[Matt23134]

I have found in my short time researching strategy/text sim football games that they either focus on mainly GM duties, or mainly on the field playcalling duties. I've yet to find one that does both spectacularly.

I prefer the on field focus over the GM management stuff. For this, Action PC Football and Second and Ten Football are good. I only own SAT and have been really satisfied with it so far. You're right though, these are mainly for replaying single seasons. These don't offer and career/franchise mode options.

Front Office Football is really good if you like the GM stuff and you love looking at spreadsheets. It has the ability to call plays in game but I never tried this so I don't know how accurate it is. I found FOF to be more overwhelming than fun. Pro Football Simulator is very similar but the developer is continually improving on it. FOF seems to be pretty much dead.

I don't have much experience with Head Coach 09, but I know a lot of people here love it.

Bowl Bound College Football is a really fun game that focuses more on the management side of things. It allows you to take over any DIV I program and build it up through a career mode (or move on to bigger, better programs). It offers in-game play calling but I found the results of the plays to be kind of random. It didn't really seem like any play made a difference over the other. If you just want to sim games though, results seemed a lot more accurate. I LOVED this game for a long while, but as someone who mainly enjoys being the coach and not the GM, I got tired of the inconsistent play by play results.

I was too lazy to include links to any of these programs, but they can all be easily found by Google.