The main thing holding this game back from being great

This right here is the absolute biggest problem with Madden. These are the top 12 players currently and the number of unique plays they run.  These numbers should be double digits for the game to actually involve skill, intelligence, and real strategy.  Any animation based game takes skill out of a game and puts luck into the outcome. However, spamming or utilizing less than a handful of unique plays makes the game more mindless, monotonous and unrealistic. 

This is objective data that the game has very poor Ai and cpu intelligence. The game caters to abusing poorly designed game mechanics rather than football strategy and using your brain. Until this game makes it so there is no way to run one formation and win (as in real life) it will never be a great game