MUTRADAR LEARN · MADDEN 27
How to Stop Cheese Plays in MUT
A cheese play in MUT is a play an opponent runs over and over because it beats a default coverage reliably, not because it is hard to stop. The fix is the same every time: find the play in the log, see what it did against each of your calls, and keep calling the one that held it under four yards. MutRadar logs every snap with both calls and the result, so the pattern shows on the board after two or three snaps instead of after the game.
What makes a play cheese
Nothing in the game is illegal, so cheese is not about the rules. A cheese play is a play that beats the default reaction of Madden's defenders reliably, and so gets run on repeat: a stick-wheel out of trips that the flat defender never carries, a corner route against a Cover 3 that keeps rolling the wrong way, a stretch run against a box that is one short. The player is not reading anything. He is pressing the button that worked.
The giveaway is the repetition. In one of our own games an opponent ran a Mountaineer Stick Wheel out of Gun Trips X Nasty twice in four snaps from that look, and passed from it all four times. That is also the weakness. A play run four times is a play you have seen three times.
The three-snap rule
The first time it works, note the formation. The second time, you have a guess, and in a 2v2 or 3v3 somebody says it out loud: trips, same look, the wheel is coming. The third time should be a stop. If it is not, the problem is no longer the play. It is that nobody was keeping count.
Change one thing, not everything
The instinct after getting beaten twice is to throw the whole call out. Do not. A cheese play usually beats one defender, so the fix is usually one defender: a user sitting on the wheel route, a safety over the top of the corner, a flat zone that carries the stick. Keep the base coverage that has been working everywhere else and move the one player.
And if a call has already held it to under four yards, keep calling it. The whole thing only works against a defense that keeps guessing. The moment the same answer comes back twice, the opponent is the one who has to change, and most of them have nothing else.
How MutRadar handles it
The board is built for this. Every snap MutRadar reads goes into that opponent's book for the game, and the second time you meet a squad, known by its scorebug tag, the board opens with the calls of yours that held up against them last time. On the formation card each play they have shown from the look is drawn with its count and its share, MTN STICK WHEEL, 2 of 4, and the LEANING chip says which half of the playbook it came from, LEANING PASS 4 of 4.
Before the snap, ON SCREEN NOW flashes the formation it just read off your play-call screen, so when Gun Trips X Nasty comes out you are looking at what came from it last time, not trying to remember. YOUR CALLS THAT HAVE HELD UP VS THIS LOOK names the defensive calls that stopped it, with stops and average yards, and DID IT WORK grades each of your coverages against each of their calls as WORKED or STUFFED, with the yards from the scorebug.
The board also ranks the calls in your own defensive playbook against what they keep running, and leads with the ones that have actually produced against them tonight; a call you have never made is listed as untested, and the heading says so.
What the log says. The formation our squad faced most between 13 and 24 October was Gun - Tight Doubles, 29 snaps from five opponents, and the play we saw most from it was Cross Wheels: six snaps, all from one opponent in one game. Five of the six had a yards read: 0 into Tampa 2, −1 into Cov 3 Buzz Match, 11 into Roll Cover 3 Cloud, 4 into Cover 3 Sky and 8 into Cover 3 Match. The same squad ran HB Quick Base from the same look five times, for 10, 7, 23, 15 and 7. And FRA's MTN Stick Wheel, the play on the card below: the first one scored; the second went for 3.
It is honest about its limits. One snap is not a tendency, and a tile is drawn thin until there are three. A read it cannot trust is left blank. And it never predicts the next play. It shows the pattern and the call that has held, which is all a cheese play ever needed. The still below is the real card from that game.
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