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How to Build an NFL Football Sim


vcczar

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So I've played a lot of NFL Football sims. The main issue for me is that the stats never seem realistic, especially when covering long stretches of time. For instance:

  • I've played versions of Madden in which half the QBs passed for over 5,000 yards every year or RBs ran for over 2,000 yards every year.
  • I've played versions of Madden in which after a few years certain accomplishments aren't occuring, say getting 10 sacks in a season or leading the league in QB passes with only 35 passes instead of always 45ish. 

I think Football Mogul might be the most accurate stats-wise, but even when you tell it to make historical players realistic they:

  • Are rarely consistent with their historical players. For instance, Brady is never Brady, Manning is never Manning, and one is ever as good as they are. 
  • If you start in 1951, the entire league plays out like its 1951 just about every year. That is, there won't be any majority passing teams. 

The best potential football sim is Football GM, but

  • He won't add historical players, like he has with Basketball GM
  • He's responded to me several times that there's no easy way to sim football like there is with basketball and he seems to not want to take the time to figure it out.

I don't think it's terribly difficult to make the stats accurate, and if I can find someone willing to make a good NFL sim with me, I'll come up with how the stats are processed. I think most sim-makers are just lazy in that they don't want to tailor 10,000 football players, so they sort of just extract them from Pro Football Reference and don't make adjustments to all of the players to make sure they function properly. I definitey wouldn't be detered in tailoring them. My main issue, other than AMPU not being released yet, is finding someone willing to do this with me.

I have the entire system in my head. 

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Front Office Football was the best I ever found, including stats.  Two issues I had:

1) His starting rosters had too much fluidity.  I liked that things could fluctuate much more than Madden did, but it would create situations where Tom Brady STARTS as the 3rd string QB, if the fluctuation had Brady come in randomly worse than he should be and also had fake rookies come in randomly higher than they should be.  This happened far too often, and created situations where it was very hard to start out with everyone in their proper spots.  

2)  He quit a year or two ago, announced he won't be making new versions of the game anymore.

But other than those two issues, it was damned near a perfect football game (if you don't care about graphics).

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