Cohesion

[Sharkn20]

Hi fellas!

I see in that season that Cohesion may change the curse of your team instantly and I´ve the obvious rookie question!!

What about that?? The more your players play together more cohesion will existed or with a high personality leader and affinities more cohesion??

Discuss and light me!

[Guest]

Cohesion is different than affinities/leadership.

It's just a function of how long the players have been on your team. The longer the players on the field have been on the team, the better they play.

For instance, I have two free safeties: One is in his second year and one is in his thirteenth. Even though the 2nd year guy has a higher rating, I start the guy in his 13th year because it makes my cohesion higher.

[Aston]

Cohesion is a measure of "year joined the team" as seen on the roster screen. Very little difference between guys who joined this year versus one or two years ago -- I think greater cohesion effects don't start kicking in until year 4 or so.

But they don't start really kicking in until year 10 or so, which is why Columbus is dominating the cohesion scores silly right now. QB Tubbs, CB Wallace have been around for literally forever.

[Sharkn20]

And... How important is that in the results?? Really big diference between grab one highest rating player in the FA or stick with "your average guy" more time?? I've a lot problems in my secondary and I'll try to fix that in this off-season

[Aston]

Talent is still the most important factor. I think the theory is that cohesion, as well as affinities, are overall 'modifiers' for performance, which means they can be maybe 5% swings in either direction or something, but better players still play better.

Last year I did something similar to Foos, where I had a guard who was probably a little better than Michael Huffman, but Huffman had 12 years on the team and he single-handedly raised my OL cohesion to near the top of the league. More importantly, Huffman was(is) still a pretty quality player.

But yes, I devalue FAs mainly for this reason. That FA stud will surely help you a lot if he fills a hole on the team, but rely on year 5/6/7/8 FAs to fill your team and you'll always be hampered by low cohesion. So my philosophy is you can patch holes in FA, but killing your cap situation spending there isn't worth it.

Then again, if you don't have existing high cohesion talent at all, you gotta do what you gotta do.

[Sharkn20]

I really love this game

[Guest]

That's a good point from Nutah about when cohesion starts kicking in. It takes a few seasons to really get guys rollin' with it.

My defense (which was incredibly awesome the year I won the bowl) had some fairly talented players in the secondary, but the rest of it was incredibly ordinary. It was the high cohesion of a lot of the players that made it perform as well as it did.

At least, that's my explanation. I'm not THAT great of a defensive gameplanner.

[mike17]

One small thing I'll add:

Cohesion is relative to the other teams in the league. So if a team like Columbus has a bunch of guys retire, you'll see a bump in your cohesion ratings as that team's ratings come down.

The only reason it takes so long for cohesion to kick in, is that there are a bunch of teams in the league who have kept their players around forever. A sly GM might try to break up those dynasty teams via trade or signing guys in FA to bring the cohesion numbers back to earth.