GAMEPLAN            

FORMATIONS

STARTING OFFENCE

An idea under consideration is to add a "starting formation" on offence in a similar way to defence. This would mean that you lose form when you change it. The effect of your starting formation would be that your offence is stronger in that formation, and less strong the further you change from it. Changing a few players who do specific jobs shouldn't reduce the effectiveness of your offence very much, or at all, but wholesale changers are not usual in normal situations. The effect should be to narrow the range of formations used by any given team.

The intention is that this is something to help customise different teams to be more different. And to do it in a visible way. But it might give us some other benefits at the same time (read on...).

TRAINING

Along with the starting formation we'd add training on formations to help make teams more consistent over the season. What you do most, you get better at, and a major change in your style of offence is something you'd normally do between seasons and not in mid-season.

Rather than add another training box to the normal turnsheet, we'd probably add some to the turnsheet in training camp. Maybe with some extra offence and defence training boxes as well. Then we'd add training points for the formations that show in the league report each week, the same as for play calls. Changing your starting formation would reduce your accumulated training.

I'd like to avoid having a training box on the normal turnsheet for formations so that a coach preparing for a game can look back over previous league reports and have a very good idea what formations the opposition will use. If an opponent comes up with something very different then you know they're playing against the system, because they haven't got accumulated training for it (unless they planned for it carefully in training camp) or they're prepared for it not working very well in the short term while they're swapping over to a new style of offence.

BASIC VS ADVANCED

I'm sure this a good point to remind people that in the advanced game, which is the main version of this game, the defence can read the formation and react to it. If you're playing a cut-down version of the game and you find the limitations of the basic gameplan annoying, because people can use formations in unrealistic ways without you be unable to react, then you should be aware that you chose to play that version, that has more guesswork and less realism.

FREE AGENCY

An interesting suggestion in relation to the free agency rule (which is being used in my leagues at present) is to increase the risk of a player qualifying for conditional free agency according to whether or not he's a starter. High-value backups are the guys who are most likely to look for other teams.

There's a counter-argument, however, that it's high value starters that other teams are mostly likely to want to steal, so we might be looking at cause-and-effect being the wrong way around. Backups are the guys that get released, because they're not needed, while starters with itchy feet get extra money to stay. Even so, backups are more easily signed by someone else becuase they're probably on lower contracts than the starters and offer better value for money. Smart starters probably stay where they are, in a scheme that they know is good for them.

Either way, concentrating the axe on the guys you might be happy to ditch is user-friendly, and if you choose your starting formation on offence then that tells us which guys to pick on.

DEFENCE OVERCALLS

An option I've looked at from time to time, to deal with the inherent differences between a game that's played strictly from a gameplan and real life (where a coach can make corrections "on the fly") is to develop a system of overcalls for the defence on the field. If there's a glaring mismatch between what the offence appears to be doing (according to the formation they've lined up in) and what the defence is planning, then the defence needs to be able to respond.

Defences already adjust to the offence, of course, but not as strongly as they can in real life, and not enough to deal with extreme variations in formations.

What would happen in real life? Presumably there's a choice between calling a timeout on the field and going back to the coaching staff, or falling back into some pre-determined scheme that either tries to cover all eventualities reasonably well, or makes a guess and goes all-out to stuff it.

In our case we're only going to be able to make it work if there's a pre-determined adjustment already decided upon, and it's varied enough that the offence can't exploit it by triggering it deliberately. Or we take it away from the coach entirely and use a complex procedure that isn't going to be predictable (eg. split a random choice between a basic sound defence, a very agrressive defence, and whichever defence kills what the offence did last time in the same situation).

Quantifying what constitutes a "glaring mismatch" is another problem. Swapping a running back for a tight end almost certainly isn't one. Two extra wide receivers? For sure. One extra receiver? Probably, or maybe. If you look at the different formations and what you really need to react to, then it looks to me like it's the number of wide receivers that's important unless what you want to do in response is blitz, in which case it's a question of the numbers of guys who can protect the passer.

All in all, this is probably not something that's going to happen soon. I've already been thinking about it for nearly twenty years, after all. But it's an area to which we can give some thought.

GUESSING GAMES

Don't forget that there's nothing wrong with using "extreme" formations, or the "wrong" formation for the situation. Run-and-shoot teams stayed in their spread formation in short yardage, for example. The problem is just that with pre-written gameplans it's difficult to adjust if you meet one that isn't expected, or you're forced to guess which one you'll meet because the opponent uses two or more different ones.

It might be that we don't really need a change in this area. If the effect of extreme formations when they're different to the starting formation is reduced then we might see the guesswork gameplans disappearing. They might need to be only marginally less effective to make them not worth using.

Although it would be nice if the guesswork was reduced by an improvement we're already proposing for other reasons there are several other changes that could be made directly. It might be enough to just reduce the effect of formations on offence, or maybe it would be better to take formations out of the basic game. They probably shouldn't have been added in the first place, since the "downside" of changing your formation (that it gives away your intentions) isn't included. But it would be a shame to lose them.

Another option would be to compare the formation in each situation with the one used the previous game and reduce the offence training value if it changes a lot. It's why real teams wouldn't make dramatic changes: constant chopping and changing and training in different formations is going to make the team less effective. And it could be made visible by throwing extra "confusion penalties" the same as with other duff formations.