Breaking Madden: Matt Stafford, as coached by the Internet

This week in Breaking Madden, we're playing as the Detroit Lions offense. Well, you are, actually. Y'all told me which buttons to push, and when to push them. This is all your fault.

I let y'all play Madden this week. I pretty much handed you the controller. I asked you to fill out a form that asked you:

1. which passing play to call for Matt Stafford
2. which receiver to throw to
3. whether to throw a lob or a bullet
4. how long to hold the ball in the pocket before throwing

And then you went and made this happen.

Poor Matthew. I chose him as the subject of this week's Breaking Madden not to beat him up, but because I thought it would be nice. His Lions just suffered a 14-6 loss to the Cardinals in which he had trouble getting much of anything going on offense. At 7-3, Detroit finally has a healthy Calvin Johnson and a good shot of winning its first-ever NFC North title. They're a good team and Matt Stafford is a fun quarterback. I thought it would be fun.

It was, in its own erratic, unpredictable, and fundamentally stupid way. This is a stupid episode:

Music: "Go Deep" by Janet Jackson

THE SETUP.

As the Lions, we'll be playing their Week 12 opponents, the New England Patriots. Stafford will have Calvin Johnson, Golden Tate, and the rest of his receiving corps at full strength, but their ratings have not been altered in any way. I'm also leaving the Patriots' secondary untouched.

While playing, I'll be keeping a "player lock" on Stafford, meaning he's the only player we'll be controlling. So if, say, Calvin Johnson somehow manages to catch one of our random throws, he'll then be at liberty to go and do Calvin Johnson Things.

The thing is, I'm allowing y'all to keep Stafford standing still in the pocket for as long as 10 seconds. If he's to have any chance of staying on his feet, I needed to take a wrecking ball to the offensive and defensive lines, then rebuild them from scratch. So that's what I did.

Eleven horrible New England defensive linemen, and six monstrous blockers for Detroit. As always, I found them on Twitter. Since this figures to be a completely ungraceful exercise, I asked people to tell me about the most awkward moments of their lives. Among those who find themselves in Breaking Madden this week:

- The man who yelled at a woman about using the wrong door, then realized she was Maya Angelou
- The kid who got his first driver's license, went to his car, and sat alone in his back seat out of habit
- The guy who had one line as Boy 3 in a production of Macbeth, forgot it, and forced Macbeth to slaughter him without context

And many more. Dang, these were so good and bad. For more:

Breaking Madden: Roster Cuts

Heading into this game, I don't know what to expect. I think the roster editing was completely necessary if we want any shot at winning this thing, but I'm not giving us any more cheats. The difficulty is set on All-Pro, the second-toughest, and the one that I figure is just about closest to the real thing. The opposing quarterback is Tom Brady, so we ought to be prepared to blindly put up at least 30 points.

This isn't our first crowdsourced game, of course. Last week, I handed y'all the keys to Marshawn Lynch. To my outright shock and delight, we somehow won, 76-32.

Throwing the ball without seeing the screen, though, feels so much more dangerous. Madden will usually give a player a couple freebies at the outset, but throw enough bad balls and the game will punish us. Darrelle Revis is out there, and could probably destroy us all by himself.

Get ready. Well, get ready in the past, three days ago, when you filled out your form. But even then, I guess you couldn't be ready since you had no information about what was going on in the game. So uh, stay unready but keep going anyway.

THE GAME.

One more thing: I also required y'all to provide a statement justifying your decision, in as many words as seconds you gave Stafford. For example, if you demanded that Stafford stay in the pocket for seven seconds, you had to justify yourself in seven words.

Second play of the game. You requested that Matt hang back for nine seconds and bomb a Hail Mary:

I've been praying a lot of Hail Marys lately.

Well, all right.

HOLY SHIT. Right away, we have a 68-yard touchdown.

★ ★ ★

Play: Slants (pistol formation)
Hold ball for: 10 seconds.
Pass to: Y.

He is not open yet. Nope. Not yet. Okay now.

This ended up being an incompletion, but Matt certainly had all the time in the world. It helps that No. 4 shakes his mime-blocker only to run the wrong way.

When you yank a pass rusher's Awareness and Pursuit ratings to zero, these are the sorts of things you see. They'll turn around eventually, but they make these giant circuitous loops on their way to the quarterback, as though they're little tugboats trying to reverse course.

★ ★ ★

Play: Hail Mary.
Hold ball for: 6 seconds.
Pass to: RB.

Gotta go deep gotta go deep

That's our fullback! Our Twitter fullback, Mr. Fox! He wasn't supposed to do anything but post up near the line of scrimmage, but apparently he got bored, streaked downfield, and called for the ball. Since you randomly chose the RB button on this play, it was his lucky day.

★ ★ ★

Play: Hail Mary.
Hold ball for: 7 seconds.
Pass to: X.

Matt Stafford loves to throw deep. buttz

Y'all look out. You run up on Reggie Bush, he'll sit on you like a mother hen. And, uh, play an invisible Casio.

The Patriots' pass rushers had pretty low odds of breaking through the line in a timely manner, but once in a while, they'd find a way through and bring Stafford down within four or five seconds. Speaking of which: next slide.

★ ★ ★

Play: Verts drag (singleback).
Hold ball for: 10 seconds.
Pass to: X.

You gotta take time to let the play develop, mang.

Charles Babbage was a 19th-century English inventor whose body of work completely fascinates me. He tried to build a machine that could perform algebra in the year 1822. It was called the "difference engine," and just looking at it gives me a headache: there's such an enormous array of moving parts that it could only come from a superhuman grade of genius.

Back then, of course, the idea of a computer was completely foreign to people. Babbage said that on multiple occasions, people asked him, "if you accidentally put the wrong numbers into the machine, will the right numbers still come out?" You and I, living in the age that we do, know that this is a completely ridiculous question, but I think it's easy to take for granted that computer logic is not naturally intuitive to human beings. It's a learned concept, and until we're familiar with it, it's just magic.

I was reminded of this when I shouted at No. 4, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING? YOU ASSHOLE!" Madden is a machine of rules and instructions, but in moments like this one, I can forget that my Xbox isn't a box full of little gnomes banging their mallets and working the pulleys. It's not a human, it's just dumb like one.

★ ★ ★

Play: Mesh (strong).
Hold ball for: 3 seconds.
Pass to: X.

fun sports play

Half the time, I just wanted to play as Calvin Johnson. Sending Megatron out there against a team like this one -- especially if the defensive tackles hang back to play zone -- is like ripping a dirt bike through a go-kart track. The Patriots should not have played zone here. I don't know what they should have played. Not zone, though.

★ ★ ★

Play: Lions comebacks (singleback).
Hold ball for: 1 second.
Pass to: RB.

well,

This is one of the dumbest plays I've ever seen. The button you pressed was RB, which stands for both "running back" and "Reggie Bush." That coincidence, in and of itself, is dumb.

Due to the nature of this play, throwing to RB wasn't an available option right away. I still wanted to do my best to fulfill your request, so I just mashed RB over and over until something happened. After a couple seconds, the game decided to process it as a lateral.

A lateral to which player? Who knows? Surely not the offensive lineman right next to him, since he isn't an eligible receiver. What we've got here is Matt Stafford spiking the ball off a New England player's ass like he's priming a bazooka rocket. And then, magically, it caroms upfield into the hands of Reggie Bush, who I was trying to throw it to all along.

Lordy, that was stupid. Let's see how the rest of the play turned out.

A TOUCHDOWN? Matt Stafford threw a touchdown pass by throwing the ball at his opponent's ass?

This was when I started to realize that this game was winnable. It was just stupid enough to be winnable.

THE RESULTS.

Good job, y'all. Win or lose, this was your game. You did all of this:

Music: "Five Seconds" by Twin Shadow

Click here for many more adventures in Breaking Madden.