Some fans find their seat under the pirate ship while others wave foam fingers in the ship itself (Raymond James Stadium). The skull of the pirate ship contains nearly 5,000 polygons, roughly the same amount of polygons across an entire game in PS2 (stadiums, players, coaches, etc).

Ah, so you can allow the CPU to control teams. Does a league need to have the full 32 teams?

Donny: Yes, you can have as many CPU teams as you need to for online franchises. If you want to do a one-man online franchise with 31 CPU teams so you can take advantage of the online web and iPhone / iPod Touch Application, you can do that. If you and Todd want to do a two-man with 30 CPU teams, you can do that. (Yes, Todd as the Lions and me as the Browns. That would be a real hoot... -- bill) Or you can do a 32 team online franchise with 0 CPU teams (and anything in between). If players drop in and out of your league, don’t worry, CPU teams take over and you don’t have to do anything.

It is up to the commissioner of the franchise to advance the state of the league. He alone is in charge to advance the week. Good news here is that you can hand off the title of commissioner to another league member if you are unable to run your franchise for any reason. We also allow the commish to boot any player he needs to who might be causing mischief in the franchise. You are also allowed to set your league to not have players join, if you wanted to ban people from doing so for a time period. Franchises can be private or public. You are allowed to password protect online franchises, if so desired.

Can you explain a bit how scouting will work?

Josh: Scouting is a key aspect of franchise mode this year and if you neglect your scouting duties during the regular season, you’ll be completely lost in the Draft. When you choose to scout a player, you’ll slowly unlock information about his attributes each week. At first, you’ll get some fairly vague comments referencing core attributes. You’ll probably see something like, “His awareness is something less than 80.” As the weeks go on and you choose to scout the players more, those comments will become more exact and you’ll see something along the lines: “We’ve completed his scouting for awareness. It’s a 75”. You’re also shown the player’s potential while scouting in the regular season. It’s displayed in a meter, so you won’t know exactly what the value is. It’s very important that you pay attention to the player’s core attributes revealed through scouting as well as his potential. Drafting a player with high potential but a low overall could mean that you’re stuck with a project for 3-4 years. On the flipside…if you draft a player with high potential and an 85 overall, you’ve hit the jackpot.

Franchise mode is my bread and butter, but player development has been my big sticking point with Madden in years past. Players simply never slowed down due to age. You'd see players retire at age 40 with a 95 overall rating. Has this been tweaked at all? Will father time slow down a 36 year old running back? I look at a guy like Jamal Lewis. He's only 30 -- but he's an old 30.

Josh: We did a lot of work tuning progression this year and this issue was one we really focused on. Players can now start to drop once they reach what we call the decline stage of their career. This varies by position, but for positions like HB, it starts when they hit 30. At this point, their attributes will start dropping and physical attributes like speed and agility will take a big hit. Players will continue to drop as they get older until they hit their career minimum, which is set by us. This means that while we may allow Jamal Lewis to drop into the 70s, we can also set Peyton Manning to never drop below a 90 overall. You might also see flash in the pan players who can get up to the high 80s in overall at their peak, but can also fall off the map and bottom out in the 50s once they get older.

Also concerning Franchise Mode, I know you guys have worked very hard on draft logic, but I need to ask: will the Colts draft two quarterbacks in the first two rounds this year? (Please say no.)

Josh: No, they will not (unless Peyton Manning suffers a career ending injury of course). We spent a lot of time tuning the draft logic with the goal to make it much smarter. Teams now draft based on severity of need instead of drafting based on taking the best guy on the board, which they did last year. They go through a process now…they check the most severe need and determine if a player to fill that need is near their draft position. If not, they move on to the next most severe need. At a certain point, they’ll look to either trade out of the pick or they’ll take the best available. They usually don’t start thinking about best available until the later rounds.

Another thing that makes the draft much better this year are our hand created draft classes. In the past, the draft classes would be ordered by the highest overall to the lowest. So you were always guaranteed to get the best player in the draft if you had the #1 pick…no matter what. The hand created classes change that completely this year. Now there are busts at #1 overall, sleepers like Colston in the 7th round, etc. The draft is a much more dynamic experience this year (and you may even see some of your favorite rookies from NFL Head Coach 09 show up as easter eggs)!