Pocket presence? His QB has been sacked once and hurried 11 times in 6 games. Neither of his INTs come off of hurries and his O-line appears to be holding their own. Pocket Presence just lowers the penalty to passes thrown while the QB is hurried, tight spiral improves ALL passes, hurried or not. If you aren't being hurried much I don't recommend getting pocket presence higher than your Tight Spiral requires.
Tight Spiral is going to be my first suggestion, after that a little confidence (not too, much you still play on a 5-1 team after all with all 5 of those wins against teams are 3-3 or better. You can't be too demoralized). Your Throwing, vision, strength and stamina are all pretty good, you can work on them if you choose, but I know players can have success at your level with those stats like that. Getting throwing, strength and vision all soft-capped this early will help you in the long run even if you have been suffering lately. You have 15 skill points coming anyway and that can go a long way to balancing you out.
I'm going to assume your 1 in every pocket passer SA comes from your custom equipment for the purposes of this example. You have 15 points to spend, 2 levels of pocket presence would cost 3 points, 4 levels of tight spiral would cost 6 more. That leaves 6 points and confidence might not be a bad idea for all 6. Alternatively you could buy another level of pocket presence for 2 points and tight spiral for 3 more leaving just 1 point to go to confidence. Either way I'd probably train confidence all this season.
The Tight Spiral will help, but I think there could be some other problems at play here. You complete less than half your passes, and that tells me the kind of pass plays your team is calling probably needs to be re-examined. Also while you average 44% completions your favorite target, Speedy Firststep, only catches 35% of your passes. In 51 attempted passes he has only caught 18 while dropping 12. Only 5 of your passes thrown to him were deflected but both of your INTs came when you were passing to him. He is obviously getting open if you throw to him 33% of the time, but the low success rate indicates he probably needs to work on his catching.
If you are set to bullet passing I would take it down to medium, if your team is calling a lot of long passes you might want to work more in the medium range. Once you have more tight spiral and if your completion % has improved throwing more medium pass, starting mixing in more long passes again to find the right balance to get the most out of your yards/attempt. I really think trying to throw long too much accounts for a significant portion of of your problems. Speedy Firststep being your primary target with a presumably speed-based build backs that up since speedsters usually get open more than posession builds when both are running deep routes but they also drop more and require a better QBs to make the catches easier. Medium routes would make it easier for him to catch the ball and also might give your more balanced #1 WR a chance to get open more often instead of being stuck running deep against guys that are faster than he is and more open receivers always make for a better passing attack. Also your team runs the ball a good bit, if you think a team might be playing their LBs too aggressively to stop your power RB (named Power RB) working in some TE passes could get you easy completions. But then again your TE is named John "Bonzo" Bonham and therefore I can't suggest NOT throwing him the ball, unless he's drunk.
Last edited Oct 3, 2008 00:59:59
