How to make NCAA 14 more fun

[LSTX10]

I’ve played NCAA 14 every year since it came out. Over the last couple of years I’ve promised myself I wouldn’t play it again. I always put so much time into it and get 3-4 seasons in to a dynasty then lose my desire to play. Since teambuilder has been down it’s been even harder to get myself up to play a dynasty.

So here’s my question.

What do you do in your dynasty to keep it fresh and fun? Here’s what I already do to help limit myself from building a powerhouse in 2 years.

I play every game.

Limit recruiting to home state and neighboring states.

Only call plays in top 3 of coach suggestions.

On defense I player lock myself.

No scouting on recruiting.

Can only add a player to recruiting board if you are in their top 10.

Roll a dice for suspensions every week.

Adjust all players injury and stamina down.

Limit JuCo and athlete recruiting.

Limit hot routes based on QB experience.

And of course I use sliders and play on Heisman.


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[Locke888]

Losing will always be the key to enjoying NCAA 14. Thank god I'm just an average player. LOL. I only limit my recruiting based on my team prestige.

[malky]

I still play every year, the trick for me is just playing it for the college football season and put it away. I use a 12 team franchise so to speak, so it's always fun to see which of my 12 is in contention for a national title.

[mpklub]

There are a couple detailed threads that talk about this that tend to get bumped every year. I had been planning to post something in that thread but since this one popped up I'll post here...

A couple things I have started doing:
- use the editor to implement 4 and 8 team playoffs. It adds so much more life to the game.

-implement more dynamic player progression. I've taken some ideas others have talked about on these forums and tweaked them for my own Dynasty. I can't remember specifically who came up with these ideas but the gist is assign each player a work ethic rating, and in the offseason randomly select between 0 and 10 players from the roster that get rating increases (or decreases depending on the dice roll) manually. Those increases are also randomly rolled. So it's possible a player with a high work ethic rating could only get an increase of 1 or 2 points, or possibly go down points wise. Doing this for my Iowa St Dynasty, my RS Sophomore backup QB who is slated to take over the starting job is now an 89 overall and stands to become of the best dual threat QBs next year when my current QB leaves.

-Someone else (again, I cant remember who I apologize) had the idea of a late bloomers/underachievers system. I decided to randomly select 1 late bloomer and 2 underachievers each year. Late bloomers get 60 attribute points to assign to them, underachievers lose 30.

- I am currently, for the first time ever, going through and assigning numbers to all incoming freshman on every team. I have always hated that the game follows NFL numbering conventions. So I decided to give it a shot. I tried doing it with the editor, but found it to be too big of a pain. Plus I can just listen to baseball or have a TV show on in the background while I edit numbers. And it helps me get a sense for who the stars are around my fictional league

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[SonOfEd]

I like controlling multiple teams to keep it interesting. I'm a playbook junkie, so this allows me venture into multiple schemes within the same dynasty.
My current dynasty I'm running 4 teams all with custom offensive playbooks.
I have my one main school that all games are played, and the others rotate each week.
The conference landscape morphed into it's own beast. A couple of 16 team Super Conferences, using old Conferences as divisions has been fun too. Pairing the old Southwestern Conference and the Big 8 together, and pinning the old Big East with an 8 member ACC.
After spending way too much time in the editor, searching for perfection, it's been nice to just let go and play it out.

[mpklub]

I forgot to add one other thing I have started doing with recruiting.

One of the complaints I had read about in various threads here at OS was that recruits names are not always ideal, and often the assigned faces don't align with player positions, meaning in real life something like 98% of all HB's are black, but in the game it is more like 50/50 or 60/40 black/white. Just to make the game more immersive I downloaded the 2018 rosters and then started a dynasty and exported the rosters of all teams with the editor. Then I did two things:

1. Broke out players by face code and position to get the ratio of dark/light skin tone of players by position.

2. Made a list of all the names (first and last) in the game based on face codes and aligned based on dark/light skin tone.

In the pre-season I will generate recruits and then export the list of recruits using the editor, reassign face codes by position based on real life ratios from the 2018 roster file and then randomize all the names. Once I am done with that I reupload the file back into the game and essentially have a randomized list of recruit names that is much more realistic than anything the game could generate.

All in all this takes about 30 minutes or so to do so it's not too bad for the level of immersion it adds to the game, at least for me.

[canes21]

These threads will give you plenty of reading material to help spice up your dynasty through a variety of ways.


The Game Outside of the Game

Dynasty House Rules Ideas

Making dynasty feel more organic

The "why I love NCAA 14 three years later" thread

I personally really enjoy the recruiting and schematic aspects of college football so I love having house rules for recruiting and I love making house rules for my playbook that help make my team get a true identity that has its own strengths and weaknesses.

For recruiting I do actually allow myself to scout recruits unlike many here do at this point, but the house rules I have set in place help counter my ability to scout.

- My commitment # is a "+1 rule". I look at how many players are graduating and only sign that many +1. No more. If I have 12 seniors I can sign 13 players.
- I create a full recruiting board in the preseason and that board cannot change. I can scout these recruits, but if all 4 HB's I have on my board are duds after scouting then I am SOL. Do I take on to have a body that class and hope they develop or do I skip out on a back that class and deal with potential depth issues.
- I only recruit players that have me inside of their top 10 or are in a pipeline state.
- I never convince anyone to return to school.

For the schematic side of things I will

- Limit my playbook size. Usually around 110 plays at most on both sides of the ball.
- Limit the size of my playbook substantially when at a school for the first time or starting a young QB or even defense. You can't just go to a new school and expect your scheme to be fully implemented game 1. The same can be said about starting a true freshman. I may go into a game with only 60 plays to choose from.
- Do anything you can to limit money plays. With J-Kits sliders some of the plays that I used to never run due to their success rate are now more realistic. Read options can still be too powerful as are offset running plays from the gun. What I do is only allow myself to call those plays once per drive and never inside the opposing 25 yard line.

These rules allow me to really have fun building a team, building a scheme, and having a healthy challenge inside of dynasty mode. I absolutely love being at a school and having like an 80 play playbook as I implement my scheme. I pick up on my own tendencies as a play caller and start to actually have a realistic list of plays for each scenario. My team takes on an identity and there are actual areas I simply don't have the plays to succeed with. I remember one dynasty I was at a smaller school as a HC and my offensive playbook was around 50 something plays as I was starting my QB I recruited as a true freshman. I wanted to be a running team so my playbook was run heavy. Well, I got behind in game 1 and did not have too many plays to choose from to really gain yards through the air as I attempted my come back. It felt like I was actually struggling in an organic way as my team just wasn't fit to air it out. I had to rely on the same few plays that were no having too much success as they were in there more as wrinkles.

I also love watching a defensive playbook grow as the year goes on. Games 1, 2, and maybe even 3 are nothing but base coverages, but as my playbook grows I start to get more exotic blitzes and coverages in the book and it's so fun to see how my success goes up or down as I start implementing new things into the gameplan.

I really do just love limiting the playbooks and analyzing the identity my teams take on. I love analyzing an opposing teams roster and adding plays to the playbook based off that some weeks. I love getting bye weeks before a big game and adding a new package into the playbook and then seeing if it works in game. I remember adding the wildcat to my playbook eventually at UMass and when I ran it for the first time I was genuinely excited. I also remember struggling in power running situations so I adopted the Maryland-I. I didn't work. I felt like I wasted a whole week or two's worth of prep implementing a failure. The next season I knew that it would really hurt my team if I couldn't pick up 3 yards when I absolutely needed to on the ground. I made it a priority to find success and I ended up adjusting my playbook with some more rules in place(you can't just completely change it year to year and only follow the play count limit, keep it realistic). I headed into the new year scrapping the Maryland-I and adding in some flexbone principles in its place. It was definitely more successful, but was nowhere near a guarantee like it was a money formation. Just seeing the growth that addition to the playbook allowed my team made it feel so rewarding after I struggled an entire season in those situations. I was able to actually feel like I was a coaching genius for a second in my own little world.

One more little thing I loved in that UMass dynasty. My team had a pretty weak pass blocking OL for a few years. I would max protect, use quick passes, and the sorts to help, but they weren't enough and I needed something new to find success in certain scenarios, especially the red zone. I added about 5 or 6 plays that were designed roll outs and they instantly boosted my offense. No more 3rd downs where I got hit before the play developed. No more games where I was 3 for 4 in the red zone with only 13 points to show for it. I was able to find more consistency moving the pocket. The plays didn't work every time, but they were definitely an addition that benefited the team. Between that and the flexbone scenario, that was the most fun I've ever had in a dynasty from an X's and O's standpoint.

[SonOfEd]

So true canes21. When it comes to playbooks, less is more.
And from a realistic stand point, college teams only have so much time to implement a few core concepts on both sides of the ball.