General Tip: QB Style.
 

I'm breaking this out from the game planning thread, because I've gotten several questions about this and it's clear that it's confusing a number of people. The question is usually along the lines of:

"My QB's style is Long Passes. I'm worried that I shouldn't use the West Coast offense."

Here's the documentation's only reference to QB style:

I am pretty much convinced that the bolded selection above is the only significant use of "QB Style," and quite possibly it's the only use at all. Your QB's red bars tell you far more about his strengths and weaknesses than his "QB Style." IF the QB Style has an impact on his performance at certain pass distances, then my observation is that it's a very minimal one.

As one small example (and I admit that the sample size is small here, but it's the easiest illustration I had available to me quickly, so bear with me), see this QB from my current dynasty thread:



Note that his "style" is long passing, but his red bars clearly indicate that short passing is the way to go with him. Over the course of two seasons as my starter, in an offense that was heavily tilted toward a mix of running and short passing, he put up a QB rating of around 98.0. The pass splits in his two seasons as a starter were:

YEAR ONE
Short: 221/306
Medium: 89/135
Long: 7/43

YEAR TWO
Short: 254/319
Medium: 82/137
Long: 13/35

Just food for thought.

It would be interesting to see the expected learning curves for QB's of different styles, to verify the bolded statement above. For example, if Scottie Owen didn't have the 4-WR or the 5-WR formation from the beginning, would these be the first he learned? Would this path of development stay constant regardless the overall style of play (i.e "smashmouth" vs "air it out") or is the type of offense a factor?

I've never really looked at the learning path closely, but I suppose it could be examined by signing a bunch of crappy QBs each right before camp, tracking the new formations they learn, and then re-signing the ones who haven't retired yet the following year. My guess, though, is that the amount of work it would take is wayyyy out of balance with the minimal strategic advantage to be gained with this knowledge.

this doesn't really seem true, in a real life sort of way. if someone, like your boy above, doesn't have the arm strength to be a very effective long thrower and in fact has skills more effective to throwing short passes - why would he learn "long throwing formations" before learning obvious shorter yardage formations? why would the above learn 5 WR Empty backfield before Double TE- Strong formation? i just think it's a design flaw, or doesn't work as intended. your opinions are more educated than mine as far as FOF in concerned, but this is one area i would say you're wrong and the game just doesn't work the way it should.

" why would the above learn 5 WR Empty backfield before Double TE- Strong formation?"

5 -WR doesn't mean long passing.

The Patriots run predominantly 3 and 4 WR sets (run 4WR on something like 40% of plays, 3WR on 50% and 5WR on almost 10%) and are a short passing offense. Their bread and butter has been 8 yard passes to Wes Welker, Kevin Faulk, Donte Stallworth, and Ben Watson.

Well, I'm not trying to define how it *should* work. I'm just saying how it *does* work. It is implemented so that the "QB Type" isn't fully correlated to the scouted ratings.

As far as this goes....
...I'd refer you to the gentleman from the Chesapeake Bay area:

that i understand, but doesn't mean i should simply wave the "it's not based on real football" wand every time something doesn't work right .

while i understand there's a yin to every yang, and some teams have success playing a certain way, the *traditional* thinking is if you see 5 WRs lined up, they're gonna be throwing it, most often long. unless you prefer to do your long passing out of the goal-line formation, some formations clearly and traditionally are used for certain things.

and Pats bread and butter has been Brady throwing long and high and having Moss jump up and catch it. that's all. if you can do that and have a high success rate then that's your bread and butter. unless you think Moss caught 20+ TDs with Brady dinking and dunking to him.

Oh, I'm not saying that it shouldn't work differently. I'd definitely like to see the skill sets correlate to the QB Type. My purpose for *this* thread, though, was to ward off all of those questions I've been getting of the same nature--to make it clear that the QB Type has little/nothing to do with what kind of offensive system is the best for your QB to run.

I'm not sure we can even define it as "doesn't work right," per se. It wouldn't be the first time that FOF terminology is defined differently from what we'd expect--like the fact that Getting Downfield has nothing to do with a receiver's ability to make plays on downfield passes. Getting Downfield works "right," just not how we'd expect it to work from just looking at the term used. I suspect the same thing is at work here.

Well, considering that more than half of Moss's TDs were on short passes inside the red zone, yeah, Moss did catch a lot of Dink and Dunk. Combine that with the majority of Welker's and Watson's TDs being short, yeah, dink and dunk.


5-WR means you're throwing. it says nothing about distance. Teams will trot out 5 wides on 3rd and 6 situations. It doesn't mean they're going deep, it means they're looking to get a WR on a linebacker.

I think it boils down to the coaching aspect being underdeveloped. The QBs who go through camp should learn the formations favored by the offensive coordinator.

There are obviously different conversations going on here.

SkyDog - thanks for sharing your observation about how FOF works in this respect. It fits completely with my own observations. It's obviously not quite what everyone might wish it were, and it might not parallel "real football' particularly well, but heck - if we're going to play a computer game, we might as well, you know, play the computer game.

You clearly didn't watch the Pats games this year. As already stated, Moss caught a lot of dink and dunk TD passes from not only within the red zone but within the 10 yard line. Welker led the team with 112 catches, predominantly very short passes that Welker then added lots of YAC. Stallworth was mainly a 10-15 yard target over the middle also getting YAC. Ben Watson rarely ran down the field, as opposed to last year. I would not describe the Pats offense this year as "long passing". It was a short to medium passing offense.

I am in total agreement with SD on this. I firmly believe, including based on what I have seen in addition to the help file, that QB type has only one function: which formations are learned first. To sum it up, QB type, experience, intelligence, and studying game film are the only factors affecting QB formations.

Perfect example is Tom Brady in the USFL, he is "short passing QB" but we throw medium and long and he often leads the league in passing. This is solely because of his ratings and cohesion. Not surprisingly, he did not learn any of the longer passing formations like 4 and 5 WR until his 11th or 12th season.

Good thread- didn't realize that QB Style was basically irrevelant. I hated finding good "system" QBs that had conflicting styles.