Every competitive Madden gamer knows that the awareness rating doesn’t mean anything for a user controlled quarterback. EA Sports even confirmed that fact for Madden 25 in a recent blog post.
By running a linear regression on the Madden 25 quarterback ratings, we found the formula that determines a quarterbacks overall rating in Madden 25 is:
((16*THP+16*AWR+12*SAC+12*MAC+8*DAC+6*PAC+4*SPD+2*AGI+2*THR+ACC)/48.684))-48.684
If you don’t just want to take our word for it, you can test it by downloading the player ratings and plugging in the individual numbers for any quarterback you want.
Awareness plays such a large role in a quarterbacks overall rating yet means nothing because you (as the person controlling the quarterback) control your own awareness. If you are a virtual Peyton Manning in Madden 25 and can perfectly diagnose every kind of defense, sense pressure, and have flawless decision making skills you would have a personal awareness rating of 99 overall regardless of whether you are using Tom Brady or Blaine Gabbert. The same idea applies to someone who has never played the game before. They’d probably have a personal awareness rating of around 30. It wouldn’t matter whether they are playing with the best quarterback in the game or the worst, you would replace that quarterbacks awareness rating with something like a 30 because that is the awareness of the actual person controlling the quarterback.
With that idea in mind, we re-ranked and re-rated every quarterback in Madden 25 with different levels of personal awareness. Click the image to zoom in.
True Madden 25 Quarterback Ratings:
For those of you who don’t know how to read the numbers above, it re-ranks the quarterbacks in the game from best to worst by controlling for awareness. We then provided a few options for what you would estimate your own personal “quarterback awareness.” Those options are 99, 90, 80, 70, 60, 50, 40, and 30.
So if you are a pretty good (but not elite) Madden player, you would probably estimate that you have a personal quarterback awareness of 80. If you were to use Robert Griffin III with your 80 rating, he would play like a 92 overall quarterback for you. Essentially we just substitute your personal quarterback awareness rating (80 in this example) for the useless quarterback awareness rating EA Sports gave Robert Griffin III (which is 70 overall).
This kind of information can be incredibly helpful when deciding which quarterback to play in a ranked game or which quarterback you should trade for in a franchise.
Actionable Takeaways From This Maddenalysis:
- Geno Smith is a very good quarterback in Madden 25. In fact he is the 16th best quarterback when you disregard his awareness rating.
- There is a significant drop between the top 11 quarterbacks and the rest of the group.
- Robert Griffin III is better than Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, and Drew Brees when you ignore the awareness rating.
- It may be worth trading Tom Brady away if you are the Patriots. The EA Sports ratings suggest he is a 97 overall and backup Ryan Mallet is a 74 overall (a difference of 23 points). Our ratings that disregard awareness show that there is really only a 6 to 7 point spread between how good they are. You could probably get some awesome players in exchange for Tom Brady in your online connected franchise league without suffering a huge drop at quarterback.
Bonus Content:
If you are wondering how many points it takes of a specific attribute it takes to upgrade 1 overall point for quarterbacks we have included that information below.
1 point overall = approximately
3.04 points THP/AWR
4.06 points SAC/MAC
6.09 points DAC
8.11 points PAC
12.17 points SPD
24.34 points AGI/THR
48.68 points ACC
You guys wouldn’t happen to have formulas for the other positions would you? (or any tips on how to figure other formulas out)
This article made me try to figure out a formula for Running Backs using regression analysis in excel, with the data you provided. After like 4 hours, I’m resigning that I definitely don’t know enough about regression analysis to figure this out on my own. (I may have gotten close, but I’m getting too confused)
The only information I might be correct about is that Speed, Carrying, Awareness, and Ball Carrier Vision (excluding Acceleration, since that data wasn’t in the provided excel file) are the most important attributes in determining RB overall rating (followed by Elusiveness, Agility, and Trucking). I could also be very wrong…
So if you guys have any information on other positions (RB was the one I was most interested in), I’d love to hear it.
But if you have no more information, thanks so much anyway. It is really great to see the math of how a QB’s overall is determined.