How to Better Understand Run Defense in Madden 25 and College Football 25

When it comes to stopping the run, you can think about your base defense, counting the number of the defenders in the box, and much more. But one thing you can do pre-snap might do more than just about everything else and that’s looking at your run fits.

It’s not something you can find in the controller settings, and it’s not something listed in the pre-snap adjustment menus, but run fits are in the game. This is play art that shows you what gap you’re supposed to run to depending on if a run goes to the left or right side of the field.

How you do it is while holding R2 for Coach Cam then hold L2 + Square/X or L2 + Circle/B for run fits left and right.

So here is how it looks when you do R2 + L2 + Square (left run fit):

And here is how it looks when you do R2 + L2 + Circle (right run fit):

It looks simple, and it is, but that play art is very helpful because you’ll start to understand where you need to be if you’re using the most common user position on defense, which is linebacker. Knowing which gap you need to be in depending on where a run goes will solve a lot of your issues.

How to stop the pass is a much more complicated question, but some of the most helpful run defense advice is to simply “be in the right spot” and make the tackle. Understanding your run fits will allow you to do that.

One other thing to note is if you use the Run Commit adjustment before the snap, you can see how the run fits get updated depending on if you choose run up middle, run left, or run right. Now, picking Run Commit has knock-on effects that mean your defenders will be out of position on a pass play, but the point is to show you that the run fits change based on stuff you do.

Here is me selecting Run Right under Guess Play:

And here is how the run fits get updated when I look at things now:

You can see how the run fits have shifted one spot over for certain gaps, and now a safety is also involved in coming up to stop the run. The same sort of updates will happen if you instead change to run up middle or run to left.

In short, if you’re getting beat up on run plays, start by looking at the run fits before the snap and make sure you’re actually nailing your run fit assignment. From there, you can get more aggressive about trying to attack certain run types by even doing things like using base align (at least in Madden, it’s not in College Football) to give your team a little more width and stop some of those outside runs.