Operation Sports Forums - View Single Post - Niagara Rhinos: An Alternate Universe NCAA 14 Dynasty

Nunyerbiz · 10-22-2019, 11:20 PM

Welcome to the Tale of the Niagara University Rhinos
An Alternate Universe NCAA 14 Dynasty Report

Setting The Table:

This dynasty report is going to be featuring the Niagara Rhinos, a team from a Canadian university that exists in an alternate universe. There is a real Niagara University, a Catholic school based in New York, but I just want to make it clear that they are not the subject. This is a flight of fancy, the story of a fictional Canadian university that gets snubbed by the amateur establishment in Canada.

Seeing a desperate NCAA conference and a potential rivalry just across the falls in Buffalo, they decide to recruit a team of walk-ons, castoffs and JUCOs and switch to that bastardized Yank version of the game to join the NCAA. (For anybody who isn’t aware, what we know today as football had its evolutionary split from rugby in Canada sometime in the early 1860s).

There is no remotely plausible way the following events could happen in our real world… which is why I love alternate universe stuff… I get to have fun. So just kick back and relax. Think of it like that episode of Star Trek where the Enterprise had to go back in time to stop JFK and Marilyn Monroe from creating an unstoppable strain of herpes. That being said, certain events and figures will coincide. The Detroit Lions still stink. God still hates Cleveland. Alabama is still the preseason #1.

I won’t be getting too deep into the backstory beyond some initial world building posts at the start. I’ll get the Rhinos into the NCAA and then it’s off to the races. While I will take the recruiting/game play aspects very seriously, I intend to have at least a little bit of fun with the backstories and side stuff. Especially early on when my team will be a Bad News Bears / Major League / Unnecessary Roughness / Mighty Ducks / The Replacements / Little Giants / Cool Runnings / Slap Shot band of castoffs and misfits.

Before I continue, I just want to throw a quick shout out to my main two inspirations for this dynasty: Hellisan and Deegezy. They’ve both been around forever and I’ve been reading their stuff for years. They manage to weave the gameplay and storylines and presentation together in such a compelling fashion… Basically what I’m saying is that they are both very good at what they do, are old as **** and refuse to quit. Thanks to both of you for the great reads over the years! But seriously, I’m essentially stealing many of Hellisan’s mechanics and presentation aspects and can only hope to weave together a storyline like Deegeezy. Hope I’m not blowing too much sunshine up your skirts, but I have to give credit where it’s due. Now on to some boring stuff...

The Nuts and Bolts:

Platform: PS3
Difficulty: Heisman
Sliders: Custom (basically the OS Community sliders with some minor tweaks)
Quarter length: 9 minutes
Game Speed: Normal
Player Speed Threshold: 20
Ice the kicker: off
Home Field Advantage: on

NOTE: I won’t be doing any kicks/punts/FGs as a user… I am going to let the CPU handle it and watch the play… which it why I turned off Ice the kicker… it’s already going to be ugly enough at the start. As far as home field advantage… I never really trust EA and it’s under the hood baloney, the less of their meddling the better, but I’m aiming for a terrible team that is going to get their teeth kicked in for a few seasons… so I guess I’ll pile on the disadvantages.

Coach Starting Level: 1
Progression Rate: slowest
Coaching Skill Trees: To start I will only invest in recruiting perks for the head coach. Coordinators will only be allowed to unlock the lowest tier of upgrades. This is subject to change as time goes on, but the coaching skills can get overpowered pretty quickly… so I will likely keep things nerfed.

Rosters: I am using the default rosters with automatically generated names. Being a fictional universe, I'm not terribly interested in the real NCAA players from six seasons ago. The Rhinos are a Teambuilder squad I found sometime last year while searching for a rebuild project. I did not create them but my thanks to whoever did.

That's the major points, so for all the other details I'll be using the spoiler brackets to avoid this first post turning into a 2,000 word scrolling behemoth. I plan on doing lots of randomization and dice rolling for things like injuries, suspensions, player progression, etc. Most of these ideas were inspired by Hellisan and things he did in his excellent J.D.Clark Story... Further details below if you are interested.

Recruiting:

Spoiler

I will always favor regional recruits and will aim to have pipelines in some combination of Canada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York. But at the start of recruiting, any player who shows an interest in Niagara is fair game. As far as scouting, I’m only going to be able to unlock 50% of their numbers for the first year and will reconsider this as seasons roll along. In general, I’m not going to get super specific with restrictions here… early in the rebuild I’ll likely take anybody who wants to sign. Long term I’ll likely restrict things a bit more.

Created Recruits:
In order to help the rather anemic prospect counts that Canada provides each year, I’ll likely add two created recruits each year that I plan to pursue. I ran an offline dynasty with Niagara over six seasons and generally I signed somewhere around 1/3rd of the created Canadians that I went after. They will fall in line with the guys I should be expected to recruit, so 1-3 star players for the foreseeable future. I’ll also probably create a few prospects that I won’t go after but maybe follow for storyline purposes.

Sleepers and Slackers:
After each recruiting class is finalized, I’ll do some random rolls / wheel spins to see if we have any guys that we completely missed the boat on during the scouting process. Sleepers: Each class will have a 20% chance to have 1 player that we totally underestimated and a 5% chance that we underestimated 2 players. When a sleeper is identified a random number between 60-100 will be rolled, this represents the amount of attribute points that I can add to the player. Points will be distributed as evenly as possible across all categories that contribute to the player’s OVR. The only exception is speed, which I generally won’t touch beyond maybe a 1 or 2 point bump. Slackers: Each class will have the same chances as Sleepers. Once a slacker is identified, the random roll will be 40-80 and points will be removed using the same rough approach as with the sleepers.

Transfers / Players leaving early:
I’ll accept a transfer request if it’s reasonable that the player could start when they become eligible. I’ll only try to persuade players from leaving if it’s obvious I can start them the following season.

Player Progression:

Spoiler

Injuries / Suspensions:

Spoiler

As exhaustively stated already, most of my ideas for this dynasty have been lifted from Hellisan and other long time contributors around here… and this is no exception. The game doesn’t really handle injuries that well in my opinion.. and offensive lineman never get hurt. Don’t even bring up suspensions, the game won’t touch those with a ten foot pole.

Preordained Injuries from the Wrathful Football Gods:
There will be a certain number of pre-determined injuries that will be rolled at the start of the season. A random number between 3-6 will be rolled prior to the first game, this is the baseline for how many injuries will be preordained from the football gods. Then the roster will be put into alphabetical order and a random number will be rolled from 1-75. (This is assuming a 70-man roster. If I had a 68 man roster, then the roll is 1-73, I'm just adding 5 "safe zone" numbers at the end.) The number rolled is then compared to the alphabetical list and we have our injury victim. If the random number falls in the safe zone, then we dodge the bullet all Matrix style and the football gods remove that injury. That process is repeated based on our initial roll. For players that are deemed to be injured, even more rolls happen… are you bored and ready to scroll onto the next post? I will not blame you… go ahead… nobody is looking. The next roll is 1-14 to determine the week of the injury, then another roll representing the number of weeks left in the season will determine the injury duration.

Offensive lineman injuries:
In the NCAA14 universe, these guys are freakin invincible… so we are going to change that. At the start of every game there will be a 20% chance that an offensive lineman will get hurt during the game. When the 20% roll is failed, a random number from 1-5 will determine the position injured, starting at LT and moving to RT. Then 1-4 is rolled to determine the quarter when the injury takes place. Then another 1-4 is rolled to determine how many quarters the player has to sit. Injury will take place during the first offensive possession of the quarter rolled. For now, I won’t be doing any carry over to following weeks with this system… but might introduce that in the future. At the moment I can’t think of a good way to handle it… so I am just going to move along for now.

Suspensions:
At this point, I’m still contemplating how I want to handle this. Maybe it will be a dice roll thing, it might be intentional to create / enhance something with a storyline… still in the air… but something will be in play.

Conference Changes:

Spoiler

For the purposes of this dynasty, the New Mexico State Aggies have been banished to FCS. I imported them into the MAC, then swapped them out with the Niagara Rhinos. I enabled protected rivalries in the MAC so Niagara and their neighbors across the falls in Buffalo could be rivals.

Central Michigan was moved from the west division to the east, swapping with Ohio, that so a protected rivalry with Western Michigan could be established. (I attended Central, so this one was personal)

In keeping with the general alternate universe feel, I wanted to mix things up a bit… so I did some additional juggling just for giggles… with the goal of eliminating the independents and turning on rivalries across the board.
Notre Dame and Boston College join the Big Ten (I mean Maryland and Rutgers?!? What were they thinking?) They will have the protected “Holy War” rivalry as two old-timey Catholic universities.

Old Dominion replaces BC in the ACC and get an in-state rivalry with Virginia Tech.

Northwestern and Indiana move to the Big 12 because between the Big 10 and the Big 12 at least one of them had to have the same number of teams as the conference name. Also moved Oklahoma and Oklahoma St to opposing divisions to give them a better chance at head-to-head scheduling. The protected rival for OU is still Texas.

BYU and Idaho join the Mountain West. Conference Championship moved to Mile High. Set up a protected rivalry between BYU and Boise State.

Army and Navy join Conference USA. Turns out C-USA is somehow incapable of supporting protected rivalries, as I wanted to have Army/Navy every year. But oh well. They are in opposing divisions, so should meet on a regular basis.

Looks like I need one team to remain an independent. UTSA drew the short straw in the C-USA shake up so they are now conference-less vagabonds. My sincere apologies to all fans of the program, assuming they exist.

There wasn't a whole lot of deep thinking going into these moves... Just wanted to shake things up a little bit for my own entertainment. I hope I didn't crap on one of your favorite teams in the process.

10-22-2019, 11:20 PM	#1
Nunyerbiz MVP OVR: 4 Join Date: Sep 2010 Location: Detroit, MI Posts: 1,479	Niagara Rhinos: An Alternate Universe NCAA 14 Dynasty Welcome to the Tale of the Niagara University Rhinos An Alternate Universe NCAA 14 Dynasty Report Setting The Table: This dynasty report is going to be featuring the Niagara Rhinos, a team from a Canadian university that exists in an alternate universe. There is a real Niagara University, a Catholic school based in New York, but I just want to make it clear that they are not the subject. This is a flight of fancy, the story of a fictional Canadian university that gets snubbed by the amateur establishment in Canada. Seeing a desperate NCAA conference and a potential rivalry just across the falls in Buffalo, they decide to recruit a team of walk-ons, castoffs and JUCOs and switch to that bastardized Yank version of the game to join the NCAA. (For anybody who isn’t aware, what we know today as football had its evolutionary split from rugby in Canada sometime in the early 1860s). There is no remotely plausible way the following events could happen in our real world… which is why I love alternate universe stuff… I get to have fun. So just kick back and relax. Think of it like that episode of Star Trek where the Enterprise had to go back in time to stop JFK and Marilyn Monroe from creating an unstoppable strain of herpes. That being said, certain events and figures will coincide. The Detroit Lions still stink. God still hates Cleveland. Alabama is still the preseason #1. I won’t be getting too deep into the backstory beyond some initial world building posts at the start. I’ll get the Rhinos into the NCAA and then it’s off to the races. While I will take the recruiting/game play aspects very seriously, I intend to have at least a little bit of fun with the backstories and side stuff. Especially early on when my team will be a Bad News Bears / Major League / Unnecessary Roughness / Mighty Ducks / The Replacements / Little Giants / Cool Runnings / Slap Shot band of castoffs and misfits. Before I continue, I just want to throw a quick shout out to my main two inspirations for this dynasty: Hellisan and Deegezy. They’ve both been around forever and I’ve been reading their stuff for years. They manage to weave the gameplay and storylines and presentation together in such a compelling fashion… Basically what I’m saying is that they are both very good at what they do, are old as ** and refuse to quit. Thanks to both of you for the great reads over the years! But seriously, I’m essentially stealing many of Hellisan’s mechanics and presentation aspects and can only hope to weave together a storyline like Deegeezy. Hope I’m not blowing too much sunshine up your skirts, but I have to give credit where it’s due. Now on to some boring stuff... The Nuts and Bolts: Platform: PS3 Difficulty: Heisman Sliders: Custom (basically the OS Community sliders with some minor tweaks) Quarter length: 9 minutes Game Speed: Normal Player Speed Threshold: 20 Ice the kicker: off Home Field Advantage: on NOTE: I won’t be doing any kicks/punts/FGs as a user… I am going to let the CPU handle it and watch the play… which it why I turned off Ice the kicker… it’s already going to be ugly enough at the start. As far as home field advantage… I never really trust EA and it’s under the hood baloney, the less of their meddling the better, but I’m aiming for a terrible team that is going to get their teeth kicked in for a few seasons… so I guess I’ll pile on the disadvantages. Coach Starting Level: 1 Progression Rate: slowest Coaching Skill Trees: To start I will only invest in recruiting perks for the head coach. Coordinators will only be allowed to unlock the lowest tier of upgrades. This is subject to change as time goes on, but the coaching skills can get overpowered pretty quickly… so I will likely keep things nerfed. Rosters: I am using the default rosters with automatically generated names. Being a fictional universe, I'm not terribly interested in the real NCAA players from six seasons ago. The Rhinos are a Teambuilder squad I found sometime last year while searching for a rebuild project. I did not create them but my thanks to whoever did. That's the major points, so for all the other details I'll be using the spoiler brackets to avoid this first post turning into a 2,000 word scrolling behemoth. I plan on doing lots of randomization and dice rolling for things like injuries, suspensions, player progression, etc. Most of these ideas were inspired by Hellisan and things he did in his excellent J.D.Clark Story... Further details below if you are interested. Recruiting: Spoiler I will always favor regional recruits and will aim to have pipelines in some combination of Canada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York. But at the start of recruiting, any player who shows an interest in Niagara is fair game. As far as scouting, I’m only going to be able to unlock 50% of their numbers for the first year and will reconsider this as seasons roll along. In general, I’m not going to get super specific with restrictions here… early in the rebuild I’ll likely take anybody who wants to sign. Long term I’ll likely restrict things a bit more. Created Recruits: In order to help the rather anemic prospect counts that Canada provides each year, I’ll likely add two created recruits each year that I plan to pursue. I ran an offline dynasty with Niagara over six seasons and generally I signed somewhere around 1/3rd of the created Canadians that I went after. They will fall in line with the guys I should be expected to recruit, so 1-3 star players for the foreseeable future. I’ll also probably create a few prospects that I won’t go after but maybe follow for storyline purposes. Sleepers and Slackers: After each recruiting class is finalized, I’ll do some random rolls / wheel spins to see if we have any guys that we completely missed the boat on during the scouting process. Sleepers: Each class will have a 20% chance to have 1 player that we totally underestimated and a 5% chance that we underestimated 2 players. When a sleeper is identified a random number between 60-100 will be rolled, this represents the amount of attribute points that I can add to the player. Points will be distributed as evenly as possible across all categories that contribute to the player’s OVR. The only exception is speed, which I generally won’t touch beyond maybe a 1 or 2 point bump. Slackers: Each class will have the same chances as Sleepers. Once a slacker is identified, the random roll will be 40-80 and points will be removed using the same rough approach as with the sleepers. Transfers / Players leaving early: I’ll accept a transfer request if it’s reasonable that the player could start when they become eligible. I’ll only try to persuade players from leaving if it’s obvious I can start them the following season. Player Progression: Spoiler The game pretty much progresses all players at roughly an equal pace and I want to introduce some more variance than that, booms and busts and high motor Rudy types and low effort Jay Cutler types. So I’ll be using a work ethic modifier to change the CPU progression choices. I won’t get into all the algebra here, but this is basically the system developed by Hellisan and then later tweaked by itsbigmike. I’ll probably provide a bit more information on my implementation during the offseason. Link if interested in further reading: https://forums.operationsports.com/f...provement.html Injuries / Suspensions: Spoiler As exhaustively stated already, most of my ideas for this dynasty have been lifted from Hellisan and other long time contributors around here… and this is no exception. The game doesn’t really handle injuries that well in my opinion.. and offensive lineman never get hurt. Don’t even bring up suspensions, the game won’t touch those with a ten foot pole. Preordained Injuries from the Wrathful Football Gods: There will be a certain number of pre-determined injuries that will be rolled at the start of the season. A random number between 3-6 will be rolled prior to the first game, this is the baseline for how many injuries will be preordained from the football gods. Then the roster will be put into alphabetical order and a random number will be rolled from 1-75. (This is assuming a 70-man roster. If I had a 68 man roster, then the roll is 1-73, I'm just adding 5 "safe zone" numbers at the end.) The number rolled is then compared to the alphabetical list and we have our injury victim. If the random number falls in the safe zone, then we dodge the bullet all Matrix style and the football gods remove that injury. That process is repeated based on our initial roll. For players that are deemed to be injured, even more rolls happen… are you bored and ready to scroll onto the next post? I will not blame you… go ahead… nobody is looking. The next roll is 1-14 to determine the week of the injury, then another roll representing the number of weeks left in the season will determine the injury duration. Offensive lineman injuries: In the NCAA14 universe, these guys are freakin invincible… so we are going to change that. At the start of every game there will be a 20% chance that an offensive lineman will get hurt during the game. When the 20% roll is failed, a random number from 1-5 will determine the position injured, starting at LT and moving to RT. Then 1-4 is rolled to determine the quarter when the injury takes place. Then another 1-4 is rolled to determine how many quarters the player has to sit. Injury will take place during the first offensive possession of the quarter rolled. For now, I won’t be doing any carry over to following weeks with this system… but might introduce that in the future. At the moment I can’t think of a good way to handle it… so I am just going to move along for now. Suspensions: At this point, I’m still contemplating how I want to handle this. Maybe it will be a dice roll thing, it might be intentional to create / enhance something with a storyline… still in the air… but something will be in play. Conference Changes:** Spoiler For the purposes of this dynasty, the New Mexico State Aggies have been banished to FCS. I imported them into the MAC, then swapped them out with the Niagara Rhinos. I enabled protected rivalries in the MAC so Niagara and their neighbors across the falls in Buffalo could be rivals. Central Michigan was moved from the west division to the east, swapping with Ohio, that so a protected rivalry with Western Michigan could be established. (I attended Central, so this one was personal) In keeping with the general alternate universe feel, I wanted to mix things up a bit… so I did some additional juggling just for giggles… with the goal of eliminating the independents and turning on rivalries across the board. Notre Dame and Boston College join the Big Ten (I mean Maryland and Rutgers?!? What were they thinking?) They will have the protected “Holy War” rivalry as two old-timey Catholic universities. Old Dominion replaces BC in the ACC and get an in-state rivalry with Virginia Tech. Northwestern and Indiana move to the Big 12 because between the Big 10 and the Big 12 at least one of them had to have the same number of teams as the conference name. Also moved Oklahoma and Oklahoma St to opposing divisions to give them a better chance at head-to-head scheduling. The protected rival for OU is still Texas. BYU and Idaho join the Mountain West. Conference Championship moved to Mile High. Set up a protected rivalry between BYU and Boise State. Army and Navy join Conference USA. Turns out C-USA is somehow incapable of supporting protected rivalries, as I wanted to have Army/Navy every year. But oh well. They are in opposing divisions, so should meet on a regular basis. Looks like I need one team to remain an independent. UTSA drew the short straw in the C-USA shake up so they are now conference-less vagabonds. My sincere apologies to all fans of the program, assuming they exist. There wasn't a whole lot of deep thinking going into these moves... Just wanted to shake things up a little bit for my own entertainment. I hope I didn't crap on one of your favorite teams in the process. Last edited by Nunyerbiz; 10-22-2019 at 11:43 PM.