The VPNFL files will give you excellent statistical performance and terrific play balance in your first season. To maintain those qualities requires some work on the part of the user. This page is about that work.

Adjusting Rookies

All players on VPNFL99 rosters have attributes that fall within a defined range by position. This is key to the performance of the files. Attribute ranges are set so that positions perform appropriately -- very few LBs are as fast as even slow DBs, all receivers are faster than linemen and so on. All players on VPNFL99 rosters also have their potential ratings set so that training camp will never take them above the allotted maximum for a given position/attribute. For instance, no WR will ever attain SP>85 through training camp.

Here follows the table of attribute ranges by position for VPNFL99 1.0.

Now for the short version of how to edit your rookie pool to maintain statistical performance and competitive balance.

1. Pick a utility and study the documentation. FBEdit98 is available on the FB98 CD-ROM, is fully functional and free. Shaun Sullivan has made the deluxe version available for free too -- good luck getting it to download. If you're a spreadsheet wiz, you may prefer to use an exporting utility and do your editing in a spreadsheet or database program.
2. Do global edits by position/attribute, raising or lowering actuals and potentials so that no player in the draft pool exceeds or can exceed the top of the appropriate range. For instance, no rookie WR should have aSP (actual SP) higher than 85 or pSP (potential SP) higher than 86. (Potential maximum may vary for remote leagues depending on training camp rules.)
3. The bottom of the rookie range should take care of itself. It's okay if some players are just not worth drafting. Still, we suspect that even the worst rookie should come within 10 points of the lower end of the attribute range. For instance, the slowest WR in the draft pool should probably have SP 60 or so, the weakest OL should probably have ST around 70, and so on. After all, they did theoretically play the position with some success in college.
4. Do any tweaking on the individual player level you want to do.
5. That's it! Easy for me to say, tedious for you to do.
   • Note: There weren't any rating adjustment utilities when Jim wrote the above. Now, however, there is Ryan Swift's ratings adjuster utility. You can find a link to Ryan's site on the Links & Leagues page.

Advanced Rookie Pool Topics

• How close do you want your incoming rookies to come to the top of the range? This is a matter of taste, but it's worth noting that every year some rookies are starters and even appear near the top of their appropriate leader boards. It's not realistic (so saith the Dark Side) to believe that even the best rookies should take 3 or 4 training camps to develop into worthwhile starters. In today's NFL there's tremendous pressure to draft players who can play now, or at least soon.
• At the same time, you want most teams' reserves to come in near the bottom of the ranges in several attributes. Which gets us to another issue. Not every draftee has a huge upside. Some players are destined to be backups and role-players. Therefore, unlike the game-generated rookie pools, not all or even most players should have sky-high potentials. Randy Moss can't get much faster. Keep this kind of thing in mind when setting your potentials.
• Training camp works like this: TC% x [pot - actual] = improvement. So if the actual is 70, the potential is 80 and you allocate 30% of camp time to that attribute, it goes up .3 x 10 or 3. The post-camp attribute value is 73. If you set a maximum camp allocation of 50%, then the highest any player can get is one point less than his potential. (Frex, player has aSP 84 and pSP 86. If he gets a TC allocation of 50% to SP training then he will improve 1 point to aSP 85. Because of rounding, he'll never attain aSP 86. The VPNFL99 files assume that users will assign as much as 50% of camp time to a single attribute. Many remote leagues limit camp allocations to 35, 30 or even 20% so that players won't make "unrealistic" improvements. Frankly, the Dark Side thinks real players make "unrealistic" improvements in the course of a single season all the time -- that's why some players have "breakout years." But if your league sets a low TC% limit you need to adjust potentials accordingly. If your limit is 35%, the highest potential should be 2 points greater than the highest actual. If your limit is 30 or 25%, it should be 3 points. Otherwise, you can't train up to the maximum.
• Certain attributes have an actual maximum of 99. Since potentials can't be higher than 99, it becomes impossible for the training camp engine to train a player up to the maximum. Either the player comes into the league at the maximum (not unreasonable for OL ST but absurd for QB IN) or he Never Gets There. Well, maybe you think there'll never be another Dan Marino. But you might want to consider giving players that last point by hand at some point.
• You can find links to roster management utilities on the Links & Leagues page.

Other business

1. The training camp and aging algorithms simply don't model the full range of improvement and deterioration of player performance over time that one sees in the actual NFL. Sorry! Some players, especially OL and QBs, fall apart too quickly and retire too soon. You may want to get Lorne Sundby's Unretire utility and rescue certain players from oblivion at the beginning of each season.
2. If you play solitaire and want the computer teams to remain competitive, you've got to help them out. That means looking over their rosters to make sure they haven't drafted 6 QBs or cut their DL down to the minimum 4 etc. Sundby's BalanceMe utility can help with this. You can also experiment with the draft profile window in FB98, but frankly, we've been playing FBPro for 3 years and we have no idea how that thing works.
3. Certain team-specific problems could develop over time. For instance:
   • TENN and SD are ace-back teams who make no use of the FB position in their game plans. If one of these teams drafts a fullback, he'll be wasted. Solution: Dump the FB, change the game plan or change the FB's position to TE or HB as appropriate using a utility.
   • WASH uses HB3 (Brian Mitchell) as their third-down back (Run Right and Pass Right plays) and return man. After retirement, the draft and training camp, Mitchell is now HB2, but is still clearly the best RB for the 3rd-down back duties. Solution: change the game plan or commit to switching Mitchell's depth slot manually every week.
   • Pittsburgh runs a 3-4. After the draft they have only 6 LBs and Joel Steed has retired. Solution: Trade for some LBs or switch to a 43-based plan.
   • And yes, I am talking about doing these things for the computer's teams. It's the price of continued challenge and sensible performance. If all this extra work means you can't collect your 40 seasons' trophies quite as quickly, well, slow down and enjoy life.
4. As far as we're concerned, it's "okay" to tweak your game plans and even develop custom plays within the spirit of our own. But we also think that, as time goes on, you should start distributing your custom plays into the computer team game plans. After all, the NFL is full of plagiarists.