General FOF8 Comment: Balance works best

[albionmoonlight]

Like many here, I've focused much more on the new offensive system than the defensive, so these comments have more to do with that. Also, this is much more of a general comment than a Ben Specialtm with 10,000 simulations and 10 pages of screenshots to prove my point.

The new system is great in the amount of control I have over the team. If I want my stud WR to get 250+ targets a season, I can do that easily. If I want my RB to pound it up the middle 25 times a game, I can do that. It's fun.

But my greatest team success has come when I do none of these things. Getting average to slightly-above-average players at each position (and, of course, as good a QB as possible) and designing an offense to spread the ball out as much as possible leads to the most productive offense. When things are clicking, I have no skill positions players getting any awards or even coming close to 1,000 yards.

Have others noticed this? Anyone manage to put up a great offense by focusing on a stud player or an unbalanced system?

[korme]

I've found success running the hell out of the ball in the Erhardt-Perkins offense, but when I try to to do a spread pass attack I come up thorns.

[wustin]

I've found success running the hell out of the ball in the Erhardt-Perkins offense, but when I try to to do a spread pass attack I come up thorns.

Same here. If you have an elite receiving running back, it's not hard to put up Marshall Faulk numbers.

[TAFIV]

heh in SP Ezekial Elliott 3 seasons 1004, 1237, and 1573 yards respectively getting better every year :p

[SocratesJC]

As a general observation (and based on some of the comments Jim has made) I think balance has always been a large point of emphasis (including previous versions. I'm not sure if FOF8 is more so or just the same.

Actually, I think the games obsession for balance might even go a hair too far. Normally games have the opposite problem, where balance is never made to be important enough at all. Jim has done a great job painstakingly making sure that a team can't cheat there way through using a single trick play every down (I'm thinking of madden right about here). However, when you forget about games and think of the NFL, balance is great, but there does come a point sometimes when a particular CB is just not good enough and a QB will just hammer him all game, particularly if he has a WR that can just destroy him that way (and it works). Tom Brady ripped apart my beloved Seahawks by targeting Tharold Simon in the Superbowl a few years ago. He could do so while using the exact same play 2 times in a row.

This is probably a case of the better of 2 evils though. I don't know if there is a way to get the best of both worlds. I certainly prefer FOF philosophy over madden.

[Dryden]

The new system is great in the amount of control I have over the team. If I want my stud WR to get 250+ targets a season, I can do that easily. If I want my RB to pound it up the middle 25 times a game, I can do that. It's fun.

Do you have any advice on how to set up an offensive system that specifically? I've been mostly focusing on the defensive side of the ball this year, trying to test out a variety of different setups but I still don't feel like I have a good grasp of the system.

Case in point; just had the 17th ranked defense in the NFL despite having 4 DL with 80+ ratings (running a 4-3), a 60+ CB, a couple of truly mediocre LBs and a bad SS but an 85+ god of a FS.

[TAFIV]

i'd probably move that FS to SS immediately myself since an FS will only see action on deep passes or if a runner gets by everyone else, but a SS is a big part of most teams run-stopping game as well as pass protection so he sees action basically every play

[Dryden]

I had considered it, but my dream was for him to turn into an Ed Reed type gamebreaker and I just kept trying to force it. My SS was a pretty good athlete but the only thing he was good at was run stopping so I played a lot of cover 1 - buzz.

[Sharkn20]

I had considered it, but my dream was for him to turn into an Ed Reed type gamebreaker and I just kept trying to force it. My SS was a pretty good athlete but the only thing he was good at was run stopping so I played a lot of cover 1 - buzz.

Just play the FS out of position until you get an All-Around SS too :)

[bdubbs]

I've simmed through about 10 seasons the last few days and I've barely changed the game planning season to season and I've had a lot of success with offensive players that don't fit the system in terms of wins, but the stats aren't there a lot of the time except for my QB.

I started as the Steelers with the X factor on the low setting and in 10 seasons I have 7 playoff appearances and 2 Bowl wins for a total record of 113-46 over that period of time.

Something interesting I've noticed is my tight ends seem to be my leading receivers in both catches and yards 5 times. I've only had a WR go over a thousand yards in a season twice even though I've only had a QB throw under 3,500 yards in a season once over that stretch. The best season by far was for Antonio Brown who amassed 1261 yards in the season where Ben threw for 5,400. By the way Ben did that in 2018 the season before he retired after his ovr rating had declined into the high 40s. I had a game plan set up where they were throwing the ball about 70% of the time and for whatever reason Ben was on fire all season.

Antonio Brown was rated in the low 60s for about 5 years but was routinely the second and sometimes even third leading receiver on the team despite significantly higher ratings. This could very easily be the fact that I hadn't delved deep into gameplanning. I think it could also possibly be teams tendency to play "cover best".

A couple random things I've noticed about the game in general. In these 10 years I've been unable to get my hands on an elite RB (x factor wasn't friendly to Bell) and I routinely find my RB's coming up under 4 ypc on the season.

When it comes to the offensive line it feels like ratings matter more than they used to. I felt like in FoF7 I could get away with having a mediocre offensive line but I started noticing I was giving up far too many sacks and that this was likely holding back the running game as well.

The draft system I really do love, not that it seems to have changed, but I'm concerned that the WR position is a little too thin at the elite level in draft classes. I've seen draft classes that seemed very weak, and I've seen others where you practically can't miss in the first 25 picks which I like. Elite QB's seem to be popping up at a rate pretty close to 1 per draft. I didn't see an Elite QB prospect for the first 3 seasons. I traded the house to move from pick 26 to 1 the first season one appeared (Ben Roethlisberger had just retired) and there's only been 1 other QB to enter the league since then with an 80 or better rating. The most QB talent I've seen in a draft is 3 guaranteed franchise QB rookies at the top of the board.

Defensive Line and Linebacker seem to be the deepest positions and I almost always find myself drafting one of these positions if I don't have a top 20 pick. Interestingly there seems to be a bigger premium on offensive tackles than in the past. I tend to see much more talent depth at center and guard in drafts and high caliber tackles tend to disappear in the top 15 picks. Stud RB's go very quick too, I've never gotten my hands on one.

As a team that found consistent regular season success I almost never have a pick better than 25 unless I trade for it so in SP I found myself building my teams by creating a nasty defensive front 7 through the draft since the best players left available were always dline and lbs while occasionally peppering in a guard, corner, or safety if a very good prospect fell to me. The rest of the team had to be developed primarily through free agency.

So drafting has to be done a little differently. The only way you get a truly elite QB, WR, T, CB, or RB most of the time is to have a top 10 pick, and usually more like top 5 if we're talking 70+. So when I happen to be in one of those spots those are the only positions I'm really looking at now. I'm not saying I wouldn't take a LB who looks like he could possibly be the best in the league, but it's a position I know I'm not going to have much trouble filling in the future.


Also I still have a huge cap advantage over the AI because of guaranteed money. The cap effect of my QB's contract alone was saving over $10 mil / season in the last 3 years and I consistently find myself able to retain more talent than the AI because theit system revolves around back loaded deals with low bonuses. There was a 3 season stretch where the free agency market was weak and the cap must have been expanding close to the max and I went from $30 mil in cap space to $80 mil due to the retirement of Ben, the end of a bad contract to Bell, and the end of Antonio Brown's tenure as well. I had to shell out a couple big money deals to retain some UFA's that I had forgotten to resign earlier that year but I managed to keep $65 million in open cap space and went 14-2 that year.

It really kind of killed the SP immersion for me.

[TroyF]

When you are talking about stats in this game, it ALL revolves around the game plan. Running 10 seasons with the same game plan is going to give you very similar numbers in terms of targets and rushes. If your stud X WR is playing with a gameplan that gives him 6 or 7 targets a game, he WILL be underutilized.

As for backloaded contracts and all that jazz, it's exactly why most of us play with some sort of house rules in single player. I won't backload a contract so I can get an advantage over the AI for example. I'll play the game with the rules the AI teams play with, even if the game would allow me to exploit them another way.

[garion333]

Yeah, my house rule for renegs is to take what the game offers and not mess around with things to maximize the contract for my benefit. Too easy to destroy the AI in cap management.

[MizzouRah]

Yeah, my house rule for renegs is to take what the game offers and not mess around with things to maximize the contract for my benefit. Too easy to destroy the AI in cap management.

I have been doing the same.

[henry296]

Yeah, my house rule for renegs is to take what the game offers and not mess around with things to maximize the contract for my benefit. Too easy to destroy the AI in cap management.

I also find it very tedious to keep tweaking since you never get a counter-offer.

[albionmoonlight]

Do you have any advice on how to set up an offensive system that specifically?

I have shitty TEs--paying no attention to the position. And my overall gameplan has no plays targeting the Y receiver.

I go through and pretty much make sure that there's about a 1/3 mix of targets to X, Z, and R, with a smattering of others (screens, 4th and 5th WR, etc.)

I then make sure that my best three WRs are always either X, R, or Z, endurance dependent.