by AKH » Fri Jan 26, 2018 7:44 am
The position skills indicate how well a player understands a position, how prone he is to make mistakes when playing that position. They modify a huge range of scenarios, e.g. Getting lost in coverage, picking up the wrong blitzer, getting wrong leverage from a 3point stance etc. etc. These increase over time (but only if you line him up at the position he is registered at - so if you play a SS at linebacker he wont increase his LB skill because he trains with the linebackers and he wont increase his SS skill because he doesnt get playing time at SS).
The overall rating is just a helper rating, allowing you a quick glimpse of the rough quality of a player, it IS a better indication than his position skills. Still when evaluating players you are better off looking at his specific attributes and personality.
Even with the limited combinations available (where you avoid over and undertraining) its my impression people have different strategies for training. A lot simply go with a balanced default schedule like you post and leave it at that. Some do very specific stuff for small groups of players and some do in between.
Same goes for defense, this is hard to give good general advice on because the success of each play is so dependent on the players you field. Just like real life, when the top CB gets injured, a lot of the concepts dont work as well anymore.
in more competitive leagues people spend a lot of time looking at the game analyses (access it through in the game box score) to figure out what works for and against them. And still they have to adjust a little every season because of the turnover in personnel.
To pass outside you need players running on the outside, so the plays matter a lot. The routes depend on which player runs them obviously (a TE running a fly wouldn't be on the outside, but the X receiver would), you can check the XML to see what players do on the different plays (or check the college game, where we added play art).