You'll need to run more nickel and dime on these newer ea football games. As the user, you don't get much margin for error on the highest difficulty. The ai tackling will take some getting used to if you haven't played Madden on the current gen. You need to really try to stop runs before they get started. So know the opponents strengths. Use run blitzes in obvious running situations. It is a Madden reskin, they just increased the players speed /speed of the action. That means in the 4th quarter the CPU gets extremely difficult because Madden games don't allow blowouts unless you're lucky 1 or 2 times. But the CPU breaking tackles and making last second cuts is just what the game does on the highest difficulty to keep the scores close.