Quote Originally Posted by rhombic21 View Post
To those of you who have experience playing online, in either dynasties or in ranked games, what is the probability that user v. user games are going to have a non-trivial amount of defense? Particularly with the issues regarding zone coverage that G already hit on, I'm just wondering how realistic it's going to be to slow down another user's passing game (especially if they are balanced enough to run it if you completely over commit to the pass).
I think you will have a decent amount of success at stopping someone who is pass heavy in both man and zone coverages. They'll still be able to make plenty of completions but you're not completely helpless on pass defense either. The tricky part though will be what you touched on, if they're balanced enough, they'll be able to catch you off guard. It's not the same chess match that we see on Saturdays but it's similar to that in that you'll have to do a good job of playcalling. Probably the biggest issue I saw though is while playing against the CPU, they could call a play with 4 go-routes and if I didn't get pressure on the QB in time, the receivers could cut off their routes and run back to the QB and there would be a pretty big opening between the hook zones and the deep zones. This mostly was when I was using the Dime 326 Cover 3. Since I was only rushing 3, the QB often had plenty of time but not to say always.
Quote Originally Posted by rhombic21 View Post
Also, what do you perceive to be the likely effectiveness of scramble oriented cheese this year?
I haven't played randoms online in quite some time so I honestly don't know how it's been the past few years (most of my user games have scrambling ruled out). As well, I haven't played anyone online yet other than JB and neither of us used the scrambling tactic. I want to say that it will be better and worse. For one, the gameplanning tactic of telling your defenders to break zone coverage in order to attack a scrambling QB could be helpful, but it could also kill you if they act like they're scrambling and then just dump it to the guy that was just left open.

I'll try to play some randoms online this weekend (assuming others have the game and are on) and see what I can determine in both of these areas.