[goalieump413]

First year blues are common. It's likely that your team's trainer bumbles his player injury estimates, just as much as your players get hurt. Your running game, as mrs844224 said is rough. But it gets worse... If you choose a new playbook thats full of plays you need to bring to the "learned" level, it just takes longer to be great.

I have some thoughts...

Don't sim games at all in the first year. You need to get off to a good start in developing your coach's career, and points count, baby! Play or supersim, but play the preseason games. The reason, you can work on key plays more by playing out the games in the preseason to build playbook knowledge for your likely starters (who play the first half of preseason games). Once those key plays are to the mastered level in the preseason, your team's chances of success against your opponent's strengths go up a lot. It's better to be great at 10 plays than to be good at 20. Just make sure you choose the right plays.

Train your rookies during the practice week, especially the ones that will be starters. It's okay to focus on bubble players, those guys who might make your squad as rookies to replace dead weight veterans, but it's a better deal to work on starters.

Shuffle your depth chart to bring younger, less experienced players into "starting" roles in the preseason. Sure, your real starters might lose a little playing time with the rest of the regulars (ie swapping your backup QB, usually rookie Andre Woodson for your starter) but they learn themselves up faster by being thrown into the fire in the preseason.

Don't cut veterans in your first year even though they won't have much playbook knowledge with your new playbook. Their play learning and awareness ratings are too high to pass up. Rookies have to learn HOW to learn to play. Veterans don't.

Don't worry about meeting all your GM goals in the regular season, but do meet them in the preseason. Playbook knowledge is huge in this game, and veterans play like studs when they have the plays burned on their retinas.

Go for it on 4th downs a lot in the preseason. That extra play you get to help teach the players that play can make the difference between healthy playbook knowledge for 5 or 6 more plays heading into the regular season.

Play all games in the regular season, but jump to supersim when you are playing any non-goal oriented games or out of division games. You can always jump back into gameplay for critical moments like 4th downs and so on, and to steal plays at the end like mrs844224 said.

Remember that you're going to struggle in your first year. Even if you've spent your coaching points in areas that help accelerate things later like Ambition and player performance upgrades, the team around you, and your coaching staff, will have to learn the new, bigger playbook. Also, I believe that if you call both offense and defense, your OC and DC may not progress as fast as if they were calling the plays. You progress, they don't.

One last thing: Make it easy on your defense by pairing down the number of plays you call to a smaller number, rather than ballooning the defensive playbook in your first year. On D, a shorter list of plays that your D masters is better than a larger list of plays they have only learned. Variety works as your successive seasons go on, and having a bigger offensive playbook helps, but on D, I've noticed the inverse is true.