Custom Plays Question / Proposal

[Donovon-Steelers]

As a newer coach, can someone please answer why custom plays are team-only usable for the 1st game after creation only?

Perhaps this was initially so the league could cultivate a large play pool for everyone to use, but that now exists.

Making effective plays takes time, effort and creativity. Why should other teams benefit from one coaches hard work? Minnesota comes up with some good defenses that would likely give him an edge, however since everyone can pick it apart and/or modify/use it, that benefit is significantly neutralized.

Benefits:

* Would reward coaches for innovation
* Would force opponents to watch tape to see what's occurring in a particular effective play and counteract it (like real NFL)
* Would likely result in a higher diversity of plays (instead of the current abundance of redundancy in many play types)
* Would allow teams to have more of personalized identity by the plays they develop

Technically this is doable, so at this point in the league's maturity what is the major drawback for not allowing this?

[Jerry-Redskins]

The nature of the league. The ideal of the PNFL is the be like the real NFL. The real NFL is a copy cat league and nothing is a secret once it is on tape in a game. The filn is broken down immediately for anything successful,

[Donovon-Steelers]

IMO that doesn't seem to offset the listed benefits of proprietary play creation. What we're currently doing is akin to each NFL team willingly sharing their custom playbook to everyone else weekly - that's not realistic emulation - opposing coaches should have watch games to analyze their opponents effective custom plays.

[Jerry-Redskins]

I disagree with it being unrealistic. The NFL has staffs of many people that break down anything that shows up immediately. There are no secrets once something is put on film in the NFL. No such thing as a custom playbook in the NFL once it's been seen in a game. We all have real life and no staffs. The play becoming available mirrors the NFL. I enjoy the open play pool way more that the other leagues I was in with closed ones. It is part of what made the PNFL different.

[Mitch-Oilers]

@Donovan - I understand your point. That's partially why I wish our play names started with the coach's initials vs the team's initials.

I've played in leagues in the past where we didn't use a common play pool and it was "illegal" to copy other teams plays. However, similar to Jerry's point, the NFL is a copy cat league, so it's more realistic to have plays available to teams in a pool.

What I like about our league setup is that you don't have to create a whole book of plays yourself. You only need to create plays if you "want to" or if you see a "need" to counter opponents. That said, I focus my team on film study and game planning for my opponent vs testing
custom plays each week.

As you mentioned, there are a lot of "similar" plays across multiple play categories. Some of these plays are by the same coaches that "re-created" plays under their new team's name (hence, naming plays by the coach vs the team).

[Jerry-Redskins]

The other piece is to maximize plays depending on your roster composition. Some carry FB's, some don't. Some have 3 or more TE's active, some don't. CB's the same. All plays are not as successful with other rosters based on this.

[Rich-League Officer]

Let me add, if this league ever became the type where teams had exclusive use to their plays and other coaches needed to create their own, the league would fold in one season.
I think being the first vpnfl league and now the last vpnfl league, after 24 years and 45 seasons, this formula works.
All those custom leagues where each coach needed to supply their plays and you could not copy, where are they today?

[Mitch-Oilers]

@Rich - I believe they are dead.

[Donovon-Steelers]

Rich, I wasn't suggesting not having a common play pool. That can be kept as-is; it was a matter of having something else proprietary to reward creativity.

[Rich-League Officer]

Creativity is rather subjective after 45 seasons of play creation.
A reward for creating custom plays would generate quantity over quality.
This is a topic we have discussed before.

If the suggestion is the play creator should have 2-3-4-6 weeks of using his plays before release, I could perhaps get on board with that.