My name is Cedric Carty and I am a designer on Madden 09. I am writing this blog to give you an insight into what went into tuning the game to produce realistic statistics.

I know that one the top issues with the hardcore Madden fans has been the stats that the simulation engine generates. I was tasked to tune the stats engine on this year's product, let me tell you it was no easy task. I looked back at stats from the past 10 NFL seasons to get an idea of what looked good in the NFL. I then started work on tuning our stats engine; this involved linking the game to our tuning tool (done by a programmer). Once this was done, I simulated through multiple seasons and checked our numbers against what I had seen on the NFL's website.

I would then get back the programmer and tell them what control I needed in the tuning tool to make our stats look better. An example of this was when I realized that our starting running backs were getting too many carries and accumulating too much of the rushing statistics. I used the tuning tool to scale back the chance that the starting running back would be used on a rushing attempt and increased the chances that the second string running back would get more touches. Doing this reduced the top end rushing attempts from 400 or more to a realistic value.