I wish I could muster the passion for one of my EA rants.
The game has seen some improvements. The tackling engine is some of the best work EA has done. However, the pretty paint job doesn't hide some glaring holes under the hood.
The online coding is asinine. Year after year of the exact same P2P connections and they still can't hold a connection.
The defensive engine is full of gimmicks. Once you really look at how the players are reacting you can easily tell it's just gimmicks instead of solid AI. In some cases, the DBs will even ghost thru the WRs to make plays. The DBs turning as soon as the ball is thrown is just another gimmick. It's apparent that they just can't find a legitimate solution to balancing the offense and defense to make the game play realistic.
What makes it worse for all of us that enjoy online play is that the online part of the game seems to be dying. I counted 40 people in the lobbies the other day. That isn't encouraging EA to put a lot into the online stuff. Which is obvious by the lack of a patch to fix the connection problems.