Thats the only way to play now. Offline franchise has been ruined for me.
The stats are awful just like everyone has reiterated here a bunch of times before but thats not the worst part of it.
I simmed through half a season and decided to play a game against the CPU. Eagles vs. Packers. Apparently, the CPU has been on OS reading about the whole
http://www.operationsports.com/forum...ter-bunny.html discussion. And the CPU Packers decided if OL ratings don't matter that they could just stick a kicker and WR on the o-line. The first play of the game the formation the packers chose had 3 WRs 1 TE and 2 RBs. I thought great a new bug that is messing up the count but then as the walked up to the line I saw the count was right. They had an extra WR playing LT and the Kicker Mason Crosby playing center. Trent Cole was pretty much stymied by the backup WR all game only getting one sack and Crosby gave up no sacks as well as doing a hell of a job in run blocking.
After the game I went to check the roster to see why this happened and realized they had no choice. Almost all of their OL were on injured reserve! Then I checked the FA market and there were no OL left I checked team after team and about half the teams didn't have 5 healthy o-linemen!! So, if you don't get frustrated by 3 guys running for 2000+ yards, 7+ yards per carry and 3 guys breaking the sack record each year from simmed games then going up against teams with kickers and WRs on the o-line should probably do it for you.
By the way, GatorBait posted way back about having a problem with the salary cap when controlling all 32 teams. I simmed 6 full seasons (3 controlling one team and 3 controlling all 32 teams). I had the same exact problem with the Saints by the end of the first season. I had to cut a veteran player and sign a rookie for 3 weeks straight starting in week 12 in order to keep them under the salary cap and have them with all the min. required players. This was due to the fact that so many linemen were injured for them and the CPU just takes the top guys (usually the most expensive veterans) at the position needed on the FA list. I also had all options for roster, salary cap etc. set to CPU.
Also, in my experience simming with all 32 teams by changing run pass ratio to 40/60 and RB1/RB2 ratio 50/50 for every team I ended up only having 2 2000+ rushers in 3 seasons but that just made the sack stats even worse. I had two seasons with a 30+ sacker. Trent Cole 30 and Jared Allen 32. In those seasons I also had at least 10 guys with more than 20 sacks too. So, I don't really see changing those sliders as the answer.
So in the end, I think the gameplay is improved but that doesn't outweigh the huge problems with stats and injuries that have made offline franchise, at least for me, unplayable. I think being in a 32 man online franchise the game would be great unfortunately for me I'm having a tough time finding a true sim league to join over here in Europe.
Hopefully there will be another patch to address these issues otherwise I'll have to put this game to rest.