How to Base Align in Madden 25

We wanted to check in real quick with a reminder about how to base align in Madden 25. A lot has changed on defense this year with the introduction of disguised coverages, but the blanket way you disguise a coverage is still to use base align.

You can’t base align at the line of scrimmage though, you can only do it in the menu before you pick a play. It’s in the spot it’s been before, but some might not realize it.

When selecting a play on defense, just press in the right stick for Coach Adjustments. From there, go to auto-alignment and change it to “Base” to be in base align. You should be aware that this won’t “disguise” everything, pre-snap motion and pre-play motion will still give away man vs. zone in a lot of formations, but it’s another way you can disguise your defense without using shell coverages.

Base align tends to give your defense more width, so it’s also helpful against outside runs, various RPOs, and just getting to things in the flats. Base align is also important because at launch, zone coverage in Madden 25 is the worst it has been in years.

It’s another subject altogether, but just so you know, deep zones are not handling corner routes or reacting to them properly, certain custom stems are causing deep thirds to break, curl flats (purple zones) are not listening to your custom adjustments (in prior Maddens we’d set curl flats to 0 to stop flat routes sometimes, for example), zone drops (blues used for the flat) are too slow to drop to their spots (that’s more of a legacy issue), and changing certain flats during pre-play doesn’t take you out of Match coverage anymore (this is more something we just need to adjust to maybe). There’s probably even more, but the point is zone coverage is a hot mess for a variety of reasons.

In other words, you’re going to need to pull out all the trickery to try and give your defense a leg up in other ways, and base align is one way to do that.