Madden 21: The design of Zone Drops appears to be broken.
June 27, 2020 3:29PM
edited June 2020
The new coaching adjustments for Zone Drops will be most welcomed in Madden 21.
But there's one thing that really bothers me about the description of this new feature. Judging by the early screen shots, both sides of the defense will play the field at the same depth.
This seems like it would be extremely easy to read if you just focus on the flat players, and if one side gets deep in coverage, you should almost always have a quick option to throw short on the same or opposite side of the field. In other words, the defense will have a tell that can be exploited on every play.
In order to prevent this from happening, you must design the coaching adjustments for zone drops to apply to two separate halves of the field, allowing the defensive zone drops to be different on the strong-side and weak-side of the field. This will create a far more challenging read for the offensive player and stop people from using the defensive reaction on one side of the field to make the read for a flooded zone on the other side of the field (which would defeat the intended reason of having the new zone drop mechanics in the first place).
But there's one thing that really bothers me about the description of this new feature. Judging by the early screen shots, both sides of the defense will play the field at the same depth.
This seems like it would be extremely easy to read if you just focus on the flat players, and if one side gets deep in coverage, you should almost always have a quick option to throw short on the same or opposite side of the field. In other words, the defense will have a tell that can be exploited on every play.
In order to prevent this from happening, you must design the coaching adjustments for zone drops to apply to two separate halves of the field, allowing the defensive zone drops to be different on the strong-side and weak-side of the field. This will create a far more challenging read for the offensive player and stop people from using the defensive reaction on one side of the field to make the read for a flooded zone on the other side of the field (which would defeat the intended reason of having the new zone drop mechanics in the first place).
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It depends on what you're trying to stop. Unfortunately the game has all kinds of dumb routes that break the stock coverage. The AI isn't smart enough to adjust, so you have to get the drops just right for the specific routes you're trying to cover with the AI.
The best advice I can give (and this is not easy to do) is start by dropping either your flat or curl zones to 30 yards. That will at the very least keep everything in front of you. Then as the offense throws underneath those zones you can adjust down. That's what I see most people doing online, starting way back and then gradually bringing the zones down as the game continues.
So yeas, 30 yards at first, then bring them down as you feel more comfortable. Ideally you'd have a combination of 30 - 25 (Curl - Flat) in a three deep zone. And then as you watch what the offense is doing, move them down to 25 - 20, or maybe 25 - 15, again depending on what the offense is doing.
I hope this helps.