Learn which teams KMac has as the best defensive playbooks to use in Madden NFL 24 from the Arizona Cardinals, Kansas City Chiefs and the Indianapolis Colts defensive formations. See which formations in each playbook will give you the edge in Madden NFL 24.

Video transcript:

If you don't know what you're doing on Defense in Madden 24, you're probably not going to have a very good time. Also, a quick shout out to EA for sponsoring this video, but whether you're a brand new player or a returning veteran, don't worry, I got you guys covered with my top three defensive playbooks.

Bengals Defensive Playbooks

Now, the first one has been a popular meta for many years. The playbook has not changed because it is an alternate playbook. But don't worry if you don't know what that means. Again, regardless of what mode you play, ultimate Team Regs or C F M, you're going to be able to use this playbook. And like I said, this is the most popular choice amongst Madden Pro players and the big reason is it's versatility. It has some of the most overpowered defensive formations in the game. The dollar three, two, the dime normal, the big nickel over G.

But the reason this playbook is so unique is it actually has the three formation as well as the three three Cub, which I believe this is the only playbook in the game that has both. And you might be saying to yourself, KMAC, what's the big deal? Why does it matter that they have both of those formations? And the reason this is so important is because linebackers are not nearly as good at linebacker as safeties are, you almost always want to be using safeties. At linebacker, they jump a lot higher. They're typically faster, they animate so much better. So what we're actually going to do here is go to our three formation and sub and safeties at all three linebacker spots. Once we've made our subs, we can go back to the three, three Cub formation, press A to select it, and then once we're actually inside the formation, we can press left trigger or L two.

If you're on PlayStation, set our audibles at our leisure. I actually swap out the first one for cover for show two. This is Match Defense if you have that turned on in your coaching adjustments, and if you're wondering how you turn on match coverage, once you're here at the play call menu, you can easily press in the right stick. You can go up or down until you get to zone coverage right in the DPA to select match coverage on. And we're setting our audibles for the three three Cub because we're actually not going to be running three three even though this is the play we're going to be coming out in and the reason we're setting our audibles for three, three Cub, but then doing our depth chart here for three three, and I understand it's pretty confusing. Again, the whole point is we want safeties at linebacker.

If you try to make direct subs in three, three Cub, you guys can see here, you can only put ends or linebackers at these positions. One thing I'll quickly note here as well is again, I'll go back to my coaching adjustments. I typically like to turn my auto alignment to base when I'm doing this exact defense. So we're going to be coming out in any three play. And then once we're here, all we have to do is press X or square if you're on PlayStation, right on the D pad to get to nickel three, three Cub, and we have all of our audible set. Again, this is just personal preference. We audible it to whatever play we want and now our safeties at linebacker become ends and again, they can rush the passer. If we want to blitz five or six or four or if we want to send three, these guys can bail out.

They're going to have much better coverage stats than actual linebackers. So again, any three play, we're going to audible to any three three Cub defense of our choosing. I love match, but again, it's not terribly important. You can run man coverage if you want. You can run match, you can run cover two, cover three. Anything that your heart desires here will audible down. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm basically going to skip a bunch of adjustments by doing one. So I'm going to hit RB here. I'm going to then pinch my defense. I'm going to shift my defense here on the left side, down on the left stick. It brings my safeties down, it pinches my D-line and it pinches my linebackers as well. Once I've done this, I'm going to blitz globally, blitz all of my linebackers by going right on the dpad.

This brings up your quick linebacker adjustments down on the right stick to blitz all. So once we blitz all of our linebackers, I'm then going to qb contain RB and then rb. Once again, this is super important because we want to keep quarterbacks in the pocket, especially this year with how good scrambling quarterbacks are. The next thing I'm going to do here is hover over my nose tackle and whether or not we're actually blitzing or only rushing three or four people, we always want to make our defense look the same. But again, the reason this defense is so good is because it's so versatile, we can make our blitz look like we're playing all out zone coverage. We can easily man up our extra blitzing linebacker right here. I'm going to blitz my user. Once again, this helps you get some, it helps generate pressure.

Basically registers them as an extra pass rusher, but that's a little bit of an advanced tip right there for you guys. Yeah, we make it look exactly the same as a blitz and this time we're actually bailing out everybody into coverage. Literally nothing is open except for Y, which is my responsibility as a user. I was sleeping a little bit to be honest. And the thread of that blitz alone is basically going to force your opponent to always block a tight end or a running back or at the minimum just play a guessing game with you. And we always have the upper hand in that scenario because we're dictating how they play offense and not the other way around.

Kansas City Chiefs Defensive playbook

For our second playbook, why not get a recommendation from arguably the greatest defensive player of all time? Noah. Up next is on a full ride scholarship to West Virginia University for Madden. He's a college national champion, a two-time belt winner, and like I said, there is nobody in the world better on defense than Noah.

Kmac. Use the hiefs defense in Madden. 24 is the best defense in the game. Definitely recommend using it. They got dollar defense. What else do you need? You don't need nothing else. Dollar defense Madden 24 Chief's defensive playbook, book it.

Indiana Colts Defensive playbook

The third and final playbook I'm going to recommend for you guys is the Indianapolis Colts defensive Playbook. The main reason I'm going to be running the cults playbook is for the big nickel over G, which is obviously in the four six playbook as well as chiefs, but Colts have some variations here of dollar has the sugar three two as well as the dime rush, which if you like being off meta, this is certainly a defensive playbook you might want to check out. Now, I've said it once, I've said it twice and I'll say it again because I'm trying to drill it into your brains Auto alignment set to base zone coverage set to match for our coaching adjustments. Of course, we want to sub in safeties at linebacker once again because we want our players to actually jump. Now I call a cover shell here and I can actually see Beog being really metal on defense this year for a few different reasons.

First and foremost, a four downline set is going to do a great job of containing mobile quarterbacks like Anthony Richardson for example, in the pocket, if you have superstar X-factor edge rushers like Chandler Jones and Max Crosby, they're almost never going to be double teamed. If they are, both of them aren't going to be. So one person is always going to have a one-on-one matchup with those superstar abilities, edge threat or double or nothing in particular. They're almost always going to instantly win their matchup. And then on top of it, this is one of the only formations in the game on defense that doesn't involve you having to change your package or make substitutions to get completely unique adjustments for all of your linebackers and all of your dbs. And what I mean by that is let's just actually demonstrate it. Again, I called a cover two cell.

I'm going to instead create a cover three invert. So the first thing I'm going to do here is bring up my coverage adjustments by pressing Y or triangle Y. Again, to quick adjust. And then I'm going to select the icon of the DB that I want to change their zone adjustments. So in this case, I want to change my free safety. I'm going to do this for both safeties. I select him, I want to place them in an outside third to the left, so left on the left stick. So it looks like this. Same thing with the safety on the right, although this time I'm going to play Simon an outside third to the right. So left on the right stick this time. A lot of different directions going on here. I'm trying to keep track of it myself. And then obviously this leaves the middle of the field like wide open, but again, it gives our linebackers unique adjustments as well.

So we can double click right on the dpad to bring up our linebacker icons. I'm going to select the one I'm not using. Then I'm going to go up on the left stick to place him in the middle third. Now we have an inverted cover three right here. We can man up our slot corner. We can place him in a hard flat. We can blitz him for some extra pressure from a five man rush. A lot of different things we can do there. I'm going to user the sky on the left hand side, and this is a really locked down coverage cell that is a little bit confusing and maybe difficult to set up at first, but once you get the muscle memory down, once you get that practice in, trust me, it happens super, super quickly. And this again, it's just a beautiful base defense to mix in with mass coverage or mixed in with a blitz mixed in with a double Mabel double flat defense, which if you don't know what that is, it's a little bit more complex.

We'll probably cover it in a future video. But yeah, a great base defense for you guys right here that is going to give a lot of offenses fits. So let's just show you guys, I'm not going to contain right here just to demonstrate that if I roll out this corner route is basically kind of getting bagged by that outside right safety and that guy's like a 60 overall. If you have somebody with abilities there or 90 plus zone coverage, they're going to bag the absolute life out of it. Just an awesome defense again to stop these deep corner routes stop things going deep down the sideline that would otherwise beat a cover two shell. But that's all I have for you guys here today. Let me know in the comments below which playbook you plan on running this year for Madden 24 and hopefully I was able to help you guys out a bit on defense.