So I had a good game to look at how the hot reads work, and I'm with Ares. They don't. Or at least, they don't in a way that makes sense.

Some observations before the plays:

1) Every single one of these hot reads followed the same pattern: RB ran straight up field. All but one were completions, but if my opponent had left a man on the RB, most would have been disasters.

2) Almost all of them came out of the same medium passing play. Here's why that's odd for my team. I don't favor medium passing at all, especially on first and second down. For some reason, my OC knew that the DC was going to call a blitz and defaulted to calling the same offensive play over and over again in that situation. Seems fishy.

3) I do like these plays against teams that call the double lb cb blitzes too much because I love watching my RBs go for 150 receiving yards. And I'm glad I exposed myself to blackflys in preseason to learn how to blast the **** out of those defenses. But in general, I think the implementation is off.

Here are the plays.

1) https://beta87.myfootballnow.com/gamecenter/view/445#82482
2) https://beta87.myfootballnow.com/gamecenter/view/445#82499 <-- The RB didn't even run the right route on this play. If he would have run his designated route to the flat, he'd have done better.
3) https://beta87.myfootballnow.com/gamecenter/view/445#82504
4) https://beta87.myfootballnow.com/gamecenter/view/445#82522
5) https://beta87.myfootballnow.com/gamecenter/view/445#82556
6) https://beta87.myfootballnow.com/gamecenter/view/445#82567
7) https://beta87.myfootballnow.com/gamecenter/view/445#82599

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I did some thinking about this, and I may be conflating the idea of a hot read and a check down in football terms. I don't think we have a concept of a check down in MFN, or if we do, it's underused to the point of non-existence. If taken in these terms, the hot read may be working as expected because it goes to the place where the defenders are not. It just looks weird because it's one player always running the same route. Let me know if that is accurate.

Here is one hot read that worked. I've seen others.

https://beta87.myfootballnow.com/gamecenter/view/453#83883

On the other hand, hot reads are terrible inconsistent. In a game against WarEagle, I pulled all of my passing plays except the ones in the 113 and 203 sets so that he'd have to be in nickle for every passing down. No hot reads, none: https://mfn1.myfootballnow.com/log/6819

Hot reads are significantly reduced for non-standard personnel for this very reason, so you can't force your opponent into hot reads when they have a reasonable game plan.

My opponent's game plan was unreasonable and mine was though. I had a good variation of runs and passes out of the 113 and 203 set. So what this means is that if I have a team with all good receivers, and no good TEs, I'm at a disadvantage by running all 113, 203, 104, and 014 sets. My opponent should have to defensive game plan to match my offensive personnel if I'm running 40 offensive plays and balancing runs and passes...period.

The only set that would cause a team grief by not game planning well would be the GL sets that default to GL defenses. There are not enough GL defenses and they are mostly terrible. I've just created a rule to use a base defense against them depending on what my opponent is using.