The Best Defensive Macros In Madden 27! transcript

Having the right defensive macros is one of the biggest things you can do in Madden 27 to get more stops. It can take a defense that looks like this and turn it into a defense that looks like this. So, in this video, I'm going to break down my six favorite defensive macros. I'm going to tell you why they work and how you can set them up so you can start using them later today to win more games. Now, let's talk about one of the best ways that you can get pressure in Madden 27 and I'm going to show you how you can do it in just two clicks.

It's actually really cool. So, it's really no secret that there's a stunt called Texas Fourman that's really good. Okay. Now, the way you would set up a Texas Fourman is first you always got to make sure you spread your defensive line. That's going to be two clicks. Going to be left on the right stick, then up on the left stick. Okay. Spread that D line. Then, if we want to call the stunt from the line of scrimmage, we're going to go left on the right stick again, right bumper, left on the D-pad, and then select Texas fourman.

This is what this fourman looks like. Don't pay attention to coverage. Just look at my defensive line right here. You'll see my ends are gonna kind of loop and stunt in and they do a really like this thing screams. It's really good against shotgun runs and inside runs in general. Now, here's the deal. I call this a ton. So, I actually have a macro or a custom adjustment set up to do this where if we just tap left bumper at the line of scrimmage, you'll see I have these different custom adjustments.

There's some sneak peeks we're talking about later. Just tap A or X. Bang. Now, check this out. We already spread. We already had the Texas fourman selected and now we're able to go. Keep in mind the Texas foreman does not come in literally every single time. Uh but it is very very good. And what we want to do to make it even better, by the way, is make sure we have fast defensive tackles and especially our defensive ends.

Acceleration and smaller body models is nice, right? Bigger guys just clog the gaps more. Again though, just left bumper and tap A or X and we're good to go. Everyone just sets up completely. If you want to call any custom adjustment though before you actually break the huddle, you can check this out. I'm going to go to my play call. Whatever it is, hold down the icon and look, I'm able to select and I have a Texas fourman macro already ready to go.

We spread easy there and we'll snap this ball and we should be able to get pretty good pressure. If we get picked up, we'll shed pretty well for the most part. Right there, we do roll out. And you'll notice there is a weakness of text formatting that we'll talk about in a moment. But let me show you how to set this macro up. So to do any kind of custom adjustment, we're going to go into the creation center in the main menu.

Go to custom adjustments, aka macros. Those names are kind of interchangeable. And we're going to be able to select create a macro or in this case, I already have a few. So we'll go to Texas forman. This one's just two simple steps. And all that's going to be we're going to scroll down. Notice we have kind of like a bunch of different options we can select. We're go to defensive line. Choose spread defensive line. Then we're going to go into our stunts and choose that Texas fourman stunt.

Now, when you call a stunt or when you decide to actually make a macro, you'll be able to name it. In this case, I just named mine Texas fourman cuz that's just what it is. But you'll notice I have some different names for different ones we're going to get into. Now, our next macro, aka custom adjustment, sets up a defense where if you've played Madden long enough, you've definitely gotten bagged by this before because I know I have.

This is my press man coverage macro. And you're going to pretty much always want to call this out of any formation that has a cover to man. You could run it from different man coverages, but really cover two man's the one we want here. Cover zero is an option, but you you definitely risk big play potential there. Now, first I'll talk about what this actual setup is, then we'll break down the macro for you. So, the setup is we're going to press our defense.

So, hold left trigger down on the left stick. Then we're gonna align our defense inside. So we're gonna go left on the left stick. Then we're gonna sell out and commit inside, which is left on the right stick. Okay. Basically, what we're doing is we're trying to funnel everything that's going inside. Push them out. Push them out. Push them out. And we're going to take away things like slants, crossers, drag, stuff like that.

Really well. My user is typically going to be as we get a safety right there. Going to be on the linebacker manned up to the halfback. So, usually you see overshack, Christian McCaffrey. I'd be on him. But if I ever want to cheat and be aggressive, I'll hop on a safety, which helps me in run defense, but also allows me to cheat some if I realize that, hey, my guys are either getting beat in the middle, which just can happen still.

It's just the reality of the game, although cover two man is really good. Or, you know, we're able to kind of jump some of these outside breaking routes and things like that. So, I might cheat down here, look for something breaking over the middle, and I'll go down and help. right there. You saw that drag from B got wide open because a little pick happening on the right side. Well, don't worry. I'm able to go jump there.

I'm using up top and I'm able to see that. This is a really good example though of pick plays. See on the right side doing a good job against man coverage. That time though, not as well. Results in a safety cover to man's incredibly tough. Now remember, you can call the macro from the play call screen just by holding down the icon of the play and I go to my press man shade and side coverage. Or we could just tap left bumper and call it from here and we're good to go.

You could also pair this with the Texas formand we talked about earlier. And this is how you can kind of stack macros. I've heard them called stackros before. Kind of neat. To take a look at what this looks like inside of our custom adjustments. So let's go to our press man shade inside. Immediately you're going to see covered shading inside route commit inside. These are called a little bit different than what they're called on the field.

EA kind of changed the name of them this year. I don't know why, but it's inside and inside. And then also, we just want to press our coverage. And so, we'll scroll down. It's going to be right here, our alignment press. Now, if you wanted to do other things like, hey, make sure when you call this, you go into a twoman shell. That's pretty important. So, you could easily turn that shell on right there. Or if you know, hey, I always call this by with a pinch of my defensive line in my specific scheme, or I always run this stunt or something like that, feel free to add those.

But what I gave you is the bare minimum to run this defense that's going to do a great job. Feel free to contain as well if you'd like. And real quick, if you like these macro setups and you want to join thousands of players just like yourself, winning more games. Well, all of these have full defensive setups behind them on my strategy website, simple.gg. Over 5,000 active members right now. You can get 30% off by clicking the link in the description below.

Get access to everything you need to win more games. Go do that. And now back to the video. Now, I love the Texas Fourman stunt, but there is a big issue that can come from it where if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Texas Foreman has my defensive ends looping inside to generate pressure. Right now, what happens there is because they're looping inside, we lose contain pretty easily. Now, the pressure is great, so I mean, he can do a really good job, but you will lose contain.

And against faster quarterbacks, even someone like Trevor Lawrence, they can break the contain and get pretty good yards, broken plays, etc., etc. Very annoying. So, here's actually my favorite solution ever for this. So, we're going to go into 33 single mug. I just think that's the best spot or best formation any of the single mugs for the Texas stunts. And let's call cover three buzz match. Doesn't really matter. And I'm actually gonna spread my defensive line.

Go into my stunts. I'm going to call either a left text twoman or a right text twoman. And the rule of thumb is you want your twoman to be coming from the side opposite of the QB strong hand. So Trevor Lawrence right-handed. He'll be rolling out to the right probably left twoman. Then we contain right bumper, left bumper. Now think about it. We're going to get that crazy pressure off the left edge. At least a high chance of it.

And if I try rolling out to the right, immediately popped. You are going to be giving out giving up potentially the roll out the other way. Here's the thing though. I'm not concerned by that. Why? Because it's just harder for QBs in general to go from here to rolling out the other way and make an actual throw across their body. Not impossible, but it is harder. And this is going to do a good job of generating that pressure that we like so much from the Texases.

And so what we can do here is simply create a left text and a right text twoman stunt. All this is doing is spreading my defensive line, calling the stunt on the side I want and then also containing. Then if you wanted to, if I know it's a pass, I'm I like the pass a lot just because it helps with our sheds quite a bit. And we're able to do a pretty good job. We're not getting crazy pressure right here, but we are getting that twoman, which does do a good job of stopping the run as well.

Now, left text two man and right text two man are obviously two very similar macros that you can create. Let's start scrolling down here and figure out what are we actually doing. Well, first of all, we want to be containing. Left text two man I'm gonna say contain right. Right text two man I'm gonna say contain left. You could just select both on these. Just reason I went like this is because I feel like sometimes contains be weird in the macros.

Don't worry about it. You go left right and then both obviously. Okay. Then from here we want to make sure we're going to spread our defensive line. And we're almost ready to go outside of just calling that stunt. Left text two man is going to get the left text two twoman stunt. Right text two man is going to get that right text two man stunt. And just like that, we're able to generate pressure off either edge or either I guess rather B gap while containing the other outside area, keeping the QB in the pocket and under duress.

So your money is made in the red zone when it comes to getting stops on defense. I'll be honest with you. Like if you can get turnovers in the red zone, you're a beast. But if you can just hold people to three a lot, you're going to at least be in most games, if not winning most games. So we made a macro specifically for the red zone. Really inside the 10. Okay, so let's take a step back. First of all, this can be a very customizable macro specific to how you like to play.

It's going to come with a few rules, though. All right. One, I like to call this from Tampa 2 just because our outside corners are already in cloud flats. If you called it from something else, I would just add into the macro CB1 and CB2 in cloud flats. Okay, so let's go Tampa 2. Then I'm going to select my cover two, red zone, cover two macro. Essentially what this is going to do, we're going to first pinch our defensive line.

We're going to contain. I actually move my safety depth to five just to get them in the box a little bit more, play the run more, and play the seams a little bit better. I then go on aggressive zone, and I make sure our read key for read options is on conservative. Now, this there's no defense that's going to totally stop literally everything. All right, so you as the user need to still be looking around for what's actually happening.

And the biggest area for this because we're in Tampa 2 is going to be the sidelines and especially the corner of the end zones. And so that throw right there is a great example of it. But watch what we can do. I should always be looking for these areas and looking to help take them away with what's called our switch stick. Switch stick is something you could do. We have videos that talk more about this, but simply by usering somebody in a yellow zone, we can then flick the right stick, go different places, and you'll see we're able to do a pretty solid job.

There is one guy I don't love on this play. It's my mid read. Okay, you actually saw right there, he left his area a little bit, which is frustrating because he gave up the uh little curl in the middle of the field. It It's very very annoying. Keep that in mind. Keep in mind that like I'm aware of this. I'm very annoyed by how mids play even on aggressive, but it is kind of the reality of them a little bit and we just have to deal with it some where they will leave their area at times.

But right here, I've just rehooked the guy and he does a good job. So, you can rehook your mid read if you'd like to. Again, it depends a little bit of what play you want to base this out of and what uh your kind of scheme is, right? You may pair this with a, you know, pirate stunt, a tom stunt. You could go Texas fourman here, of course, right? This is the kind of uh well in that case you want to do it like that but you could go Texas fourman if you wanted to add that in.

You have a lot of flexibility here but I love it out of Tampa too because we're going to do a good job in the middle and then we're able to kind of play some other stuff happening here as well especially looking for the corners of the end zone and switch sticking to our flats or our inside quarters and getting out there. That's a huge huge huge deal. We want to have a lot of help in the middle. Make sure they can't hit us with some kind of nonsense like you know they try to throw something like this.

We don't have a player there, but we want to protect the seams, which is where those inside quarters come from, too. Pinching our D line's going to do a great job as well. If you're worried about the run, one thing I'll do is user a high safety. Just get him more involved in the run game, right? Where we come down. Can do a pretty good job there by using a safety. Always a nice little cheat code in the run game. And if you're ever worried about an RPO, I recommend just manning up one of your linebackers to the RPO player.

Simple as that. Tap A or X on the player you're on, then select the receiver you want to man up to. If I thought Y was going to be on an RPO, I'll just man him up. But let's take a look at what this RPO actually looks like. And we'll talk about some of the options that you of course have. So, we go into our red zone C2 custom macro. And this is kind of what we're looking at. Again, I want to be very clear. You have a lot of customization on this because everyone plays red zone a little bit different.

I do love QB contains in the red zone just kind of don't want them rolling out on me and scoring a easy dumb touchdown. Additionally, uh I do want my option read key to be on conservative. I just don't want to get torched by a read option here. It's very annoying when that happens. Same thing with RPO pass. You want it on conservative. Defensive line. We're going to pinch our defensive line. I want to slant my defensive line or point of attack them inside.

Help with inside runs. Stunts. Right now, I'm not running any. But if you had a stunt you wanted to run here, you could. Popular ones are pirates and toms. You could also go what we talked about earlier with a text twoman or a text fourman even if you're feeling kind of frisky. From here you have a lot of different options, right? Uh whether or not you want a covered shell or not, whether or not you want to have specific depth on your CBS and your safeties, for example.

I think safety depth at five is pretty cool in this situation. Just gets them down low, but you don't have to. Quarterback depth at five I have a lot of success with, but could leave it default. You could press them. Really, you know, the balls in your court just how do you want to play? I do think safeties should be pinched here. Just helps protect the seams. And then if we go down more zone drops, I'm not touching right now, but you definitely could.

I like aggressive zone strategy in this situation. Just getting players play more underneath plasters, whatever you'd like it to be on. Uh but if we scroll down here more, uh there's a big one that I want to get to, which is one, if you're not going to call Tampa 2 play, just have your CB1 and CB2 and cloud flats. Okay? Or even a hard flats you could do. And then from there, we're going to want our free safety and our strong safety both in inside quarters.

That's going to get them defending the seam significantly better than a deep halfwood, inside third, anything like that. From there, that's everything that I recommend. You do, again, I keep on saying it because it's important, have a lot of flexibility with this specifically of just how do you want to play in the red zone. So, let's talk about a situation that we find ourselves in quite a bit where it's end of half.

We're not really trying to defend against a Hail Mary, so don't need to be in mainup 3D, but we're okay with on defense giving up the drag route or giving up the check down, whatever that might be. But we want to defend against those deep post, deep in routes, corners, all that stuff. Well, I actually created a macro to do this called conservative D, which really attacks the conservative zone cover strategy setting. But here's kind of the guidelines for running this at a level where we're not just going to get totally cooked.

First and foremost, this is meant to be more of a zone coverage thing. I recommend you run whatever you're normally running. If you're a Tampa two guy, run Tampa two. If you're running cover three, run cover three. Cover six zone. Run that. Right. But from this, I do recommend a few things. One, being a cover two shell just so we get two high safeties up there. They'll play better coverage as a rule of thumb. Less little seam shots that they're able to hit.

Additionally, we want to call this conservative D because we're now going to put our zones on conservative, which will allow them to play back further. This means no uh no zone drops by the way, unless you specifically want to set a zone drop from there. I also like to contain here. Why I like contain being part of this macro? Because a lot of times the biggest plays come from some kind of roll out throw broken play nonsense.

So the easiest thing to do here is just to contain. This is an area where I would be more skeptical on calling something like a Texas stunt because Texas stunts are very easy to roll out on and this is going to do a better job of keep you in the pocket making up the dot and it's hard to dot when all the defenders are dropping back pretty far. If you wanted to go match, you could. And conservative zone coverage strategy does affect that.

But I do think match coverage is risky here because you do run the risk of, hey, you give up a big play, right? Like match coverage could get broken without you realizing it. And you just got to be really set in your rules. If you're running cover two, you are the mid read here. And the midre is responsible for carrying anything vertically. Any kind of vertical shot. We're going to go up. We're go up. We're defending.

Okay, we're good to go. If they want to, they of course can take underneath shot. So like right here, right? They we are open to them throwing this drag right here. Not the end of the world. Gain of 10. That's okay for the situation we're playing against right here. If you were really worried about this, I would just set your zone drops lower on your hooks to five or 10. I wouldn't do that in the macro, but in the coaching adjustments in in game or you might just not be in a spot where you want to do conservative yet.

This will help a lot against potential oneplay touchdowns as well where people hit you deep up the seam, deep up the sidelines, or they just kind of burn your cover three for a big gain. So, it's going to the conservative D. Again, this is another one that we have some flexibility on. If you wanted, you know, if your base defense was always, hey, you show blitz a lot, keep the show blitz. That's totally fine. I'll never recommend you get out of your to your base defense entirely.

But what I will say is I think you really should be containing here. I think your option read key should be conservative. I don't want you getting a read option right on you. The QB pulling it and him taking off for 50 billion yards. Really frustrating. RPO read conservative here as well is a big one. From there, I don't care about ton your defensive line, stunts, anything like that. Do what you feel the best with in those situations, but I do want you to scroll down here.

I recommend I won't put it in the macro, but I recommend a cover two or a cover four shell. Make sure we can't get kind of misaligned by something dumb happening. Just go to the shell from there. Also, I'm not going to put this in the coverage, but pressing your DBs when you're running this would not be very smart. I'd recommend a five yard uh kind of depth right here. All right. Same thing with your safeties. Having that five, they're in deep zones, not the best idea.

Nine or 12. All right. Again, up to you. I want you to have flexibility in the coverages that you run, in the scheme that you run. I'm not going to set any kind of zone drops for you, but I think zone strategy should easily be conservative. Plaster. I want to turn this off because there are potential for big plays to happen when you have plaster on. That's going to be a bit of a like a a matching situation where your zone will drop back, see somebody, the player will break down, he'll try matching and leave his area which could get a bomb behind.

I turn plaster off for this situation. From there, everything else is pretty straightforward except for my checks are all zone it. I don't want to accidentally be in match coverage here unless you don't mind, which in that case, don't do this, right? If you actually run a lot of match, you want to run match in this situation, just turn off the zone it. Don't add this into your macro. But if you are someone who's like, "Yeah, I don't want to actually be a match either." Right?

Do that for me. Okay. From there, that's a conservative D. You set this bad boy up and it will do you wonders in those end of half late game situations where you're okay with the checkdowns, but you got to prevent the big ball. Getting corner routes thrown on you is not fun. No matter who you are, who you're playing, anything like that. It's just super super frustrating and annoying. And even still, you know what else is also annoying? getting things like crossers thrown on you, which I've had numerous crossers thrown on me in my day.

So, I want to give you guys a macro that's going to help against both of these ideas. We'll break it down. I like to do this from the Tampa 2, but you don't have to. This is more of a concept than it is a specific like you have to do it like this. I hope you take the concept away because it's a pretty big deal. So, I'm going to go Tampa 2 right here on defense. And what I want you to do is well, first I'll show you what I have is a Tampa 2 Mabel.

Now, what is a Mabel? Well, in Tampa 2, we're actually going to set zone drops and turn our slot corners into curl flat. So, to do this, I also want you in a nickel or a dime or quarters or something like that set. 425 would work as well where I have now have my zone drop set to where Cloudflat is 25 yards and my curl flat is set to five yards. We'll show this in the macro screen in a moment, but think about it. If Cloud Flat's set to 25 yards, the zone drop, and Curl Flat's set to five yards, and they run a corner route to the right side.

Well, guess what? Flats bagged, so is the corner. Now, he could add me right here, and I wouldn't be shocked if he did. He tried to. But this could do a good job right there, right? So, that's simply by going into my Tampa 2 Mabel. Just like that. We're good to go. Now, there are some things to keep it uh to keep in mind on the back side where for example in Tampa 2, if we only have a curl flat to one side, we're in nickel.

So, my slot corners are in the curl flat. Tampa 2 only has one slot corner, right? Have auto flip on. He's on the strong side. That means the other side has curl has a quad flat to 30. You just simply put him in a curl flat manually if you wanted to or call a dime set because we go here now, right? The flats also bagged now. Right. What are you going to do? I do want to show you though what can happen if you call this macro from a dime or quarter set.

So we're going to go back here and let's go into dime 23. We'll go into a Tampa 2 call Tampa 2 Mabel. Now we have this on both sides. And actually we don't in this case. This is why personnel is so important. Tim Mabel or I'm sorry dime what are we in? Dime 23 is a weird one where we don't actually have two slot corners still. It's just a weird we have like an extra safety and so I just manually put this guy in. So make sure you always check your uh you always want to make sure you check your actual packages and your defenses because it can be weird sometimes with how how formations align.

Let's go to something a little bit simpler like two four single mug where it will actually align correctly for us. It's a great catch. That's a big deal dude is like knowing that different formations are just different. And now let's go here and this is what it looks like now to both sides. See what I'm saying? where crossers, corners, anything on either side is totally bagged. We do only have one person in the middle of the field that it's our user most likely.

We could pair this with the Texas fourman and we're going to be able to get pretty good pretty good pressure while usering and try to make something happen. We're going to defend the the sidelines both short and deep easily. Now, this macro, I don't really care what you do with anything. You can always make your defensive line the way you usually would do them. So, if you always run a stunt, you always do a pinch, a contain, whatever it might be, that's awesome.

Go ahead, do whatever. Instead, what I want to focus on is our zone drops here. So, we're gonna go flats to 25 and curls to five. Okay, simple as that. Flats to 25, curls to five. Then, we're going to go down into specific player adjustments. So, we'll keep going. And what I want from you is slot CB1 to be in a curl flat and slot CB2 to also be in a curl flat. That's because in Tampa 2, naturally, they're in yellow hook zones.

But if you call this, they're now going to be curl flats, which will give you a deep flat zone, that cloud, and the five yard curl from the slot. Now, that's a super easy way to slow down all different types of offenses. But if you want the complete beginners guide to Man27, you should check out this video right here because this bad boy is going to get you ready to go to win some more