College Football

[olivertheorem]

If there's no in-game standings, you could do something like this to sim one yourself (it would be a fair bit of work, but somehow I don't think that would stop an interested party).

Make a spreadsheet (well, multiple tabs probably) that produces each team's average current rating (assuming these are available). Use those average ratings, Bill James log5 method, a random number generator, and some kind of HFA adjustment (say, +/-5 on the ratings) to produce W/L results. You'd have to make the schedule up yourself (or, go find a full schedule online somewhere), and you wouldn't have scores....but you would have standings.

[dave1927p]

Originally Posted by olivertheorem

If there's no in-game standings, you could do something like this to sim one yourself (it would be a fair bit of work, but somehow I don't think that would stop an interested party).

Make a spreadsheet (well, multiple tabs probably) that produces each team's average current rating (assuming these are available). Use those average ratings, Bill James log5 method, a random number generator, and some kind of HFA adjustment (say, +/-5 on the ratings) to produce W/L results. You'd have to make the schedule up yourself (or, go find a full schedule online somewhere), and you wouldn't have scores....but you would have standings.

sounds like a ton of work...and when a game starts feeling like work I do not bother with it. Rather the game calculate average team ratings.

[Francis Cole]

Also, if we could do something like that for V1 (I don't know yet if we will), do we have to explain (and how) to the user that college stat rankings (e.g. who is the leading college rusher this year) mean very little.

[olivertheorem]

Originally Posted by dave1927p

sounds like a ton of work...and when a game starts feeling like work I do not bother with it. Rather the game calculate average team ratings.

Hey, I came up with it on the spot. Cut a guy some slack.

[Rizzo]

I realize it's not likely that the college teams would be playable in v1 but if they were there and simulating games and results that would be amazing.

[ConStar]

Originally Posted by Francis Cole

I guess the ultimate goal is to have it all in one game. So you start as a college coach, then get hired by an NFL team and then get to the draft the kids you were coaching.

Two games would be tricky, mainly as there is only one of me and I'm busy enough as it is.

Obviously this is all way in the future though! By which time maybe we have invented cloning.

Sorry I'm a bit late to this thread...

I bought Front Office Football The College Years and Grey Dog's Bowl Bound College Football and played them both for years. Humbly, I offer this advice if you're thinking about adding a college game, or adding it to your pro game:

1) Recruiting is what will drive the college game. It's where the real interest is, because it's not completely under your control, it really gives those computer-generated names some humanity and separates it from a pro game. Simply put, if you don't have a VERY good recruiting engine, the game will fall flat. Bowl Bound is the gold standard in the field at the moment; it might be worth your time to buy a copy and play a few seasons.

2) As such, you're going to end up with a database that might well dwarf OOTP. Assuming everything goes in the same game, you have 32 NFL teams, 120 Division-IA college teams, another 110-120 Division-IAA teams, another 100+ Division II teams and a bunch of Division-III teams, and then for recruiting purposes you've got every public and private high school in the United States, plus some Canadian schools, and now we're seeing players from Australia as well. If you can make this all into one game, my hat is off to you in a big way, but it might get unwieldy. On the other hand, there's a huge market for you guys here.

3) Please, whatever you do, don't skimp on the playcalling and formation options for either game. The failure of Front Office Football is that you can't call plays. It would be like playing OOTP with only a scoreboard and a scrolling text window, with no other control during the game. Bowl Bound improved this by a million percent, but it came out just as the spread-option offense was taking off, and as such there are no plays dealing with either it or the HUNH offense. Neither game has a play editor, either, and in football that's a pretty huge thing. That's the one place where EA Sports' NCAA series runs circles around everything else -- size of playbook and the ease of integrating it into a gameplan. EA was also good (up until 2012) of integrating the college and pro games together so that you could upload draft classes from NCAA 12 to Madden 12, for instance.

There's more, but that's the big areas of concern for me.

[Francis Cole]

1)I agree recruiting is very important. Luckily this isn't in V1 or the foreseeable future, so I don't have to worry about that just yet!

2)Starting with V1, I'm already re-designed all the DBs and way the data is stored etc compared to OOTP.

On the plus side you'll have better performance and with BTS it will be far easier to do more with the data (cross-referencing etc), on the negative side (as discussed before in other posts) this means that just because OOTP had customization for something doesn't automatically mean BTS will have it.
I know some people may be upset at that, but I think the pros outweigh the cons

In regards to the numbers:

Let's say c500 teams (NFL+College), and then for HS we don't need to a model all HS fully, aside from the name we can do some clever stuff (basically cheating ), so say another 500. That's 1000 teams in total. Let's double that just to be safe.

That's only 2k teams, I have no real worry there (FM is near 50k for example).

The amount of players is a concern however. Say we have an average of 50 players per team. That's 100k. That's not too bad if we again are clever.
The problem however is that if we store all retired players this number will continue to rise, I'll have to decide what to do (for example) with players who never make it out of HS etc.

3)This is not just a worry for the college game, but a worry for historic NFL games as well.
If we ever go back to NFL in the 50s then all those plays/formations etc will have to be different too

Again, luckily I don't have time to worry about that right now.

Thanks,
Francis

[Cryomaniac]

Originally Posted by Francis Cole

on the negative side (as discussed before in other posts) this means that just because OOTP had customization for something doesn't automatically mean BTS will have it.
I know some people may be upset at that, but I think the pros outweigh the cons

As I've said a lot here, I'm pro-customisation in all it's forms, so obviously this is disappointing. Generally though as long as it will potentially possible to make something customisable in a later version I think it's okay for V1.

Originally Posted by Francis Cole

3)This is not just a worry for the college game, but a worry for historic NFL games as well.
If we ever go back to NFL in the 50s then all those plays/formations etc will have to be different too

I've mentioned this before, but ideally for a future version there should be at a minimum, 3 or 4 pro playbooks for offence (run heavy, pass heavy, balanced, hurry up offence) and the same for defence (4-3, 3-4, 46, hybrid), then perhaps 3 college playbooks (pro-style, spread and flexbone) plus similar defensive playbooks and finally there should be at least one historical playbook, although obviously more if possible.

Playbooks are one area where the community might come in handy too, and as I mentioned before, some NFL (and some college) playbooks have been posted online in various places.

[goalieump413]

Originally Posted by Francis Cole

1)

...Again, luckily I don't have time to worry about that right now.

Thanks,
Francis

I've never seen this kind of sentence before

Anyhow,

I'm no database expert, but that doesn't sound like a lot, considering enterprise software can handle millions of entries.

And, I'm very happy you've chosen to develop the game into a college simulation too. People like me who played EA's NCAA have been pining for a modern college football simulation for a long time. I have a couple of questions:

1. Do you have some initial thoughts on player ratings? Since the plan is to develop both games into one universe, could the ratings scale be built so that there's no "translation" between college and pro?
2. Will the development of a college system delay development or the release of the pro version? I'd bet we'd all wait for the college version to come later...

Again, thank you for lifting our college spirits!

[Francis Cole]

1)Do you have some initial thoughts on player ratings? Since the plan is to develop both games into one universe, could the ratings scale be built so that there's no "translation" between college and pro?

The current system has been designed to take into account college ratings to a certain degree. It may have trouble at the lower end of HS ratings though.

2)Will the development of a college system delay development or the release of the pro version?

If it happens I can imagine it will be the main feature of that version, so all the time for development will be used to for that. e.g. V5, main feature = College, and not too much else.

[olivertheorem]

Add a couple checkboxes to clear the players who never got out of HS or college, respectively. That way people whose comps can handle it can keep all the players, and those with lesser hardware can restrict it as necessary.

[ConStar]

Francis,

One follow-up: Roster size. I'm glad you said something because this was a big drawback to the other two college games...

Pro rosters are 53 players, so that should be doable for you guys off the bat. The current NFL also has the practice squad, but there aren't many players on that (5? 10?). You could handle it like a reserve roster in OOTP.

But the big thing -- and this is major, for a college fan -- is the college roster has to be somewhere between 85-100. At the Division-IA level, which is what I'd assume most people are going to sim as, there are 85 scholarshipped athletes on the roster, plus walk-ons. The walk-on component is a big deal because it's a great flavor element to be able to take a chance on a walk-on, then see him develop into someone good enough to get a scholarship. Both FOFTCY and BBCF had this feature, but where they skimped was on initial roster size (I want to say it was in the neighborhood of 70 for each game, which made the college roster look like a pro roster.).

Incidentally, even capping the roster at 100 would fall short of where D-1 schools play. D-1 schools are allowed to bring in 105 players at the start of fall camp, then the roster expands to an unlimited number somewhere around the t-minus-2-week mark until season start. Once the rosters expand, most major programs go up around 125 and some go higher.

[olivertheorem]

While ConStar is right about real-world roster sizes, for the sake of manageability (both of the database and of the player's roster), I'd be willing to settle for 53-man roster with 5-10 walkons. At least for V1, anyway. I personally don't see the usefulness of having another 50-odd players per roster who aren't ever going to see the field, much less make the NFL.

[Cryomaniac]

Originally Posted by ConStar

Pro rosters are 53 players, so that should be doable for you guys off the bat. The current NFL also has the practice squad, but there aren't many players on that (5? 10?). You could handle it like a reserve roster in OOTP.

Practice squad in the NFL is currently 8 IIRC.

[ConStar]

Originally Posted by olivertheorem

While ConStar is right about real-world roster sizes, for the sake of manageability (both of the database and of the player's roster), I'd be willing to settle for 53-man roster with 5-10 walkons. At least for V1, anyway. I personally don't see the usefulness of having another 50-odd players per roster who aren't ever going to see the field, much less make the NFL.

I strongly disagree that it creates a manageability issue. The two college games I played had rosters around the 70 range and even that was too few.

The problem is, if you limit a roster to 53, it has a cascade effect on recruiting and makes it very unrealistic. Colleges are limited to 25 signees per year but no more than 85 in the program at a time; with 5 classes on campus (freshman, redshirt freshman, sophomore, junior, senior), that's an average of 17 recruits per year. With 53, it's basically 10. Trust me, it won't feel the same during a recruiting cycle.

A college game with 53-man rosters is just the pro game with different names, which wouldn't interest me much. The hook to both BBCF and FOFTCY was recruiting, how you juggled promises, numbers, feelings, etc.

The other issue is that the pros have a 53-man roster because they also have the ability to sign free agents. If they lose someone to injury, they just go sign someone else. You can't do that in college, and if you go two-deep at every position plus kickers, you have already spoken for 48 of your 53 players before you snap the first ball. You're not going to make it through a year with just 5 injuries.

I would rather the developers wait for a future patch and do the college game properly than go halfway.

[TGH-Adfabre]

Will there be college labor unions?

(CNN) -- The National Labor Relations Board in Chicago has ruled that football players at Northwestern University are employees and can unionize, the board said Wednesday.

Labor board: Northwestern University football players can unionize - CNN.com

[Francis Cole]

Originally Posted by TGH-Adfabre

Will there be college labor unions?





Labor board: Northwestern University football players can unionize - CNN.com

You will also be required to mark the papers of your players.
https://twitter.com/BryanAGraham/sta.../photo/1/large

[TGH-Adfabre]

Originally Posted by Francis Cole

You will also be required to mark the papers of your players.
https://twitter.com/BryanAGraham/sta.../photo/1/large

Hilarious! I am very excited for this game. I am also very impressed with how well you are managing expectations.

[Cryomaniac]

Originally Posted by TGH-Adfabre

Will there be college labor unions?





Labor board: Northwestern University football players can unionize - CNN.com

I can see the NCAA making joining a union an eligibility violation at some point soon.

[killershrew]

I love the recruiting in bowl bound. At first it is intimidating and feels like you'll never learn but after a few (or alot of maybe) seasons you start to figure it out. It's a real challenge to take a small school and win some games. In fairness most sports simulations are too easy after a while but in Bowl Bounds there's always a challenge to be had. I have FoFTCY also but it feels more like a draft class generator than an actual game.

Bowl Bound gives you that feeling of it being more complex than it actually is. I love it when i can trick myself like that