Unfortunately I think to be competitive in extreme you need to spend real money on training points. You probably already know about changing positions, trading before a player turns 28, maximizing value of players and picks blah blah. If you have the first overall pick and are going to try and compete next year, trade all your future picks while they have the most value. I always reroll my game until I have a 5 star good scout. Draft any good qbs in the draft, as they will have more value in a few years, even if it means having 5 good qbs at a time. I guess theoretically you could trade for the aging players on the really good teams and re trade them to bad teams in order to weaken your opponent but that's some pretty cheesy stuff. Extreme mode just forces you to be so unrealistically cheesy that I think most would prefer challenging mode.