Madden 2004 Hints

By exploiting an easy to learn AI weakness, you can score a sack on nearly every play in Madden 2004.
When on defense, pick the Free Fire blitz from within the 4-3 package. Move your two interior lineman away from the ball one click each, move the lineback on the left down, and move the middle linebacker a little bit to the right and a little down. When the offense snaps the ball, the left tackle will go to block the linebacker on the left, the left guard will block the defensive end on the left, and the center will block the middle linebacker. This will give the interior lineman on the left side a huge hole and have a free path to the quarterback, which is a tactic that the offensive AI will hardly ever account for and can easily lead to several hundred sacks throughout the course of a season.
For even better results, sub in one of the fastest players from your defensive backfield into the position of the lineman that will have a free path to the quarterback so that you can sack him that much faster.

To advertise for free, go to the weekly schedule and view the Monday Night Game. Select it, then go and set you advertising all the way up. Play your game then simulate the week. The Monday Night Game still will not have happened, so go turn down your advertising and voila! free advertising.

In franchise mode go to create-a-player mode. Make 3 players and decrease all their attributes till they are an overall of 12(this is the lowest). Then go to Sign Free Agents and sign all three for about 1 Million. Then go back to Create-a-Player Mode and increase all their stats to maximum. You can leave them like this and use them, or you can trade them for the best players on any team. For the latter option, go to trade players in the roster menu and pick a team with a really good player and trade one or all of them for that good player, and the worst player on their team. Go back to Create-a-Player mode and decrease all their stats back to an overall of 12. Then go back to trade players menu, and trade their worst player for the players you created. Wash Rinse Repeat. You can have all the best players of the NFL that have stats like players should have.

During a regular season or playoff home game, pause and save the game. When game is saved, quit and go to the main menu. Reload your franchise file, which will take you to were you left off during that game. Everytime you do this it is like the computer charged the fans to re-enter the stadium because all income from tickets,concessions,etc. have now been doubled. I made $20 million during one regular season game in my second season by doing this four times(once at the end of each quarter). Do this only when you are the home team or else your just making alot of money for the other team.

In order to play Owner's mode without the cap, first you must enter Owner's mode and create a player. Sign him to your team, then bring your team over the salary cap (the cap room is in the negatives).
Go back and edit your player's attributes (one point difference in anything will do). The game will notify you that this will bring the team over the cap, that the cap will be turned off, and will ask you if you want to proceed. Select yes.
The salary cap will be turned off, but Owner's mode will not. This takes off the burden of cap room economics. Have fun!

If one of your players gets an injury during a game press start and challenge the play. Whether or not you get the challenge, the player will not be injured. NOTE: This only works if the play is challengable.

Thanks to being able to use any playbook in the game on offense as well as the ability to line up any player at any position, you can easily use this to your advantage and move the ball virtually at will.
Regardless of what team you're using, choose the Washington Redskins playbook and then put your best wide receiver at fifth on the wide receiver depth chart. When on offense, run the Slants play from the five wide receiver Shotgun formation. This will cause your best receiver to either be matched up against one of the worst defensive players from the other team or to be wide open outright on virtually every play. The defensive AI will never figure this out, and you can literally run this same play over and over again until you score whenever you have the ball. In the rare event that the defense drops back or adds extra defenders, simply Hot Route your best receiver and have him run a curl route; he'll always be wide open due to always being against one of the backups from the other team.
This obviously works best with a team like the Vikings or Colts (who have Moss and Harrison on their teams, respectively), but the glitch is so cheap that you can use it with virtually any team in the NFL and have easy success.