, increase/decrease the Years to the number of years you would like them to stay. The values will automatically update to keep the same value, but modified for the new year amount automatically.

When offering contracts: as long as you don't offer them an insulting contract, you can keep resubmitting adjusted contracts until they are signed, despite what they say after offering a contract ("I'll get back to you next week"). You actually get your feedback/answer immediately if you go right back into the Re-Sign screen. If they reply "Signed", obviously you're done. If it says "Negotiating", that means your offer was rejected, but he wasn't insulted enough to walk away. This is probably the best result actually, because you know by increasing your offer slightly, you are inching closer to the absolute minimum you can sign that player at. So after a couple offers and "Negotiating", if you arrive at "Signed", you know you got close to the best value from your contract with that player. Keep in mind: a player will switch to "Not Interested" after approximately 6 lowball offers, even if you continue increasing the offer every time. Offer a new contract immediately after seeing "Negotiating", no need to wait until "next week". If it says "Not Interested", you're basically screwed, they will not re-sign with you and will become a Free Agent at the end of the season. You CAN, however, Franchise Tag them and force them to stay by paying them a top-5 salary for their position. You can Franchise Tag a player on the Re-Sign screen by pressing Triangle (see the bottom of the screen) The Franchise Tag option will not be available if you can't afford the Franchise Tag salary for that player (they are expensive!) Not Interested: they will get to this status if you offer them a single offer that's too low and considered what I call "insulting", or if you wait until the Offseason to re-sign, and your only offer is anything less than accepted. Offers that would normally result in "Negotiating", if offered during the offseason, are immediately rejected and they will be Not Interested.



Game Prep

NEVER do anything else in Game Prep except EARN XP .

do anything else in Game Prep except . Try not to spend any Game Prep on a player unless you have already unlocked the Coach Trait for Game Prep Boost for that position. It makes sense to upgrade your coach for this right at the beginning of preseason, when you are deciding which player(s) you're going to commit to.

The best way to use Game Prep is to repeatedly spend "Time" on one or two players each year. Go into Game Prep, choose Start Game Prep, browse to "Develop Promising <POSITION>", and uncheck all the other players except the guy you want to progress. Accept. Then, do it again. You can usually get 3-5 "sessions" with one player in per week, which means you can get someone from Average to Quick development with about 11 sessions (a couple weeks in the season/preseason). This means you can get someone to Superstar within about half a season. Totally worth it, just do it immediately! As I said, you should commit to only a couple players for the whole season. But if done correctly, those positions will be solid for the next 10+ years. Using this method, you can upgrade a certain position from a total scrub rookie to someone respectable (if not amazing) with 10+ years of production ahead of them, assuming you took my advice and got someone started at age 20 or 21. Sometimes the game decides certain positions are not "Promising" and you won't have the option to develop them. This is pretty unfortunate but usually only a couple positions are excluded. I have noticed that the available Game Prep positions are dependent upon the depth chart somehow, but I don't have the details. But I have seen them change after I've changed the depth chart. Unfortunately I still haven't unlocked the secret behind this one. You can also try signing a Free Agent at that position, or Releasing a bad player from a different position which has multiple entries in the "Develop Promising" menu. In the postseason, you can only progress your Kicker or do a Scrimmage. Kind of crappy, since Scrimmage offers garbage XP, but at least your players get pretty good XP from playoff games. Sometimes "Develop Promising Center" is available with the normal bonuses we exepct. In this case, take the XP for your C! (or whatever position is being offered).



Player Progression

My Golden rule: Never increase a player's stats unless they have Superstar development. Use all XP to get their Development Trait to Superstar before doing anything else. The only exception to this rule is if your player is ~28 or older. Then it doesn't make sense because they don't have much longer anyway, so you might as well auto progress them and hope they get a little better before they start regressing at ~31.

This means you should NEVER Auto-Progress all players from the Actions menu!! You want to save up for each player until you can get them to Superstar, then you can go into Manually Progress Players, and press Triangle to auto-progress individual players.

Development Trait: This trait has nothing to do with in-game performance. It plays a major role in determining the amount XP the player earns. This includes XP from game performance and from Game Prep as well. It also affects them their whole career, and the trait never degresses, which is why it is crucial to get it to Superstar as soon as possible for any player you are committing to long-term.

Once an individual player is Superstar, you can progress them automatically or by increasing individual stats manually. I switch back and forth depending on how I feel or what I want out of a certain player.

Press R1 to get to Traits while on the manual Progress Player screen, where you can upgrade their Development level.

I recommend checking progression every week

Nearly all starting players get some XP each game. The amount is dependent upon their individual performance in the game and their Development.

If a player reaches their Goals (you can check these on the first tab in CFM under Team Goals), they will get a HUGE XP bonus at the end of the regular season (after week 17). You will definitely notice if you're having any success in the season. I don't usually track player goals that much; as long as your team is winning, you'll naturally achieve a lot of them.

Development Trait levels

There are 4 levels in the game. The numbers in parentheses below are the values you will see on your Draft Board when you look at your scouted DEV values. The names on the left side of the slash are what they show as in the Progress Players screen, and the ones on the right side of the slash are what they look like when you are Scouting them. Note that there is a "progress bar" of blue blocks on the Game Prep screen when you look at a player. There are only 4 levels of Development, even though there are 5 blue blocks to measure with. The second block is never used; "Slow" is 1 block and then it jumps to 3 blocks for "Normal/Avg".

Development Trait Name -> Slow Normal Quick Superstar Scouted Name Slow Average Fast Star # Blue Blocks 1 3 4 5

How to determine what a player's Development Trait is



Unless I've been wasting a lot of my time, I do not think it's possible to easily see a player's Development trait outside of Scouting, Game Prep, or Player Progression. This makes it hard during the offseason and Preseason Week 1. I wish it was a regular stat you could view in View Roster.

For players on your team, use the Scrimmage Game Prep to "spy" on all your players' Development traits. You can tell using the blue blocks on the right of the screen. Don't actually spend the Game Prep Time on anyone in Scrimmage, just use it to see their Development.

You can also see their Development if you click on a player to do Manual Progression, then click R1.

Old players

If you have a player who is 95+ and is a starter at the end of a season, I would re-sign them to a 1-year contract before Week 17, regardless of their age. Just don't commit to anything more than a 1-year contract if they are over 30.

1-year contract offers ONLY, for anyone over 30, to ensure your'e not stuck in a long contract with an old man whose stats are way down due to regressing

When younger, offer contracts at a length that will make them 31 when the contract expires. Then you can decide if you want to continue re-signing them year by year, or if you want to just let their contract expire and draft someone new. Example: You have a 26 year old who is ready to be re-signed. I would offer him a 5 year contract to get him to 31 when his contract expires. Obviously I am committing to him staying on my team until then. Then I can decide what to do when he's 31. Example: You have a 28 year old who is ready to be re-signed. I would offer him a 3 year contract.

For players who already have long contracts on your team (when you start the Franchise), and are old: I basically just ignore them. Sit them on the bench if their stats start regressing. Wait for them to retire. You can't release them because you'll get cap penalties. You can't trade them away for the same reason.

Free Agents

During the season: You can sign Free Agents, check their Development, and release them for free, for basically an unlimited number of times to try to find someone young who's available with decent or high Development. You can keep releasing them because Free Agents are only for 1 year and never have a Bonus, which is the only thing that can ever give you Cap Penalties.

Free Agents in the Offseason: Usually these are all old guys. Sometimes there are some young players you can target if it's the right time. Anyone ~27 or younger would be a potential prospect. Anyone older is mostly a waste of time; you might as well draft someone in the upcoming draft, and develop them yourself to get an extra 3-4 years out of them. Young, good Free Agents in the offseason also want a ton of money, because they couldn't be afforded by the team they left. I usually skip Free Agents in the offseason to avoid hurting my Salary Cap too much.



Trades

I don't trade players or draft picks.

I accumulate new talent through the draft and by progressing the players I already have. This avoids cap penalty confusion and wasting time trying to get other teams to accept your trade offers

I don't trade my draft picks. I value them because they are the only way to get young players (20-21).

I don't "trade up" in any draft because I know I can upgrade even the worst player to Superstar within one year if I wanted. I'd rather have more (quantity) young players on my team.

NFL Draft

General

Ignore Projected Draft Round.

Focus on Age and Intangible, along with physical characteristics (height/weight).

All players in the draft are aged 20 - 24.

Scouting

Coach Upgrade for Scouting is less important than the Game Prep for the guys you're progressing, but definitely upgrade the Scouting Package when you can. At the end of a season, I believe I have 6300 SP to spend.

Don't scout any draft picks until Offseason Stage 4, the latest possible stage to spend your scouting points. Spend them all at once.

I only scout players who are 20 years old unless there are none available and I really need to fill the position. Then I go for the youngest available at that position. Also consider other positions.. for example, if you need a TE, but the youngest TE is 23, you might find a large WR who is 20 who you can convert to TE before the season starts

UPDATE: I used to scout Development, but now, I only scout Intangible . You only need to scount one "level" of Intangible (cost 25 SP). This will get you the "letter grade", but you don't need "+" or "-" I have found Intangible to be a very accurate indicator of the player's OVR and Development, at a fraction of the Scouting Points cost! I have never seen a single player with an Intangible scouted grade of "A". Intangible "B" players are rare, but you should find some. These are the best players in the draft. I don't think I've seen an Intangible "B" player below about 75 OVR with Normal development. The best one I found was an 85 OVR 20 year old DT with Superstar Development! Intangible "B" players at age 20 or 21 should be drafted immediately, regardless of their projected draft round, or even your team's need. Most players with "B" Intangible have at least Normal Development, if not higher! At a cost of only 25 SP, it's insanely cheap. With all the scouting upgrades to your Coach, you can scout Intangible for nearly every player available in the draft; certainly at least every position that you need to fill (every player available from 3 or 4 positions) Players with "C" Intangible are acceptable. Players with "D" and "F" should be avoided. These guys end up at ~65 OVR or less, with Slow development.

I only scout .

Drafting



The first thing I do when the draft starts is scroll down and click PAUSE DRAFT. This gives you unlimited time to view your draft board and make your selection.

The second thing I do is Advance Draft to Next User Pick.

I sort by Scouted on L2, then sort the list with Square on Intangible. I think you have to click twice to get the best players at the top.

Keep in mind that every player you draft will have a 4-year contract. So there is some level of commitment to each player you draft.

If all other things equal or unknown, draft by Age (youngest available) and physical characteristics (height/weight).

AGE IS KING! You can easily get them to Superstar within half a season, so don't waste 3.5 years of their career by drafting a 24 year old! That being said, there is SOME consideration between your team's needs, Age, and Inangible. For example, players with "B" development are going to be great immediately. You need to decide if you can afford to spend the Game Prep XP on a 21 year old player if their Intangible is worse than someone who is 24. See the section below for examples.



Draft Scenario Examples

Assume these examples are between two players at the same position. Hopefully these scenarios and descriptions will help you make decisions in your drafts.