One of the big new changes to franchise mode in Madden 23 is the addition of player tags. You will notice that some players have a tag like, “Franchise QB,” “Day 1 Starter”, or “Bridge Player.”
There are 9 different player tags a player can have which we went over in an earlier article. Keep in mind that not every player will have a tag and even if they do, many of the player tags are relatively useless.
There are a few though that can really help your players progress. For example, a player with a “Future Starter” tag will get bonus XP each week resulting in that player accumulating skill points at a much quicker pace. That tag is nice to have but it only impacts the player who has it.
Note: Check out our guide on which archetypes to spend your skill points on in Madden 23.
The tag that you will want to sign players with is, “Mentor.” Usually Mentors are older regressing guys maybe around 70-80 overall and in their 30s. They are the guys no one ever wants to sign in free agency (until now)!
Mentors grant every player at their position +150 XP per week. That may not sound like a lot but over the 20-25 weeks you have to progress players (pre-season, regular season, post season), that can be an extra 3,000 to 3,750 XP for every other player at that position which is enough to get +1 skill point on a young player.
That’s not the best part though! The best part is that the +150 mentor XP bonus stacks. So if you were to sign 4 wide receivers with the mentor tag, you would get +600 extra XP every week. You can just stash these mentors on your roster. They don’t even have to be on your depth chart.
This will result in significantly faster progression for your young future stars.
Let’s take a look at an example.
The New York Jets have a couple young receivers we really want to develop: Elijah Moore and Garrett Wilson. So we went out and signed 4 free agent mentors at wide receivers.
The image below will show you their weekly training XP before we signed the mentors.
They were getting decent XP before. But now compare that to what they get each week after we signed the mentors.
You can see that we increased our drill XP and bonus XP from a total of +750 for our top receivers in the first screenshot to a total of +1350 in the second screenshot, nearly doubling the weekly XP for them. If we were to go out and sign a 5th mentor at wide receiver we would get a total of +1500 XP each week (in addition to the optional focus XP).
In that example, you can see how truly powerful the Mentor tag is, especially if you are able to get a few of them.
Our actionable advice is once you draft a player you really want to develop, immediately go sign/trade for all of the mentors that you can and just sit back and watch the progression happen.