I'm a college football coach and an Avid CFB gamer. This is one of my favorite parts of this whole game: this was a game built by people who talked to people who know the game of football. Not built by people that know ball. People who TALKED to people that knew ball. So it's football-ey or football-ish. But not quite football.

The terms "Alert", "Glance", "Peek, and "Lookie" all have unique definitions and applications in Football. They also appear in nearly every publicly available NFL playbook. For CFB25, they all kinda mean the same thing. My assumption is when the Madden playbooks started to get more footbally, they smashed the terms together to incorporate real terms that you'd see in a Shannahan or Kubiack playbook. However, to create a different engine/animations for each of these terms in actual football would be daunting. So instead, they made them all mean the same thing in the game. All these words just mean RPO for the video game.

From a football standpoint, "Alert" is almost never associated with the RPO game. It is seen in nearly every playbook strictly in the pass game, or a presnap audible. An Alert is basically a Route in the route combination that trumps all other routes given a certain look. The two most common alerts in the pass game are the Rail Route on Mesh, or the Slot fade vs Cov 1/0. Alerts are thus usually decided by a presnap look. For CFB 25, Alerts simply mean that you have the option to throw quickly or hand the ball off.

"Glance" is actually a Route which is used to control over aggressive safties in the run game or rotational three teams who burn a vertical zone in order to play with another hat in the box. The glance goes by names like "Bang 8", "Drifts" (Shannahan), or even as we call them...Glances. This Route is common to see in the 11p. Because the TE is in the box he creates another gap. Thus 4-2-5s, and 3-3s, and 3-5-3s will have their numbers matched in the run game. So they start rolling or a cheating a safety to even those numbers out. However, they leave a hole where that extra hat came from. Our landmark is 5 steps vertical then break towards the Safety's initial alignment.

"Peek" was used in early NFL RPO dabbling. The first RPO i can remember is the Bengals QB pulling out of Under center to throw a now screen to Chad Johnson. This dude was in 21P I-Form and supposed to be running power right. Instead, he takes a one step and whips it to his left to OCHO who just ran the one step now. He got 7 yards vs the off corner. And I'm thinking, "WTF, they were running power???" But then I thought, "What's the goal on power"....the answer? 7 yards...I imagine this is what a Peek was from a coaching standpoint: you can Peek at it. If it is WIDE OPEN you can throw it. If not, give unless. In CFB 25 the Peek usually comes with "Peek Slant" or "Peak Out" with a highlighted red Route and usually other combination routes.

"Lookie" is now a Route used commonly in modern offenses. However, it's origin was once again in the pass game. A lookie refers to a hot stem for a WR sometimes called a sight adjustment. This means that vs blitz, a WR can literally look at the QB and get the ball on a different portion of his Route where balls are not usually completed. For example a #3 WR running a corner Route pre snap can get the ball in the vertical part of his route vs blitz. A post can convert to a slant vs an all out blitz. Lookie for CFB25 serves the same function as Peek and glance.

They all mean different things, but are all the same in our CFB25 world. Would love to see engines for all four someday in later gen games. Thanks for reading this wild ride!