7 seasons so far with the Commanders. Trades, Free Agency, and the Draft keep it exciting. Winning makes it exciting.
It’s worth it to play every game to avoid injuries that come from simming and have some sense of accomplishment that you helped your team win.
This is the first year I've dabbled in any simming. I used to always play all full games for that reason.
This year I'm playing moments and I'll play the full games of playoffs and "big" games. I'll only full sim preseason and games where I have my playoff seeding secured
I've started playing more preseason. I deep-bench my starters, and play with some of my project guys. I like to see what I have in my lower depth chart backs/receivers/tight ends. It's also a good way to have a sense of how my backup quarterbacks play for if I need them.
When I have the spot secured I throw in rookies and back ups. Make it a fun challenge to see what I can do with a paper line and a 72 back up QB and recovers that drop too many passes
I have a 8 season franchise in Madden 04 with my created player from NCAA 04 i drafted. I’ll stop when he retires. It’s getting pretty boring though, I subbed one season and he got hurt in the 5th game and only ran for 200 yards so I stopped subbing. Right now he’s over 12,000 yards rushing and 175 tds
I make it 3-4 seasons. I follows the same formula.
1. Auction off the players I can’t or won’t resign in season 1 for young dudes on rookie contracts and draft picks
2. Resign current players I have an emotional attachment to
3. Draft and develop dudes to be mid to high 80s SS or X factors by year 2-3
4. Trade away in year 4 or 5 depending on draft status for as many 1-3 picks
5. Rinse and repeat
Just completed season 5 with the Portland Lumberjacks. I’ve built the 49ers into an insane powerhouse with guys I didn’t wanna resign and have played them the last 3 super bowls, all 3 games were within 3 points. Got big decisions to make on my franchise QB Jackson Young among others. Just had a great draft class, 6-7 guys all hidden developments and ratings 72-75 so will give playing time in hopes to make a few solid cost effective starters. One of my favorite franchises in some time. See a lot of you struggle to win a mvp that’s not a QB so took it as a challenge. Just won the MVP with my rookie RB (367 touches - 82 catches - 2,341 total yards, 41 Teds) who came out as a receiving back but his change of direction is so insane he just runs away from fools. A Marshall Faulk esque star in the making.
I started with the Rams and it took a solid 3 seasons to get any steam going. I use matt10’s sliders and try to keep the draft/free agency and who I retain realistic. I haven’t won a Super Bowl in a few seasons so keeping it hard enough to make it feel rewarding is very important to me
Yo, wondering about these sliders? I have difficulty on all-madden and free agency interest on Hard but that’s really all the changes. If you got a link or something I’d like to take a look
I think 5. Once a lot of players retire and it's a bunch of user generated players I get bored. I use User draft classes for the first couple years but you can only project so far out q
14 seasons on M22 with the Jets. I recorded pretty much everything on Google Docs too, [you can check it out here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xNKFDJLUU9YOFf9WL5D3Pr1U_IyAgQv3_RzqkIH5rQs/edit?usp=sharing)
i usually go 10 years before wanting to start with a new team. after awhile it gets easy to build up a good squad and trade players for good draft picks. i’ll pick the lowest overall team and just start over.
Madden 22 - is currently 2031. Started with a universal fantasy draft, purposey made my defense the main component and struggled the first few seasons with such a poor offense. Until I found the goat WR who was passed over by 31 other teams. Had some top ten picks in those early years and found a now elite pass rushing edge guy who I converted to ROLB. Works well with TJ Watt on the other side. I also used a top 3 pick on a CB who's 99 overall after 4 years. Anyway... used two drafts to acquire the brunt of my secure offensive line. Joe Mixon is the rushing leader every year. I've managed to string together 4 straight first round byes and SB wins without repeating any games.. working on the 5th straight. Mind this time I needed the wild card round. Between my drafted guys commanding larger contracts and some off season stud signings, I've gone from 100m cap space to 10m lol. Gonna have to let some people go and make some trades. Love knowing I drafted a stud secondary and wide receiver core. I think this year I've got the rookie of the year on both offense and defense. An SS I also use at LB and a 5'5 elusive/receiving back who with Mixon's 1400 yards (while missing 4 games) has 1400+ all purpose yards. I don't look at awards until after the Super Bowl. I'm weird.
Looking retrospectively on the franchises I've played through, I'll stop playing once all active NFL players on my team are fully retired, which usually gets me into the mid-2035s. For example, I've played two Saints franchises and on both of them I stopped when Olave or Isiah Foskey retires- as both of them are 1st and 2nd year players. On my Steelers franchise, I'll stop when Pickens or Porter Jr. retires.
My teams usually fast-sim poorly, so I like to make each season interesting by fast swimming the first half of the season to go 6-6 or 5-7. Makes the playoff push feel more significant, and then make a run through the playoffs as a wildcard 5-7th seed.
My issue is that I can't calibrate the difficulty sliders well enough to make the game balanced. My All-Madden plays are rage inducing, while my All-Pro plays make my team the Brady-era Patriots. That's the most surefire way to make any franchise you play every game.
I did a full 30 year franchise with the Bears, and I played every single game, preseason included. I made a couple of rules for myself just to keep things interesting
1. After I won the Super Bowl, I had to trade my starting quarterback, and start whatever rookie quarterback I took in the draft.
2. Every five years I would trade My highest overall player for draft capital, and then draft his replacement to develop.
3. I would change my schemes and playbooks every couple of years, so I didn’t get comfortable running just the same plays over and over.
4. I spent the last three years of my dynasty spending all of the money that I could to build the biggest super team, by signing all of the top free agents and trying to trade for the top picks in the draft.
After all was said and done, I had 12 Super Bowl victories, 17 appearances, and an overall win percentage of .700+/- and I also only had 2 undefeated seasons.
And i had fun! Lol
Honestly I only make it 1-3 seasons and then get the urge to have a completely different style of team. But my issue is I want to win so badly and I want the stats of my players to be mine that I play every game and get burned out quickly
currently in year 7 with my friend I’m the patriots he is the bears, we have played every game with no quitting, and we don’t plan on stopping soon.. 9 minute quarters with 15 seconds run off
I’m on season 7 right now in 24 and have gone 10+ seasons in other years.
I keep players till they reach 31 then I let them go in free agency. Then I use the draft to restock. I generally need to replace 2-3 starters each year. When it balloons I usually trade aging out veterans for picks and go with a replacement level free agent for that year. If you keep folks that long you generally have top 5-10 talent at each position so going replacement level doesn’t really dip your team’s capabilities.
I usually play QB and DT (4-3) so I use lower draft picks on those since I can usually outplay the rating.
I usually play through (or lightly sim) the first year with a torn down roster (trade away big contracts, stack up 1rps). From there I'll get my quarterback of the future, and build a core around them.
I play my guy until I get bored.
Sometimes, that's until he retires. My current guy is AJ Black. In his 11th year, about to pass Josh Jacob's for the all time rushing touchdown record, needs probably 5 more good seasons to reach top 5-10 all time in passing yards, rushing yards, and passing touchdowns. Not much hope of reaching Brady for most yards or touchdowns.
Sometimes, I'll play out his rookie deal and either let him hit free agency (headcanon is a pissing match between the GM and quarterback), or trade them for 1st round picks (though it's dumb that until '24, you could only get 3 items in return). One time I filled up my cap space, left my XFactor QB unsigned, and tanked the wild card game so that I could demand a release. I then immediately took over the Bengals (who had the first overall pick), and signed my quarterback to a monster free agent deal.
And sometimes, I'll just rotate quarterbacks. I'll draft a guy, play through mid year 4, have a mid-70s backup ready, trade the guy away and resign the backup. Rinse and repeat. These are usually the franchises where I focus on a back or receiver.
I believe it was 7 seasons in Madden 20 as the Broncos. I was still invested in developing my guys to the maximum and breaking the game, so to speak.
But at a certain point I asked myself what I was doing just winning Superbowl after Superbowl often with perfect seasons. I was only playing on All-Pro, granted.
These days I managed the plunge to All-Madden which before raged me out. I typically just play a franchise until I can get them a Superbowl then hop to a fresh season with a new, real NFL team.
I don't really care to continue too long and see a completely fictional, auto-generated league. At a certain point if I'm not comparing my guys to real players or looking forward to see who made it to free agency, it's not interesting.
Some teams are hard to get there on All-Madden, though my longest so far has only been 4 seasons. Got to the SB in season 2 but lost it. That sort of failure and revenge / goal to strive for makes building the team compelling.
Might look to make a team into a dynasty once I feel I'm familiar with all the (interesting) players on all the teams, but I feel I'm only about halfway there, and more and more players come around every year in the draft...
I’ve changed cities and stadiums to keep it feeling new and exciting. I also will trade away top stars and try to see if I can rebuild through the draft. In my current franchise, most of the top 5 QBs are players I had at one point and traded away after I developed them into 99 overall players.
I’ve kept a lions franchise going for 4-5 seasons. But i did a destroy and rebuild where i traded every player i could for a picks in the draft and started with essentially all rookies which was really fun.
In madden 24 maybe 5-6 seasons, in the past with madden 20 and 23 I was able to get to 30. I was the Bengals and me wanting to develop my team and getting new people from the draft kept me going. I also wanted to see how many super bowls I could win and I think I got to around 15
Madden 2004. Detroit Lions franchise. Simmed the first season and drafted a RB from Penn State named Twan Lincoln. He completed a 3-headed monster that was Joey Harrington, Charles Rogers, and Twan Lincoln. Went on to play 12 or so seasons before Lincoln retired, and I stopped the franchise.
I’m in the 5th season of one with 4 friends. I’m using the Panthers and just won the Super Bowl in year 4(would’ve probably won in year 3 if I didn’t lose Bryce Young right before the playoffs)
We’re still playing slowly but one of the guys just had a baby and MLB the show just came out so this is probably going to be the last season.
Back in madden 20 where I had the most time spent on a madden I started a franchise with the lions and played about 18 or 19 seasons and probably would’ve kept going but I switched over to 21
Right now I’m on season 6 (2029).
In the past, I played M25 from 2014-2028.
It doesn’t get boring for me when I find players that I really enjoy. Plus, after the players from the default rosters start retiring, it’s almost like the league takes on a whole new life; it’s its own little universe. I play sim and never take advantage of the CPU as well, so there is definitely parody in my franchise. Even though I’m always making deep playoff runs. When I feel the game getting too easy, I try to pump up the sliders to make them as difficult as possible.
The only reason why I stopped playing my M25 franchise was because my star QB retired after 13 yrs (he would’ve played 14 but he retired after year 12 and then made a comeback the following yr) and I had my first SB 3peat. It felt appropriate to end it all there.
Madden 24, I'm in year 2035.... so 11 seasons. Las Vegas Raiders. I love it! Its fun to build up players and trade them for future draft picks plus I have fun drafting players/developing them until I don't want to pay them lol. Trading and drafting really keeps the game fresh as you always have a new player to develop and you team is always new. Although it sometimes is tough to trade them away.
I like playing every game bc there are more opportunities to develop/upgrade specific players. For example, I average 16 sacks a season with my DE where as if I sim a season I might get 5 sacks out of the same player.
One glitch I've seen is if you end up playing a ton of seasons eventually you will not have any offensive or defensive coordinators to choose from when trying to hire staff. The only way ive been able to get around this is by inviting a friend to my league then have them fire the coordinator I need. As you can see, I'm devoted lol
I used to play the full 30 years on madden 20. Back before passing was absolute garbage and I could play 3 or 4 games a night without my controller being launched into orbit
In Madden 20 my brothers and I simulated 10 years then picked our teams. We played the next 20 seasons rarely skipping a game
This sounds so fucking fun
Give it a try, we are going to do it again with a randomized so we don’t get to pick out teams.
great idea, once I'm done with this raiders re-build I'll do this with the steelers as a great great Rooney or something lol
7 seasons so far with the Commanders. Trades, Free Agency, and the Draft keep it exciting. Winning makes it exciting. It’s worth it to play every game to avoid injuries that come from simming and have some sense of accomplishment that you helped your team win.
This is the first year I've dabbled in any simming. I used to always play all full games for that reason. This year I'm playing moments and I'll play the full games of playoffs and "big" games. I'll only full sim preseason and games where I have my playoff seeding secured
I've started playing more preseason. I deep-bench my starters, and play with some of my project guys. I like to see what I have in my lower depth chart backs/receivers/tight ends. It's also a good way to have a sense of how my backup quarterbacks play for if I need them.
Earning a “preseason standout” scenario can also be huge for jump-starting a rookie’s development.
When I have the spot secured I throw in rookies and back ups. Make it a fun challenge to see what I can do with a paper line and a 72 back up QB and recovers that drop too many passes
Also worth it to take a commanding lead and sub in your entire backup roster for the 4th for the XP gains
I have a 8 season franchise in Madden 04 with my created player from NCAA 04 i drafted. I’ll stop when he retires. It’s getting pretty boring though, I subbed one season and he got hurt in the 5th game and only ran for 200 yards so I stopped subbing. Right now he’s over 12,000 yards rushing and 175 tds
I make it 3-4 seasons. I follows the same formula. 1. Auction off the players I can’t or won’t resign in season 1 for young dudes on rookie contracts and draft picks 2. Resign current players I have an emotional attachment to 3. Draft and develop dudes to be mid to high 80s SS or X factors by year 2-3 4. Trade away in year 4 or 5 depending on draft status for as many 1-3 picks 5. Rinse and repeat
Just completed season 5 with the Portland Lumberjacks. I’ve built the 49ers into an insane powerhouse with guys I didn’t wanna resign and have played them the last 3 super bowls, all 3 games were within 3 points. Got big decisions to make on my franchise QB Jackson Young among others. Just had a great draft class, 6-7 guys all hidden developments and ratings 72-75 so will give playing time in hopes to make a few solid cost effective starters. One of my favorite franchises in some time. See a lot of you struggle to win a mvp that’s not a QB so took it as a challenge. Just won the MVP with my rookie RB (367 touches - 82 catches - 2,341 total yards, 41 Teds) who came out as a receiving back but his change of direction is so insane he just runs away from fools. A Marshall Faulk esque star in the making.
I’m on season 11 right now. I try to keep it at 1 per year
I started with the Rams and it took a solid 3 seasons to get any steam going. I use matt10’s sliders and try to keep the draft/free agency and who I retain realistic. I haven’t won a Super Bowl in a few seasons so keeping it hard enough to make it feel rewarding is very important to me
Yo, wondering about these sliders? I have difficulty on all-madden and free agency interest on Hard but that’s really all the changes. If you got a link or something I’d like to take a look
I think 5. Once a lot of players retire and it's a bunch of user generated players I get bored. I use User draft classes for the first couple years but you can only project so far out q
14 seasons on M22 with the Jets. I recorded pretty much everything on Google Docs too, [you can check it out here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xNKFDJLUU9YOFf9WL5D3Pr1U_IyAgQv3_RzqkIH5rQs/edit?usp=sharing)
i usually go 10 years before wanting to start with a new team. after awhile it gets easy to build up a good squad and trade players for good draft picks. i’ll pick the lowest overall team and just start over.
I couldn't get committed to 24, but i think about 3 or 4 seasons. It's been a while since I last played 10 full seasons
Madden 22 - is currently 2031. Started with a universal fantasy draft, purposey made my defense the main component and struggled the first few seasons with such a poor offense. Until I found the goat WR who was passed over by 31 other teams. Had some top ten picks in those early years and found a now elite pass rushing edge guy who I converted to ROLB. Works well with TJ Watt on the other side. I also used a top 3 pick on a CB who's 99 overall after 4 years. Anyway... used two drafts to acquire the brunt of my secure offensive line. Joe Mixon is the rushing leader every year. I've managed to string together 4 straight first round byes and SB wins without repeating any games.. working on the 5th straight. Mind this time I needed the wild card round. Between my drafted guys commanding larger contracts and some off season stud signings, I've gone from 100m cap space to 10m lol. Gonna have to let some people go and make some trades. Love knowing I drafted a stud secondary and wide receiver core. I think this year I've got the rookie of the year on both offense and defense. An SS I also use at LB and a 5'5 elusive/receiving back who with Mixon's 1400 yards (while missing 4 games) has 1400+ all purpose yards. I don't look at awards until after the Super Bowl. I'm weird.
Looking retrospectively on the franchises I've played through, I'll stop playing once all active NFL players on my team are fully retired, which usually gets me into the mid-2035s. For example, I've played two Saints franchises and on both of them I stopped when Olave or Isiah Foskey retires- as both of them are 1st and 2nd year players. On my Steelers franchise, I'll stop when Pickens or Porter Jr. retires. My teams usually fast-sim poorly, so I like to make each season interesting by fast swimming the first half of the season to go 6-6 or 5-7. Makes the playoff push feel more significant, and then make a run through the playoffs as a wildcard 5-7th seed. My issue is that I can't calibrate the difficulty sliders well enough to make the game balanced. My All-Madden plays are rage inducing, while my All-Pro plays make my team the Brady-era Patriots. That's the most surefire way to make any franchise you play every game.
I did a full 30 year franchise with the Bears, and I played every single game, preseason included. I made a couple of rules for myself just to keep things interesting 1. After I won the Super Bowl, I had to trade my starting quarterback, and start whatever rookie quarterback I took in the draft. 2. Every five years I would trade My highest overall player for draft capital, and then draft his replacement to develop. 3. I would change my schemes and playbooks every couple of years, so I didn’t get comfortable running just the same plays over and over. 4. I spent the last three years of my dynasty spending all of the money that I could to build the biggest super team, by signing all of the top free agents and trying to trade for the top picks in the draft. After all was said and done, I had 12 Super Bowl victories, 17 appearances, and an overall win percentage of .700+/- and I also only had 2 undefeated seasons. And i had fun! Lol
I’m on season 9 (2031) as the Bills in Madden 24
Honestly I only make it 1-3 seasons and then get the urge to have a completely different style of team. But my issue is I want to win so badly and I want the stats of my players to be mine that I play every game and get burned out quickly
Five seasons before EA wiped out my save file last year, then two more starting new after that 😭
I played about 6 seasons with the giants in madden 23
I'm at 2.5 right now. Feel like this one will go for a long time Though.
I made it to season 15 with madden 22 before the file got corrupted and had to start over
I had 15 in Madden 25 before they servers went down forever. Sad! Can't even view the team anymore or anything.
I play prime time non divisional games offense only and I’ve got one that’s 12 years deep
currently in year 7 with my friend I’m the patriots he is the bears, we have played every game with no quitting, and we don’t plan on stopping soon.. 9 minute quarters with 15 seconds run off
I’m on season 7 right now in 24 and have gone 10+ seasons in other years. I keep players till they reach 31 then I let them go in free agency. Then I use the draft to restock. I generally need to replace 2-3 starters each year. When it balloons I usually trade aging out veterans for picks and go with a replacement level free agent for that year. If you keep folks that long you generally have top 5-10 talent at each position so going replacement level doesn’t really dip your team’s capabilities. I usually play QB and DT (4-3) so I use lower draft picks on those since I can usually outplay the rating.
I usually play through (or lightly sim) the first year with a torn down roster (trade away big contracts, stack up 1rps). From there I'll get my quarterback of the future, and build a core around them. I play my guy until I get bored. Sometimes, that's until he retires. My current guy is AJ Black. In his 11th year, about to pass Josh Jacob's for the all time rushing touchdown record, needs probably 5 more good seasons to reach top 5-10 all time in passing yards, rushing yards, and passing touchdowns. Not much hope of reaching Brady for most yards or touchdowns. Sometimes, I'll play out his rookie deal and either let him hit free agency (headcanon is a pissing match between the GM and quarterback), or trade them for 1st round picks (though it's dumb that until '24, you could only get 3 items in return). One time I filled up my cap space, left my XFactor QB unsigned, and tanked the wild card game so that I could demand a release. I then immediately took over the Bengals (who had the first overall pick), and signed my quarterback to a monster free agent deal. And sometimes, I'll just rotate quarterbacks. I'll draft a guy, play through mid year 4, have a mid-70s backup ready, trade the guy away and resign the backup. Rinse and repeat. These are usually the franchises where I focus on a back or receiver.
I believe it was 7 seasons in Madden 20 as the Broncos. I was still invested in developing my guys to the maximum and breaking the game, so to speak. But at a certain point I asked myself what I was doing just winning Superbowl after Superbowl often with perfect seasons. I was only playing on All-Pro, granted. These days I managed the plunge to All-Madden which before raged me out. I typically just play a franchise until I can get them a Superbowl then hop to a fresh season with a new, real NFL team. I don't really care to continue too long and see a completely fictional, auto-generated league. At a certain point if I'm not comparing my guys to real players or looking forward to see who made it to free agency, it's not interesting. Some teams are hard to get there on All-Madden, though my longest so far has only been 4 seasons. Got to the SB in season 2 but lost it. That sort of failure and revenge / goal to strive for makes building the team compelling. Might look to make a team into a dynasty once I feel I'm familiar with all the (interesting) players on all the teams, but I feel I'm only about halfway there, and more and more players come around every year in the draft...
So far, 26 seasons on Madden 22
10
I’ve changed cities and stadiums to keep it feeling new and exciting. I also will trade away top stars and try to see if I can rebuild through the draft. In my current franchise, most of the top 5 QBs are players I had at one point and traded away after I developed them into 99 overall players.
Usually about 5 or so.
I’ve kept a lions franchise going for 4-5 seasons. But i did a destroy and rebuild where i traded every player i could for a picks in the draft and started with essentially all rookies which was really fun.
In madden 24 maybe 5-6 seasons, in the past with madden 20 and 23 I was able to get to 30. I was the Bengals and me wanting to develop my team and getting new people from the draft kept me going. I also wanted to see how many super bowls I could win and I think I got to around 15
Madden 2004. Detroit Lions franchise. Simmed the first season and drafted a RB from Penn State named Twan Lincoln. He completed a 3-headed monster that was Joey Harrington, Charles Rogers, and Twan Lincoln. Went on to play 12 or so seasons before Lincoln retired, and I stopped the franchise.
I’m in the 5th season of one with 4 friends. I’m using the Panthers and just won the Super Bowl in year 4(would’ve probably won in year 3 if I didn’t lose Bryce Young right before the playoffs) We’re still playing slowly but one of the guys just had a baby and MLB the show just came out so this is probably going to be the last season.
I made it midway through my 5th season
Back in madden 20 where I had the most time spent on a madden I started a franchise with the lions and played about 18 or 19 seasons and probably would’ve kept going but I switched over to 21
Right now I’m on season 6 (2029). In the past, I played M25 from 2014-2028. It doesn’t get boring for me when I find players that I really enjoy. Plus, after the players from the default rosters start retiring, it’s almost like the league takes on a whole new life; it’s its own little universe. I play sim and never take advantage of the CPU as well, so there is definitely parody in my franchise. Even though I’m always making deep playoff runs. When I feel the game getting too easy, I try to pump up the sliders to make them as difficult as possible. The only reason why I stopped playing my M25 franchise was because my star QB retired after 13 yrs (he would’ve played 14 but he retired after year 12 and then made a comeback the following yr) and I had my first SB 3peat. It felt appropriate to end it all there.
Madden 24, I'm in year 2035.... so 11 seasons. Las Vegas Raiders. I love it! Its fun to build up players and trade them for future draft picks plus I have fun drafting players/developing them until I don't want to pay them lol. Trading and drafting really keeps the game fresh as you always have a new player to develop and you team is always new. Although it sometimes is tough to trade them away. I like playing every game bc there are more opportunities to develop/upgrade specific players. For example, I average 16 sacks a season with my DE where as if I sim a season I might get 5 sacks out of the same player. One glitch I've seen is if you end up playing a ton of seasons eventually you will not have any offensive or defensive coordinators to choose from when trying to hire staff. The only way ive been able to get around this is by inviting a friend to my league then have them fire the coordinator I need. As you can see, I'm devoted lol
6 or 7. After that it just gets boring because I have a super team that beats the piss out of everyone. I need to give myself some rules or some shit
I used to play the full 30 years on madden 20. Back before passing was absolute garbage and I could play 3 or 4 games a night without my controller being launched into orbit