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The Best Safety Archetypes To Increase In Madden 24 Franchise

Continuing on in our series of the best archetypes to upgrade in Madden’s franchise mode, today we are covering safeties (free safeties and strong safeties).

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.

Safety Archetypes

There are 3 archetypes you can use your skill points on to upgrade safeties in Madden.

  • Zone
  • Hybrid
  • Run Support

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:

Zone

Madden Claims: ZCV, PRC, PUR

Reality: ZCV, AWR, PRC

Hybrid

Madden Claims: MCV, PRS, PRC

Reality: AWR, MCV, TAK

Run Support

Madden Claims: PRC, POW, TAK

Reality: AWR, ZCV, TAK

Our Recommendation For Upgrading Safeties

When it comes to upgrade your free safeties and strong safeties, the archetype that we recommend you upgrade may come as a bit of a shock.

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 which Safety archetype you should upgrade in Run Support.

Highest Expected Value For Total Attribute Increases

We did 50 tests for each S 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 Support was higher than any of the other archetypes.

  1. Run Support: 304 rating increases on 50 attempts. Expected Value = 6.08
  2. Hybrid: 255 rating increases on 50 attempts. Expected Value = 5.1
  3. Zone: 187 rating increases on 50 attempts. Expected Value = 3.74

You can see from the numbers above that the Run Support archetype gets MUCH more rating increases than the Zone Archetype.

Expected Value Increases For Important Attributes Like ZCV, MCV, AWR, TAK, PRC, HPW

Most gamers will generally want their safeties to be well rounded in both coverage and against the run. Let’s look at the individual ratings increases for these attributes.

When we spent 50 skill points on each archetype, here were the results.

  • Run Support: 49 ZCV, 32 MCV, 55 AWR, 48 TAK, 38 PRC, 25 HPW
  • Hybrid: 28 ZCV, 61 MCV, 69 AWR, 44 TAK, 19 PRC, 0 HPW
  • Zone: 59 ZCV, 0 MCV, 59 AWR, 28 TAK, 8 PRC, 0 HPW

Looking at this data, it is pretty easy to just dismiss Hybrid right away unless you are using this safety as a slot cornerback in a man coverage scheme. (If that is the case, you should move him to cornerback and instead upgrade the Slot archetype at CB).

That leaves just Run Support and Zone. Run Support gets 63% more individual ratings increases than Zone. That is a HUGE difference.

Then going through each important individual rating we see that the benefits of upgrading Zone over Run Support is you get an additional +10 ZCV and +4 AWR on 50 upgrades.

The benefits of instead upgrading Run Support over Zone is you receive +32 MCV, +20 TAK, +30 PRC, +25 HPW on 50 upgrades.

In this comparison you are basically trading +10 ZCV and +4 AWR for +32 MCV, +20 TAK, +30 PRC, and +25 HPW. That is an easy trade to make

In our 50 tests, Run Support also had the greatest expected value for Speed with 4 increases on 50 attempts versus 3 speed increases for Zone and 2 speed increases for Hybrid.

Final Ratings, Raw Data, and Conclusion

Our ratings for both free safeties and strong safeties is very strong.

  1. Run Support
  2. Zone
  3. Hybrid

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.

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DustinJustin23
DustinJustin23
1 year ago

So glad I paid for the subscription, this information will really help in team building for online franchise!