BFL - Who? What? When? Why?

[Spear]

What’s the name of the league? Brewers Football League

How many teams are there in the league? Start with 8 but we can expand later.

What is our starting year and is this a fictional league? We will be starting in the past and I'm in the process of crafting a little backstory. Here's your hint, we'll start in either 1986 or 1987.

Potential League Settings: 53 man rosters, 10 practice team spots, basic salary cap, no OVR player ratings, no custom team plays.

When will we sim? On BLB off-days!

Are there live sims? We should be able to do live-sims!

What game are we using? Draft Day Pro Sports Football 21 - https://www.wolverinestudios.com/dra...ll-simulation/

Where can I buy it? Wolverine’s website and Steam – the game is $29.99 and is PC only.

What about FOF or OOTP Football? The developer of FOF separated with OOTP recently so it appears this game is our only option for a potential football league.

What about the other failed leagues on SGN? This game may feel like OOTP lite but it’s functional. It’s very easy for a Commissioner and it generates great HTML. It’s better than nothing and I think another league during the pandemic would be great for everybody. The previous hockey game was plagued with infrastructure issues that this game doesn't have.

Does the game offer in-game download/exports? Yes! One of the main reasons why we are moving forward with the league.

Where will I access the HTML? http://www.bflsim.com

What are the next steps? I’ll be posting a team submission thread where you can express your interest. I also suggest you download the free trial of the game to check it out. Which you can do from here: https://www.wolverinestudios.com/dra...ll-simulation/

ETA for starting: Inauguration Draft would start after we have our teams registered, GMs owning the game + team logos in place. Hopefully just after Thanksgiving.

I've compiled my thoughts on the game which I have shared on Slack previously but will post here:

What are the quirks with the game?

• Player Ratings. Pat's feedback to me was that there wasn't enough player ratings - QB throwing is limited to an arm accuracy rating and arm power rating. No individual rating categories for short, medium or deep. I'm personally okay with this because OOTP is somewhat vague.
• Scouting at the Pro Level. It appears that once a player enters the league universe their rating is revealed to everybody else in the league. However, scheme, personality, chemistry appears to mean a lot in the game. Just because a player is a 90 OVR doesn't mean they are going to tear the league on fire. I've seen situations where the top rated RB isn't even in the conversation of having the most rushing yards. There is an option for us to come up with our own OVR calculation, which may allow us to eliminate this category all together and only rely on the individual rating categories. The Draft scouting is vague and varies from team to team.
• Finances. The financial system is bare bones and is simply salary cap based for your players (there is a franchise tag). No accounting screens like you'd see in OOTP. There is a Staff budget but I think it only acts as a "salary cap" for Staffing, so you can't go ham and hire all the best coaches with no consequences. This means there is no way to allocate a ton of money into player development/scouting like OOTP. Scouting success is based upon your Coaching Staff's scouting ratings (GM, Head Coach, Offensive Coordinator, Defensive Coordinator).
• The Game feels low budget compared to OOTP. The user interface feels low budget and there are some quirks. For example, when you release a player on your team, you click release player and then you think nothing happens because there is no prompt to say "Player has been released". You back out of that screen and you'll see the player is no longer on your roster. There is a lot of unused space on some of the screens at times, which gives that low budget feeling. Despite this, the functionality is there.
• No External Coach Hiring In-Season - You can fire any of your coaches at any time during the season. However, you'll be forced to hire an "internal" candidate. Which is a randomly generated "positional" coach that gets "promoted" or you could promote your OC to HC. This means there is no "Free Agent Staff" pool until the offseason during the Staff Signing period, during this period you can hire free agent coaches or hire away other people's coordinators to become your HC.
• Signing Free Agents In-Season - If you sign a free agent during the season, they automatically go on a 1 year $300K deal. I don't know if this is an NFL rule or not but it's similar to how Madden handles it.
• There is League Expansion but no Expansion Draft. We can expand the league in the offseason, however the new teams are forced to build their team through the amateur draft and free agency, there is no expansion draft. We could do this ourselves offline though.
• Game is PC only, no Mac.

What’s good about the game?

• Ease of Use. The biggest selling point to me is how easy the game is from an administrative standpoint. As a user, you click "load game" and it downloads the game file from a web URL. You login as the GM, make your moves, hit export in-game. As commish, I import the files automatically run the sim and then upload the game file and HTML in-game! I think some of the burnout with FHM was the administrative stuff because it was clunky. Also the only way I see a simulation stopping is because a team is over the roster limit. Because this is week to week. You have the chance to adjust injuries and we don't have to go in and update lines for every little injury like we did with FHM.
• HTML. The HTML is super robust including historical stats, play by play for individual games, player profiles, etc. This is also mobile friendly and probably a big selling point to us because it gives us a chance to look at something while we're at work or on the go.
• It's our only option for a football league. For those that aren't aware OOTP and FOF split. Jim at FOF is back on his own and he inherited the OOTP user interface that he can use in future games - however, I think as a dev he's going to push that off until the longest possible time. He already said it's not a possibility anytime soon. Wolverine Studios is super responsive on their Slack server and improving the game with patches and annual releases. We can carry the league to future editions of the game.
• Coaching/Strategy. The game spits out football stats realistically based upon your strategy. You can make decisions on Game Planning, things like attitude, focus, temp, and individual offensive/defense strategies. You can then combine your different philosophies into game planning so you have a different approach to offense/defense game scenarios (1st and 10, 1st and short, 1st and long, winning, losing, etc). In addition to this - there are custom playbooks, so you can add/delete individual plays to your own book. Each Head Coach/OC/DC comes with their own playbook. I'm sure we can download mods and import more playbooks. You can create custom plays too but that might become too cheesy. The depth chart can be done at a team level or formation level.
• Training/Development. There is a points based training system around 4 categories, positional drills, athletic training, physical training and game-tape. You can distribute points to each category and then assign that individually to each player. This occurs week to week. For example, if I want my QB to focus on game-tape i can put all my points into that category and assign him that task for the week, whereas other players may be focusing on other areas or more balanced. Players can progress week to week but the major gains/losses are in the training camp offseason stage.
• College Scouting. There is a period in the offseason where you can "interview" or "scout" the college prospects. The combine data is already available to us but you can dive into the prospects more. This is where our coaches scout ratings will come into play. I was running a comparison between two teams and the information/scouting reports were different for the teams.
• Free Agency/Players/Coaches. This is done by us "bidding" on each individual player. Each player has different value systems so this will hopefully make for a more interesting free agent signing period.
• Player Traits/Personality. Although I mentioned above the player ratings might be lacking, each player may have a trait and there are quite a few. From "Clutch QB" to "Game ManageR" to "Diva" to "Distraction" to "1st Overall Pick" to "Community Benefactor". There are quite a few and it gives the player some life. There are also personality rating categories as I mentioned above with the Free Agency. There is also a mentorship system in the game, where you can assign a veteran player to mentor a younger player. It appears that chemistry plays a big role.