Weather effects in FOF 2k7

[Galaril]

How is the weather effects in FOF 2K7? Is it similar results to FOF 2K4.

[gstelmack]

I won't have any empirical data until I get the log format figured out.

[mmarra82]

Does anyone out there take into account the weather for their game?

Reason I ask, I have a game in Chicago which is scheduled to be cold (24 degrees), snowy and winds at 19MPH. Is it necessary to adjust with the offensive game plan? Common sense says yes, however, I cannot find any information on it.

[direct.entropy]

The help file does indeed say that it does... but you know - that's one thing that would be very, very hard to test. If Jim coded it into the game, then you would think it affects the passing and kicking game most.

Yet, I've never seen any messages (in my short time) taking weather into account. Do defensive backs ever slip? Or do passes 'float' in windy games?

[direct.entropy]

I always thought and the help file does say that it affects attendance. The effect on game play has never been noticeable but I don't ever look at my kicking statistics which is what I think it would effect most.

[jdavidbakr]

The help file does indeed say that it does... but you know - that's one thing that would be very, very hard to test. If Jim coded it into the game, then you would think it affects the passing and kicking game most.

Yet, I've never seen any messages (in my short time) taking weather into account. Do defensive backs ever slip? Or do passes 'float' in windy games?

I've seen messages in the log about the wind blowing passes off course, runners slipping and falling, fumbles and incompletes being caused by wet balls. Here's a smattering from the windiest game I've seen:

Played in Kansas City, MO, weather: 85 degrees, stormy, 58 mph wind.

Birmingham: Single-Back formation with trips receivers, strength is right. The defense is in a 43 with goal-line personnel and 1-deep, man-to-man coverage, expecting the run.
3-4-BIR47 (1Q: 10:06) Turk Schonert pass fell incomplete, intended for RB Earnest Jackson. S Deron Cherry defended the pass. The wind blew that pass off course.

Birmingham: I formation, strength is right. The defense is in a 43 with nickel personnel and 2-deep bump-and-run coverage, expecting the pass.
2-9-KCY36 (1Q: 04:20) Earl Gant ran a counterplay inside the right tackle for 2 yards. Tackled by OLB Bob Brudzinski, assisted by DE Art Still. Gant lost his footing on the wet field.

Birmingham: Pro formation, strength is right. The defense is in a 43 with goal-line personnel and 1-deep, man-to-man coverage, expecting the run. Cherry is blitzing.
1-10-BIR18 (2Q: 06:19) Earl Gant ran inside the left tackle for 0 yards. Tackled by S Deron Cherry. The ball was fumbled and recovered by KCY ILB Randy Gradishar to the BIR18. The weather has created a very slippery ball today.

Birmingham: Weak formation, strength is left. The defense is in a 43 with goal-line personnel and 1-deep, bump-and-run coverage, expecting the run. Odom is blitzing.
1-10-KCY33 (2Q: 02:50) Turk Schonert pass fell incomplete, intended for WR Duriel Harris. OLB Bob Brudzinski knocked the ball out of his grasp. The wind blew that pass off course. PENALTY: Birmingham was called for an Ineligible Receiver Downfield. The penalty was declined.

Kansas City: Pro formation, strength is right. The defense is in a 43 and 1-deep, man-to-man coverage, keying aggressively on the run. Hickman is blitzing.
1-10-KCY40 (4Q: 11:37) Frank Pollard ran around the left tackle for 2 yards. Tackled by S Steve Freeman, assisted by DE Mike Raines. Pollard lost his footing on the wet field.

Kansas City: Pro formation, with the second receiver in the slot, strength is right. The defense is in a 43 with nickel personnel and 3-deep zone coverage, keying aggressively on the pass.
3-10-KCY06 (4Q: 01:22) Jim Zorn pass was dropped by WR Jim Jensen. The wind blew that pass off course.

At the same time, there were long field goals (40+) that probably shouldn't have had a chance in 60MPH winds.

[gstelmack]

I did a study back in 2k4 (and with some of the work of primelord and celeval, may be time to run it again) to look at the effects of rain. Solecismic's claim was that weather had a minimal impact, and if the play did not say "ball was slippery" or "player slipped on wet turf", it did not affect that play at all.

My study showed that nearly all stats (turnovers, yards, etc) were very close, except for rushing yards, where yards per carry dipped something like 0.3, or 10% of the total. Which seemed to match anecdotal evidence that it was better to pass more when it was raining.

But none of this included wind or any 2k7 tweaks, so we need to run it again.

[elmatt]

Since I've joined, I've read about everything in the reference thread (which is alot).

Never, though, have I come across anything regarding the weather conditions and their effects on the game; like in real life when its raining the passing game would likely decline or when its cold the passing game would still likely decline.

So, are the effects of bad weather apparent in FOF?

Thanks in advance.

[gstelmack]

We had a long discussion on this in FOF2k4. The answer then was that the affects are there but minimal and you'll always see it mentioned in the logs (Solevision for 2k7). You'll see "slipped on the wet grass" or "ball was hard to handle" or something like that. However, I have yet to see a specific mention of wind effects in the 2k7 game logs, so I'm not sure how/why they affect gameplay, and I don't know why they don't get a mention in the logs if that's how weather effects are communicated to us.

I do know that when I did my study in 2k7 (I took game logs and compared rain / snow / clear games for a variety of stats like turnovers, yards, etc) the only noticable difference was running game yards per carry which dropped something like 10% (something like 4.1 to 3.8), which corresponded with anecdotal evidence that it was better to pass when it rained. That was the only noticable statistical difference, things like fumbles were pretty comparable. I have not done a similar study for 2k7. Yet. Although I think we have enough info in the databases to do this right now. Hmmm...

[stevew]

I believe wind is the main factor that effects passing. Not rain so much.

*edit* in real life. I've never bothered to look at the conditions in an FOF game. Ever.

[Autumn]

I've definitely noticed anecdotally that when the wind is high my passing yardage goes down and my QB scrambles A LOT more.

[gstelmack]

Ben's getting me some data, I hope to have some time to analyze tonight and answer some of these questions...

[tarcone]

My thought is that wind affects the kicking game most. If you set it so your FG kicker kicks a max of 55 yards, if he is kicking into a stiff breeze you are more likely to punt.

[gstelmack]

Okay, here's the plan since I'm having some data collection issues:

I am going to write a quick utility that will load a league and generate the data for us to analyze. I'll then pass that around to a few folks who can run it on some leagues and then we'll collate the data. Then we can see how numbers change in various forms of weather.

[Ben E Lou]

Don't worry with that utility, Greg. I just sent you a total of 30ish seasons of data.

[gstelmack]

Yes, saw it, woohoo! I've got someone else who may be able to add to it as well. Off to work with Excel!

[gstelmack]

Freakin' vBulletin not letting me post tables. What I'm seeing from a sample of 8191 games (so far, maybe more later) is:

Rushing yardage still noticably declines with rain. No weather = 4.16 yards per carry (6638 games), rain = 3.90 yards per carry (1314 games), stormy = 3.29 yards per carry (109 games), snow = 3.52 yards per carry (130 games).
Passing doesn't change much with clear or rain (both at 6.76 yards per attempt and close on completions) but drops noticably with stormy or snow (6.15/5.88, and yards per completion drop as well from 10.92/11.05 to 10.07/9.56).
Field Goals seem unaffected.
Net Punt Yardage stays the same, but the number of punts increase the worse the weather gets (duh).
Fumbes are really bad in stormy weather (4.29/game) but better in other conditions (2.96/3.18/3.18), maybe a 10% increase in rain or snow.So offense in general goes down when weather gets bad.

Correlations are similar as wind picks up, but I think that's in part because of the typically corresponding precipitation. Wind effects overall seem slight, although I need to figure out how to group them properly. And of course high wind conditions suffer from a small sample size in my data.

Someone with a better stats background than I could probably take the data and do a more detailed correlation analysis, as right now it's hard for me to determine how much precip / wind affects passing vs rushing. My suspicion (based on 2k4) is precip hurts a rushing attack, wind hurts a passing attack, but since they often go hand-in-hand offense in general goes down with both.

[gstelmack]

The data I have so far along with the pivot tables that I used for the above is available at http://www.gstelmack.com/WeatherData.xlsx.

[tarcone]

Im guessing it would be impossible to really tell how FGs are affected. Sure the same amount may be kicked but the distance is what is affected. I have seen where my FG kicker wont kick into a high wind in the range that I set for him.
And how would you know which way the wind is blowing, etc.
I know this is impossible to get data on.

[Ben E Lou]

What I'm seeing from a sample of 8191 games (so far, maybe more later) is:
Rushing yardage still noticably declines with rain. No weather = 4.16 yards per carry (6638 games), rain = 3.90 yards per carry (1314 games), stormy = 3.29 yards per carry (109 games), snow = 3.52 yards per carry (130 games).
FAIR: 4.35 ypc (WOOF), 4.42ypc (IHOF).

RAIN: 4.11ypc (WOOF), 4.11ypc (IHOF).

STORMY: 3.10ypc (WOOF), 3.66 ypc (IHOF).

SNOW: 3.55ypc (WOOF), 4.38ypc (IHOF) (only 15 snow games in IHOF in 6.3 family)
Passing doesn't change much with clear or rain (both at 6.76 yards per attempt and close on completions) but drops noticably with stormy or snow (6.15/5.88, and yards per completion drop as well from 10.92/11.05 to 10.07/9.56). Same story here. YPA in IHOF is actually a hair higher in rain (6.62 vs. 6.61) than fair, but no real difference there. Snow and stormy show big drops.
Field Goals seem unaffected. Sample size is relatively small, BUT FGs do appear to drop in stormy/snow. The percentage is right around 80 in fair/rain, but in the low 70s in stormy/snow.
Net Punt Yardage stays the same, but the number of punts increase the worse the weather gets (duh). Same. Pretty big increase in punts per game. It's 10.5/10.2 in fair weather, and up to 14.2/14.0 in stormy conditions.
Fumbes are really bad in stormy weather (4.29/game) but better in other conditions (2.96/3.18/3.18), maybe a 10% increase in rain or snow. Same.I've merged the threads on this and ran some of these same queries on 6.3. Comments in red above.

[Ben E Lou]

Overall, my conclusion here is that nothing has changed in 6.3, and probably nothing has changed in weather since 6.0. So with that in mind, I think it's safe to present all of the weather history for WOOF now, and then attempt to run the same query on the massive original FOWL database (40ish seasons, all in FOF2K7.) My guess is that it will take an hour or so. Meanwhile, here's the WOOF data (a little over 17 1/2 seasons worth).

<table border="1" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1"><tbody><tr> <th align="center">games</th><th align="center">precipitation</th><th align="center">rush_ypc</th><th align="center">pass_ypa</th><th align="center">pass_ypc</th><th align="center">cmp_pct</th><th align="center">pass_rtg</th><th align="center">ppg</th><th align="center">pr_avg</th><th align="center">kr_avg</th><th align="center">run_pct</th><th align="center">krbpct</th><th align="center">punt_avg</th><th align="center">fg_pct</th><th align="center">fmbperhundredtouches</th><th align="center">sackrate</th><th align="center">hurryrate</th><th align="center">blockrate</th><th align="center">prpct</th><th align="center">yacpercatch</th><th align="center">thirddownpct</th><th align="center">pntpg</th><th align="center">fgpg</th></tr> <tr> <td align="center">3847</td><td align="center">Fair</td><td align="center">4.22</td><td align="center">6.79</td><td align="center">11.13</td><td align="center">60.98</td><td align="center">84.40</td><td align="center">21.04</td><td align="center">7.91</td><td align="center">23.55</td><td align="center">45.75</td><td align="center">34.54</td><td align="center">44.22</td><td align="center">78.62</td><td align="center">2.49</td><td align="center">5.62</td><td align="center">12.30</td><td align="center">3.05</td><td align="center">20.12</td><td align="center">2.59</td><td align="center">70.15</td><td align="center">9.9895</td><td align="center">3.8380</td></tr> <tr> <td align="center">718</td><td align="center">Rain</td><td align="center">3.96</td><td align="center">6.79</td><td align="center">11.24</td><td align="center">60.44</td><td align="center">84.04</td><td align="center">20.79</td><td align="center">7.94</td><td align="center">23.64</td><td align="center">45.39</td><td align="center">32.01</td><td align="center">44.36</td><td align="center">78.50</td><td align="center">2.67</td><td align="center">5.60</td><td align="center">12.43</td><td align="center">2.98</td><td align="center">20.16</td><td align="center">2.64</td><td align="center">71.03</td><td align="center">10.5454</td><td align="center">3.8841</td></tr> <tr> <td align="center">56</td><td align="center">Stormy</td><td align="center">3.32</td><td align="center">6.40</td><td align="center">10.60</td><td align="center">60.38</td><td align="center">77.91</td><td align="center">17.92</td><td align="center">8.03</td><td align="center">22.95</td><td align="center">44.85</td><td align="center">25.99</td><td align="center">44.87</td><td align="center">77.53</td><td align="center">3.15</td><td align="center">6.15</td><td align="center">11.44</td><td align="center">3.38</td><td align="center">20.07</td><td align="center">2.19</td><td align="center">65.27</td><td align="center">11.8571</td><td align="center">4.0536</td></tr> <tr> <td align="center">75</td><td align="center">Snow</td><td align="center">3.57</td><td align="center">5.87</td><td align="center">9.86</td><td align="center">59.56</td><td align="center">74.69</td><td align="center">16.63</td><td align="center">7.71</td><td align="center">23.87</td><td align="center">44.46</td><td align="center">26.90</td><td align="center">44.45</td><td align="center">78.46</td><td align="center">2.68</td><td align="center">5.43</td><td align="center">12.74</td><td align="center">3.37</td><td align="center">20.66</td><td align="center">2.27</td><td align="center">60.12</td><td align="center">13.1733</td><td align="center">4.1467</td></tr></tbody></table>