Different difficulty same franchise

I made a franchise last week for my friends and i to all play in. We wanted to fantasy draft our teams and play every week against the AI and have a slower paced full season. I made the league, set it to all madden comp, and one friend and i were struggling against the cpu, while my other friend that was brand new to madden went 11-0. Looking back at the clips, he was on arcade somehow. Even though in all of my clips and my other friends clips, it is on comp (can be seen in top right corner while in game). I couldnt find anything online about this, so we decided to just restart the league because one friend had such an unfair advantage, and I even had someone else create the league this time to make sure it wasnt some glitch in my account or something. Then, of course, this brand new league we all draft, and then A DIFFERENT one of my friends is playing on sim in week one while everyone else is on comp. It makes the game unplayable as we cant even be in a franchise together without EA randomly selecting someone to have a free W every game of the season.