Some Bye-week food for thought on Realism in the PNFL

[Dean-Atlanta]

I was thinking about this yesterday afternoon, about how realistic simming tens of thousands of games involving thousands of plays and if this is realistic to NFL football. One coach refers to tens of thousands simmed games as weekly practices, but is this truly realistic?

There ae thousands of plays used every season in the NFL, much like our league. That part is realistic. So imagine if each team, each week, practices by having their offense practice 1500 or more plays on offense vs their defense practicing defensive plays used by the other team, and then their defense practices 1500+ of their plays against the offense practicing plays used by the other team. Would play the equivalent of 16,000 practice games to practice all those plays? Of course not. There are not enough hours in a week nor can the human body tolerate playing that much football in a one week period. That is ridiculously and highly unrealistic. But that is what is typically done via mass simming of games. Simming is viewed as a necessary evil by those who do it, but no one really enjoys simming 15-20 or more thousand games every week. We can't ban mass simming because such a rule is unenforceable. But think about this... simming becomes "necessary" because teams want to finds the best plays out of several thousand plays in our play files.

But how many plays are in an actual playbook used by a typical NFL team? Not every plays the entire league uses or that has every existed. No team, even in an season or off-season, can practice and learn how to competently execute, that many plays. So teams create and use smaller playbooks in real life NFL football. I Googled it found out that a typical NFL team, and I found this:

[url]footballxos.com/free-football-playbooks/offense-playbooks/nfl-playbooks/[/url]

A full answer to this question could be a bit complicated, but a simple answer is, the number of actual plays used, on each side of the ball, is probably 150-250 at most. If we created a winlogstats DB for each PNFL team last season from all that team's log files, we might see around 150-200 plays on each side of the ball used by each team.

We can't ban mass simming to make the league more realistic. But if we address this issue from the other end of the situation, we could make the league a LOT more realistic, and allow coaches who do not mass-sim, to be more competitive without mass simming.

Here's how this could be done, in the future:

Each team would 2oo offensive plays and 200 defensive plays, which could include 20 new plays, and those 400 plays would be all the offensive and defensive plays they use for the entire season. Maybe Brian could develop a tool that would check game plan against the team's playbook list to quickly check that the team uses only those plays. The tool could be used by coaches and league officers to check game plans fore this.

This would massively reduce mass simming because teams only scout the other team by their 400 plays, and since that is about 4 unique game plans on each side of the ball, a team could sim as few as 800-1000 games to sim against all those plays, instead of tens of thousands. Coaches that do not sim can still not sim and use other methods to scout and prepare to play their weekly opponents.

By having to build weekly game plan from the smaller group of plays each team selects in the off-season, this would more realistically reflect real life NFL football.

I think this would be far more realistic than tens of thousands of games mass simmed. And a tool to check game plans would make this VERY easy to implement. What do you all think?

[Mitch-Dolphins]

I agree that the play pool should be reduced. Too many bad plays, clones and unused plays.

Delete all plays that haven't been called atleast 3 times in the last 5 seasons unless the play was introduced in the past season.

[Rich-League Officer]

If I understand your argument it's this.
***Teams only use 150-250 plays each season
***If we restrict a teams playbook to 200, it would reduce simming.

My response would be, flawed on both counts.
The better teams use double that amount in any given season.
And, a smaller number of plays would just make it easier to laser focus sims on that smaller number.

The issue is not simming.
It's that we have 1500 shit plays on O/D that never get used.
If anything, it maybe slows down a simmer hoping to find gold in this collection of crap.
I think a major deletion is long overdue.

I did a quick look at the 2046 season and checked 2 very successful coaches and they used 400+ plays.
The reason it appears we only use 150-200 is, bad coaches are copying successful coaches.
And, it does not work. But, they win enough games to fool themselves thinking it does.
The reason is, more than half your games might be against another coach who "mailed it in"
Well, neither coach leveled up his coaching skill.
And rolling out copied plans or old PPPs might net you 5-10 wins but it's tough to win SBs or win consistently year after year.

We have been down this road before, this game is not the NFL.
They can't practice a pass 500x like we can.
But, Andy Reid is not wasting time trying to create 6 brand new custom plays each week.
He already has binders with thousands of plays to pull from.
NFL coaches also do not mail it in. They also can be fired and also get paid.
This is a game. You play it the way you want to play it.
Sim away, create plays, do nothing and hope for the best.
Is this league competitive? sure seems like it to me.
Week to week, anyone can win games. The key is some coaches have a formula for being consistent over time.
That is your challenge to create that while it fits into your real life.
But, as this season unfolds, I have NO idea who is going to win the SB. No team has been overly impressive.
Games are close but even the good teams seem vulnerable to me.
Isn't that the idea?

[Dean-Atlanta]

I agree that the play pool should be reduced. Too many bad plays, clones and unused plays.

Delete all plays that haven't been called at least 3 times in the last 5 seasons unless the play was introduced in the past season.

When we get the tool that Brain discussed on the show, that will make creating game plans much faster and easier, the effect of mass purges that has been disruptive for coaches using simming (or season data) to build game plans will be far less disruptive, then the idea of purging plays not used in the last 5 seasons makes more sense.

[Dean-Atlanta]

Excellent response Rich and many good points made. I think you understand well what I was wanting to communicate.

There is a lot of crap in the play files, much of which we never use. There are plays that good one week against one team and not so good another week against another team. One week a plays is play of the week on Charlie's scouting report and another week it is a dud of the week. This happens.

I think with the game plan creation tool that Brian talked about, it will streamline the creation or practice or sim gam e plans and make future plays purges far less disruptive. With that, perhaps we should purge the play files of plays not used in the last 5 seasons, every off-season.

Then those who sim, or do not sim, van be more focused on working with a smaller pool of usable plays rather than a play pool populated by unused less effective plays.

[Matt-Jacksonville]

Unless teams study Justin's win against Baltimore, we better hope Justin wins the NFC or else we will see Baltimore win the Super Bowl.

[Dean-Atlanta]

It's up to the AFC playoff teams to defeat The Headless Horseman. It can be done.

[Mitch-Dolphins]

Baltimore won't be in the Super Bowl.

[Dan-Cincinnati]

I think the more plays the better. Don't see any reason to erase legal plays that have been created. This won't stop anyone from winning by simming practices. If a play is not effective you can simply not practice against it and it will save you the same amount of time that erasing it from the pool will

[Brian-Broncos]

When we get the tool that Brian discussed on the show, that will make creating game plans much faster and easier.

In case you missed it, I'm creating a tool to update a game plan from a list of plays and to create a list of plays from a game plan. I have been working on it and it should be ready in the next week or two.