Fivethirtyeight Sports had a great article today on how the Madden ratings are made and the “secret sauce” behind Madden Czar Donny Moore’s player ratings.
There are roughly 2,600 players in today’s NFL and every single one of their digital counterparts is represented in EA’s annual Madden game. Of those players, each one has an overall rating compiled of more than 40 numerical grades ranging from passing accuracy to kick power.
That seems like a monumental task and one would think that managing a database of more than 100,000 player attributes would take a football sized team of employees to complete.
“Quarterback decision-making is the most difficult thing to simulate,” Moore said.
When it comes to Madden though, that is not the case. EA does not rely on a 53 man roster of people to manage their player ratings. For the most part they solely let one man decide how a player receives his virtual attributes best reflecting his play on the actual field.
That man is Donny Moore and with that power comes great responsibility. He is in charge of all player ratings from launch day, all the way until the last roster update after the Super Bowl. Each week there can be upwards of 600 players who see their skills re-evaluated based on their most recent performance on the real gridiron.
Moore’s job has evolved from a behind the scenes analytical guru to a “celebrity” in recent years. Twitter has become an outlet for players and fans to voice their appreciation or dismay for a certain players attribute rating. He is praised by players when giving them a favorable rating but even more so ridiculed when giving a player a rating that the player doesn’t agree with. He takes it all in stride and given his methodical and analytical approach, one has to appreciate how accurately player ratings reflect their real life counterparts.
To get a closer look at how exactly player ratings in Madden are determined and for the full story, click on the link above. What do you guys think? How is Donny doing in your eyes? Biggest player rating snub in Madden 15? Most overrated player?
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