Continuing on in our series of the best archetypes to upgrade in Madden’s franchise mode, today we are covering defensive ends.
We spent thousands of skill points on all of the different archetypes for each position and documented the results of our experiment. This effort took weeks of data collection and man hours and we hope that you find the actionable takeaways from it.
Defensive Ends Archetypes
There are 3 archetypes you can use your skill points on to upgrade defensive ends in Madden.
- Speed Rusher
- Power Rusher
- Run Stopper
We spent 50 skill points on each of these archetypes and we’ll go through what we found in much more detail a little later on in the article. First, let’s start with what Madden claims each archetype’s top skill increases are:
Speed Rusher
Madden Claims: FMV, TAK, PUR
Reality: FMV, AWR, TAK
Power Rusher
Madden Claims: PMV, TAK, PUR
Reality: PMV, AWR, TAK
Run Stopper
Madden Claims: BSH, TAK, PRC
Reality: BSH, PRC, TAK
Our Recommendation For Upgrading Defensive Ends
There isn’t one clear winner for upgrading defensive ends. Each archetype has a different strength and the upgrades mostly give you the types of ratings increases you would expect.
Note: Our recommendations do not take into account superstar abilities that unlock at specific overall ratings. We are only looking at which upgrades produce the best individual attribute increases.
If there is a specific superstar ability you are working towards getting, it can make sense to upgrade that archetype even though the individual attribute increases might be low.
Our recommendation for the best DE archetype to upgrade is whatever archetype your player already has the highest rating at.
Highest Expected Value For Total Attribute Increases
We did 50 tests for each DE archetype and marked down every individual rating increase they got then added all of it together for the total number of individual ratings increases.
What we found for these 50 tests is that the expected value of ratings increases for Run Stopper was higher than any of the other archetypes.
- Run Stopper: 220 rating increases on 50 attempts. Expected Value = 4.4
- Power Rusher: 204 rating increases on 50 attempts. Expected Value = 4.08
- Speed Rusher: 192 rating increases on 50 attempts. Expected Value = 3.84
Expected Values For Important Ratings Like FMV, PMV, BKS
For defensive linemen ratings like Finesse Moves, Power Moves, and Block Shed are by far the most important. Most of the time they will either be rushing the QB or trying to stop the run so we put much more weight on these attributes than others.
On 50 attempts these are the results we got:
- Run Stopper: 99 BSH, 2 FMV, 2 PMV
- Speed Rusher: 0 BSH, 95 FMV, 5 PMV
- Power Rusher: 0 BSH, 6 FMV, 78 PWV
You can see that defensive end upgrades are exactly what you would expect. The Run Stopper archetype gets block shed, the Speed Rusher archetype gets Finesse Moves, and the Power Rusher archetype gets Power Moves.
There are a couple interesting things to note.
First, neither Speed Rusher or Power Rusher archetypes at defensive end ever received any block shed increases.
Second, in our tests the Power Rusher archetype got the most Speed and Acceleration increases. That came as a shock as the popular assumption was always the Speed Rusher would be more likely to see those increases.
- Power Rusher: 7 speed and 7 acceleration increases on 50 attempts
- Speed Rusher: 4 speed and 4 acceleration increases on 50 attempts
- Run Stopper: 2 speed and 7 acceleration increases on 50 attempts.
Final Rankings, Raw Data, and Conclusion
Like we stated earlier on, which archetype to upgrade on your defensive end really comes down to personal preference. If you forced us to do a ranking though it would be:
- Power Rusher
- Speed Rusher
- Run Stopper
Madden School Unlimited members have full access to all of the raw data that went into this experiment so you can dig into the details further.
Return to our Madden 24 franchise mode skill points/archetype overview.