PNFL

I think what is going on in PCFL shows us we need to go back to original ratings. It makes for a more exciting game to watch. It will also make us have to be better GMs. I propose after next draft we going on a X seasons even decline in draft classes to original PNFL ratings from the first season. I presonally god with just ripping the bandaid off and doing in 2047 draft class because 2046 picks have been traded. I am also good at spacing it out. I think doing it through draft classes is the best idea.

THe reason I think right away(2047 draft) would be fine is because we have so much depth in the league. Only a handful of these guys would make rosters.

We had 40 players who are going to retire at the end of the season for sure. That means only 2-3 players per teams are really needed to fill out the 53 man rosters. Plus there are pently of Free Agents left in the league. These players realistically won't see the field for 5-7 seasons. They won't be starting until season 9-11 or later.

Theses are teh top draft rookies at each positions and you can see why I can say they won't see the field until seasons 9-11. This is after a training camp.


A QB1 2 Tim Couch OK R 5-11 214 69 70 71 83 63 72 80 80
76 75 77 92 71 91 95 88
I HB 29 Ricky Williams OK R 5-10 180 77 76 75 75 66 73 70 68
81 81 83 81 75 78 82 77
A FB1 44 Robert Konrad OK R 5-11 190 72 71 69 76 70 72 74 74
74 78 74 85 81 81 81 81
A WR2 89 Torry Holt OK R 5-10 206 81 79 84 60 87 77 77 79
84 86 91 69 96 91 92 96
A TE1 86 Jim Kleinsasser OK R 6-0 241 70 76 78 81 74 66 69 68
76 86 85 91 81 86 91 86
A C2 56 Damien Woody OK R 6-3 298 58 57 59 90 56 72 73 73
68 62 69 96 66 86 87 84
O G3 56 Brandon Burlsworth OK R 6-0 314 59 59 59 89 48 75 76 76
(Actually second G first moved to C 69 68 66 98 58 86 91 86
A T1 54 John Tait OK R 6-3 292 59 56 63 93 50 77 75 75
66 65 71 99 56 85 86 85
A DE2 66 Jevon Kearse OK R 6-3 310 55 57 62 84 49 74 69 73
60 60 66 92 56 86 81 91
A DT2 61 Anthony McFarland OK R 6-3 295 50 50 59 88 49 75 72 77
55 55 64 95 56 86 81 88
A LB2 59 Chris Claiborne OK R 5-11 238 71 73 73 77 70 75 70 72
75 76 81 86 81 84 86 81
A CB1 23 Champ Bailey OK R 6-0 210 77 79 79 52 84 72 80 74
81 81 86 60 91 86 91 87
A S4 30 Tony George OK R 6-1 213 72 74 71 59 82 76 76 74
78 80 79 66 91 86 91 91


The thing I want you to notice is they are most are starting. If we want to be at basic to actual Original PNFL attritbutes in 10 seasons We need to do the change in 2047.

The way I would suggest to do it Basically take the 2025 NFL Draft class and put it into an full PNFL draft like the first season. Rank them by positions then odds 2047 even 2048.

We are seeing more run after the catch, more effectiveness on medium passes, more broken tackles and jukes, and even a few more penalties/injuries.

I love the gameplan in the PCFL right now and helps support what I've been advocating for a long time, expand the ratings between the players.

Interesting discussion and I may have some words to eat...

I have railed against the push for what I thought was too much ratings differentiation, but I built some of this into the ratings model for the PCFL because I thought it made sense for a college league, and if we are going to have 5-star players, 4-star, 3-star, etc. there have to be differences between the 1-2-3-4-5 star players. So I put in what I thought was a fairly reasonable amount of differences in those skill levels of players.

We can keep it in place by simply following the numbers in creating a recruiting class every season, with minor tweaks to add a little variety to the players but still keep them in the same ratings ranges for their talent levels.

What has followed is interesting results.

I want to try a similar experiment on a spare copy of the PNFL league files but I need to find an FBPro utility I used in 2000-2001 when I ran the ECCFL. It was a league editor called FPS-something (not FBPEDIT or FPSEDIT, both of them lack the editing functions this other one had) that had an ability to edit league ratings and set them on a bell curve, not just simply lower or raise ratings like FPEDIT and FPSEDIT can do. Does anyone else remember this other utility, and even have a copy of it?

I will look in my old hard rives, but I don't think I have it, because I think I deleted all my FBPro stuff after retiring in 2022 and never thinking I would go back to playing this game.

If someone can find that utility, I'm ready to do a really interesting experiment. I may have been totally wrong about this issue and I'm not afraid to admit it if the experiment shows what I think it will show. I've re-thought a lot of things over the last 6 years, so being wrong and having my mind changed on an issue related to FBPro would be easy in comparison.

Just to see how it would look, I did a TC simulation of QB Tim Couch using the ratings James posted. Below that, for comparison, are his actual ratings from the PNFL history rosters. As you can see, players aged then. The last 3 seasons listed, he was dumped into the FA pool, after being a backup QB for a couple seasons, because his age-related decline in talent.

QB Tim Couch was 665 total ratings, QB Hendon Hooker on my roster is also total 665. Similar right, so may our players haven't gotten that much higher since 2000 season?

Yes and no but more yes for one reason, the draft pool stocked with about 300 players when 126 are drafted for 18 teams, means that we drafted mostly from the top half of the draft pool, leaving the lower half as FAs. This factor mostly, raised our average roster ratings gradually over time.

Mitch was right, we need the smaller sized draft pools to prevent this skill ratings inflation that has taken place since the early seasons.

The talent level in the PCFL is equally distributed right now so that is going to make for fun, exciting games. The problem comes in when coaches who are both great at making PPPs and General Managing start to stretch their leads over the others. This was the problem in the XFBS where we started having massive blowout games with big talent disparities. I think we need to see a full recruiting cycle of five seasons with PCFL to see if huge talent disparities becomes evident before we do anything in the PNFL.

I am not talking about using PCFL as an example. I am talking about what games looked like before the depth of talents. We currently have. I am saying returning to VPNFL ratings. There isn't run after the catch because LB3 is almost as good as any top 10 LB.

There is some severe disparity in the PCFL player ratings between teams that I complained to Dean about and gave many examples (some Team's Position 1 player would rank as another Team's Position 4, etc), but even if that's the case, the overall rating-set is still close enough that the games are quite competitive and IMO more interesting/fun than the PNFL. And as Mitch said, the difference in jukes, dives, big plays, compared to vanilla PNFL action is quite noticeable.

PNFL player ratings are so close that you spend time deciding if Player A with 99.12% of max is really better than Player B with 99.38% of max (depending on the difference in key categories) - when truth be told, most players don't really matter that much compared to your PPPs, which is the far higher determinant of win/loss outcomes.

I'm all for a wider spread of ratings, but don't think anything will change our league's current trajectory of slow, incremental drip change which should get us to where we want in about 6-7 seasons.

But if we want (a) more diverse player ratings that gives more weight to front office decisions, leading to (b) more exciting action on the field, then we should also consider (c) Rich's suggestion of masking certain potentials in the draft -- knowing the potentials of every new player removes the real NFL-like "bust" possibility and just makes scouting a mere mathematical process.

This is why I say using draft pool. The solutions is have to less players at that level. If there is a bigger gab between Number 10 and Number 20 at a positions it will help. As players slowly retire we have to fill in with less talented players. There will be a spread. I say do it drastic because it's going to take 6-10 seasons for them to see the field anyways. If we do it over 10 season we looking at 15-20 season before anything happens.


@Dean the difference is Couch was the best QB in the Draft Hooker was 3 or 4. That is a huge Talent creep in a league. Over 12 seasons that means every team has 2 QBs at Couch level. The season Chicago lost all their QBs there was no drop until QB4.