Front Page Sports Football....EGAD!

[garion333]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

My big issue with FOF is roughly the same as bigtrouble77's. My particular gripes are the fact that, 16 years after its original release, you can play with any league size you want as long as it's 32 teams in size, and the complete lack of attention paid to the coaching aspect of the game. I'm actually of roughly 20% of a mind to build my own game, as I have a really specific idea of what I would like a football game to be that I really can't expect any other dev to share, but sadly I am 80% too lazy for that.

Did you pick up FOF7? He fleshed coaches out a little, but not in a personality sense.

[Syd Thrift]

It's still "hey, go and hire these guys and they'll do this for you instead of you doing it". To me, that removes what is the most interesting aspect of the game of football. I want to coach, dammit.

[redfox000]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

It's still "hey, go and hire these guys and they'll do this for you instead of you doing it". To me, that removes what is the most interesting aspect of the game of football. I want to coach, dammit.

You can call your own plays you know, right?

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by redfox000

You can call your own plays you know, right?

Yes, but have you done this? If you call the same play 3 or 4 times in a game, it becomes less effective due to the "The defense seems familiar with this play" mechanic. This is annoying for a couple of reasons:

1. Young quarterbacks who don't have as many formations memorized perform poorly late in games, which is not necessarily accurate (Andrew Luck and Russell Wilson are two good examples of guys who have been pretty damn awesome at 4th quarter comebacks since they came into the league).

2. Good teams - Super Bowl caliber teams - have won consistently and readily by calling a relatively small number of plays. The best example of this is the late 90s Broncos, who had a playbook consisting of 6 plays (this is a thing you can do when a couple of those plays involve zone blocking because those plays give the running back the leeway to go into one of at least a couple and arguably several holes depending on what the defense is showing). Even this year, the Seahawks don't really run a huge number of different plays (for reasons similar to those Broncos, actually) and, an ill-timed pick aside, they did just fine late in games.

In real life, what happens if you run the same running play over and over again is not "the defense gets familiar with the play" and automatically negates its effectiveness. It sees a given set and does specific things to negate the play such as shift a linebacker over directly in front of the hole (not so easy with ZBS, of course) or cheat in the strong safety so that there are 8 men directly defending the run instead of 7, or forgo reading the play and defend as if it's a run until proven wrong. In turn, the offense counters this by running a counter (freezing the linebacker plugging that hole and catching him way out of position) or a play-action pass (freezing the safety for long enough that the man he's tasked to cover - usually the tight end - can now beat him deep).

Similarly, if a team runs the same route concept over and over again, you counteract that by changing up your coverage scheme. If a team over-relies on a hook route, dropping a guy back into the hook zone will often not only stop that play in its tracks but give your side an easy interception. Or, on the flip side, maybe you've run a sail route concept a couple times and killed the other team deep, causing them to play their cornerbacks several yards off the line. Depending on your personnel, this might just be the perfect moment to call a bubble screen and give a shifty wide receiver the ability to make a nice gain of his own just by making a move or two downfield.

I wouldn't call any of this stuff advanced football science that only football nerds care about. This is, like, the backbone of football strategy and I'm sorry to say that Gary Gorski has forsaken it for the entirety of the existence of FOF. Which, fine, the game is more about the front office experience than coaching. But let's not pretend that the game fills that other niche when it does not begin to do so.

[fredreed]

Here's an update on Front page sports football. The game is still full of bugs which still makes the game unplayable. From my understanding people still cannot re sign or sign any of their draft picks as It is still a major bug in the game. The game is still getting a really bad negative review from almost everyone who has brought this title. Most of them either cannot play the game or It's just full of bugs still. There hasn't really been any major update to the game since It's release. My advice don't bother with buying this title stay away from It and wait for BTS to be released.