Frowny messaged me asking about my strategy and I thought it'd be pretty good insight for anyone looking to get a really good time, so I thought I'd type this up.

The general strategy I used is the same intuitive idea for other football game speedruns where you want to run as much time off the clock as possible, but the secret is something I noticed while watching other runs. When you select a play (on offense and on defense), the camera does this wide panning thing where it kinda zooms into place where it sits before the play. It takes a couple seconds, but you can mash A after selecting a play to skip that camera pan to make the camera jump into place; every time you do that, not only does it skip the animation but the play clock and game clock jump forward a couple seconds to account for the fact that you skipped it. It's why you might've noticed me running plays a lot faster towards the end of the half ( ); running more plays = more time skips.

The same concept applies to games like NCAA 14 that have a "conservative" clock option; with it turned on, as soon as you call the play, the play clock ticks down to 12 seconds and the game clock runs down too. You can see that in action here:

In Madden 12, it's a lot less significant timesave than that, so it becomes a balancing act of going slow enough to drain the play clock, not running out of field, etc. but still running as many plays as you can to skip forward as much as possible. Hope this helps!