Can anyone lose a game besides the QB?

Alright, I tried this same test with the OL and oh boy, I think Madden might be drunk today. Yeah I can't figure this one out, so here are the results.

I isolated Reiff on this one. First a reminder of how the control group did, where Reiff had an overall rating of 65, which made him pretty much the worst starting LT in the league. In my QB test, Mannion was a 66 and my bottom benchmark for QB's. So Reiff and his 65 in the control group will be my bottom benchmark for LT's, so I only need to try an elite LT in this test and call it a day.

So that's what I did, I made Reiff the best LT in the league. A 99 rating. Not 99 across the board, he has the same ratings as whoever the best LT was and that happened to give him a 99 overall. A 99 in pass blocking and run blocking however.

The control group with 66 Reiff finished with an average of 8.4 wins, so how much did that improve with a 99 Reiff? It shot up to 8.9. So going from the worst LT to the best only led to in increase of 0.5 wins. The worst QB to the best led to exactly 5.0 more wins, or 10x as many. According to Madden, LT's aren't nearly as important as QB's.

So ok, how about the entire OL as a unit? In that 8.4 win control group, the Vikings OL was awful as a unit.

Reiff     34th ranked LT with a 65
Elflien   16th ranked LG with a 74
Bradbury  19th ranked C  with a 74
Kline     22nd ranked RG with a 73
O'Neill   26th ranked RT with a 70

As a starting unit, that's a combined rating of 356, which ranked them 28th in the NFL. The Eagles ranked #1 at 435 (87 average). And the Eagles are in the playoffs all the time BTW.

I didn't want to get too crazy, so I decided to give the Vikings a top 5 OL unit to start with, or about an 81 average. That put each individual in the 10-15th range for their position, but made them top 5 as a unit. Should be enough to get some results right?

Annnnnnnnnnnd the Vikings got worse lol. Go drunk Madden, you're home. Yep, with a top 5 OL they only won an average of 7.7 games in 10 simulations. Only made the playoffs once at 11-5.

But hold the phone. The offense was actually better than the control group offense. Scored 1.7 more points per game, and racked up 12.6 more yards per game. It was the defense that went downhill for whatever reason. They gave up 1.6 more points per game and 12 more yards, so it was pretty much a wash lol. I didn't touch the defense. All other aspects were the exact same as the control group.

Ok ok, fine. Lets try an elite OL then. I bumped each guy up to match the 3rd best player at their position, or right around the 90 range, and that made them best unit in the league at 448.

Annnnnnnnnnd they only won 9.0 games or 0.6 more than the control group. Only made the playoffs 3 times. They scored more points than the "top-5" line, but statistically they were about the same. Injuries are off, so it's not because Cousins or anyone missed games. Exact same schedule all 10 seasons. The defense was slightly better than the "top-5" team, but still slightly worse than the control group.

Makes no sense to me. Madden puts no value in the OL apparently. I mean I almost got better results just making Reiff a 99 than I did making the whole unit #1 lol. Tomorrow I'll make them all 99 to see if that finally does anything.

I think we can safely say if we tried this in real life, the 3rd best OL at every position would produce more noticeable results. Maybe Madden isn't a reliable source to answer certain questions after all xD.