Boston Gameplanning Thread

[mike17]

Attached are my stock gameplans that I use in every league. I do not adjust them except to make sure my QB knows the formations.

Disclaimer:

These are not magically going to get you 10+ win seasons. You need the correct talent, cohesion, and chemistry to get results like that.

Important Notes on Offense:

This scheme requires a specific roster makeup to work well. You make your money (Pun very intended) throwing deep, so you'll need to find a players that maximize your ability to do so. You also run more than most teams, so RBs you can rely on for about 500 total carries are also needed. Here's the skills I look for by position:

QB - Medium, Long, Deep passing. Also sense rush, and 3rd downs. All other skills are nice but not necessary.

Starting RB - Breakaway, Speed Outside, Blitz pickup. 3rd down skills are also nice. This is your starter, and possibly Third and Short guy. Don't skimp on the blitz pickup skills. This guy will do his fair share of pass blocking.

Change of Pace RB - Elusiveness, 3rd downs, Breakaway, Speed Outside. This is your backup RB, and passing down back. The elusiveness is very important, as it gives him a boost when running against nickle/dime packages. Also, passing downs are generally third and long, so third down skills are needed on this guy.

WRs/TEs - Big Play, Route Running, Avoid Drops/Adjust to Ball. In that order. Other skills are not necessary. Those 4 skills maximize your receiver's chances of hauling in those deep bombs.

O-Line - Pass Blocking. That's it. Other skills are nice, but don't help you all that much. Mostly those other bars make your O-linemen think they deserve too much money, and I hate overpaying for skills I don't need.

FB - Blocking skills only. He should never run, and he should never catch a pass.

Defense post coming shortly..

[Guest]

Without looking at the game plan (on ma phone) I'm guessing you run something similar to Ben's Insomnia.

Interesting about Elusiveness on your 3rd down back. Hadn't considered that.

[mike17]

Important Notes on Defense:

This game plan aims to do 1 thing, disrupt the pass game as much as possible.

I go about this with a 3 way attack; 4 down linemen get after the QB at all costs, 3 LBs play man/zone to disrupt the short pass game, 4 DBs are as good overall at coverages as possible to stop the deep routes.

Completely ignore the run game. Nobody beats you with the run. The only reason there is agg run defense in this gameplan, is because I think it works well against short passing offenses.

Skills Needed by Position:

D-Line - PRT as high as possible. Strength is a bonus. All 4 linemen need to be pass rushing. Even though inside guys don't get sacks, they are contributing to your overall rushing effectiveness.

LBs - M2M/Zone. BnR is nice, too, but I tend to focus on the other 2 coverages. Other skills are not needed. Maaaybe you get a MLB with run defense since they tackle a lot, but that's a luxury, and they better be able to play pass coverage too.

CBs - M2M/BnR. Interceptions are also good. Ignore other bars. These guys need to stop opposing WRs and nothing else. Zone might be nice for a dedicated Nickleback

S - Zone. M2M is also good, especially for a SS, but mostly zone here. Interceptions are always a plus. Same as with a MLB, a SS makes a ton of tackles, so if you happen to have a run defense guy, SS is a good place for him.

[mike17]

I wrote all that pretty quick, and without as much detail as it probably deserves. I'll revise in the morning.

[Aston]

Mind if I piggyback here?

On RBs, I sorta like the elusive bar. It's great when a guy has no physical ability, and you see this quite often: little Breakaway, little PI, little STO, and then a 90 elusive. It's boom/bust but it's one way to get more big plays, and I am generally of the opinion that more big plays outweighs the negatives.

That said, I think if you can find it, Hole Rec (old reliable) is the key bar to have on a RB, provided they bring some physical ability to use it with. Breakaway's nice, but lately we've gotten great mileage out of guys like Josh Clovis and Ryan Green, who basically just have Power Inside.

On OL and DL, can't emphasize what mike says enough: PB, PRT. I guess I make an exception for center on the OL, although more likely I'm just stuck with the guy I picked to be C before I came to my current viewpoint.

Remember, OVR is just some kind of weighted bar average, not the end-all be-all of who's better and who's worse. You can have a 45-rated DT with 78 run defense and little else and that guy is worthless because by playing him, you're giving up wholesale one of exactly four pass rush assets you have available to you, and there is no way to make that up. None. You're just going to get less hurries, which directly means more completions for the opposing team. The only hope you have against a team that has a lethal offense is by harassing their QB, NYG-on-Brady style. Sorta like the NFL

The problem with a team like Boston is they have the weapons to bomb it and the will to do so, but even the best pass rush teams are going to have a hard time getting to Money. By having a balanced GP and running frequently, Money stays efficient ('simulated playaction', it's been called, or maybe it's just the benefits of balance and variety). They're a load to handle.

[mike17]

OK. not much here that isn't readily available on FOFC, besides the actual gameplans themselves.

Now lets talk about Why they work so you can take ideas and make your own GP if you don't like just plugging in mine.

My gameplan is a "run and stun" style offense which works well against any defense because they cannot gameplan to stop you. If they play the run, you complete deep passes, and if they play heavy pass D, the RBs eat them alive. The only thing that stops this offense is big red bars and a balanced defensive GP. The other thing that makes this gameplan effective, is that we avoid the redzone. Everyone knows that in the redzone, your offensive effectiveness is lowered. To combat this problem, we try to score between 50-20 yard lines on the opponent's end, whether its a deep bomb, or a long run against a dime package.

Offensive Gameplanning Tips:

Basic Principles - Balance is key. Don't use any formation more than 30% of the time (20% max usage is even better if you can do it.); Don't use more than 60%(-ish) on your play type selection chart unless it's a down/distance that rarely occurs; Don't run more than 20% in any particular lane; Don't throw more than 50% of your passes in any particular distance bracket. Balance, balance, balance keeps the defense honest. Skewing your gameplan to do too much of any particular thing will result in decreased effectiveness.

1st and 10 - This is where you set the tone for what you want to do on offense. You are in 1st and 10 much, much more than any other situation during the game, so what you do on this down has a huge impact on your offensive style. My gameplan is run and stun, so on 1st and 10, I use 57% run, and 42% long pass, because those are the general percentages I want this offense to be running in all situations. If you wanted to play west coast, then the first step to setting up that gameplan is to play 40% run, and 55% short pass on 1st and 10.

Formations - Running the wrong formations for the offense you run is something that a lot of people do without knowing it.

-Normal sets are key. You should be in your normal formations as much as possible (60-80% of the time). The reason for this is that there are far more possible plays in a normal formation than any of the specialty formations. You give less away to the defense when you line up in any of the normal formations. (There's no sneakiness to your play calling when you're lining up 4 or 5 wide.) Secondly,

-Choose formations that have your best players on the field. If you have 3 excellent WRs (Like Boston), then you should be coming out in the single-back formations a lot. You can see that in my offense, we're in some version of single-back about 35% of the time, and we are in a set with 3 or more WRs about 50% of the time.

-General Strategy when choosing formations: I start by putting 15-20% into each normal formation that my QB knows, then adding 5-10% into sets where my best players are on the field, then filling in the rest of the formations my QB knows with 2-3% until they total 100. Make sure that there are zeroes for the formations your QB doesn't know.

Pass Distances - As mentioned previously, balance is key. But with passing distances, being balanced is a little trickier than meets the eye. When you're using long passing in your play selection, the game then goes to your long passing distance chart (in the miscellaneous offensive settings) to pick the actual route distances. 9-12 and 13-18 are actually medium passes; 19-26 and 27-39 are long passes; and 40+ is a deep pass. I balance the gameplan to throw fairly even amounts of medium and long passes, with the occasional deep bomb. If you total my percentages in each bracket, I'm using 50% medium, 40% long, 10% deep. I see too many people that are playing a short passing offense doing something like 40% in 9-12, 40% in 13-18... That's skewing your gameplan 80% towards medium passes and ignoring the long and deep almost entirely, even though in the window it looks like you're balancing the pass distances.

Pass Blocking - RB/FB block 100% of the time, TEs block 0% of the time. I don't care how good your back's pass catching skills are, he's not a WR. You might change this for a short passing offense (But probably not). The only reason to have a TE block is if he's really, really terrible at pass catching (and if he is, then why did he make the team?)

[Guest]

interesting read

[Guest]

Directionally i agree but i dont think "throwing deep" is the end all be all of this game.. Here's my 2cents on building a winning program in FOF.

At highest level its a resource optimization game.. so i would break apart the GM and GP part of the game..

On the GM part of the game.. you have to have a system to evaluate your team. This system give you a direction in the offseason to use your resources (draft pick, players) to improve your team. Then you need the ability and discipline to evaluate and acquire the talent.

If i look at my team BKL this year.. I look at the team this way:

We are 7-4
Lost to BOS twice (35-32, 34-33), CHA (30-27), SMD (23-22)

We are 2nd (29.3) in points per game.. good!
We are 2nd (66.2%) in completion %, 6th (7.78) in YPT, 3rd (18.2%) in opp pass rush.. good!
we are 20th in YPC (4.01) but 9th (34.6) in Block %... Oline seems good. We need a better RB
We are 30th in turnovers.. too many turnovers.

OFFENSE EVALUATION: We have a very good offense, if we can get a quality RB and turnover the ball less we will have a dominating offense... overall we look good on offense.

On D:

We are 20th (21.0) in points allowed.. NOT GOOD!
We are 8th in pass rush %... good
We are 19th in pass defense %... not good
We are 20th in opp completion %.. not good
We are 10th in opp turnovers.. 3rd in INTs.. good our D can get turnovers
We are 31th (32) in pass defends.. SUPER SUCKY!

DEFENSE EVALUATION: Need to improve our pass D

I would go into the offseason looking to improve my running game and my pass D.. looking to upgrade my RB or CB/FS.

Draft time i would look at NEED (RB, PassD) or BPA

I just do this every year.

In general i agree with bars that mike and nutah focuses on (big play WR, pass blocking Oline, pass rushing Dline, great 2ndary)..

In general, you need a mix of studs ( guys that can do it all at their position) and role players (1 bar specialist.. pass blocking Oline, pass rushing Dline, INT CB/FSs).

I tend to use my 1st and 2nd round picks on studs and rest of picks on role players .

On the GP part of the game.. once i feel you have talent there are many ways to slice the cow.. for example, BKL we are mostly a short passing team with 70% completion % for most of the year and 2nd currently in scoring. I try to throw deep but i couldnt because of crappy cohesion, crappy running game, crappy oline so i just went with short passing.. even in short passing you still need pass blocking and you still need great WR to break big plays.

Nutah i feel is the best at evaluating, acquiring, and utilizing high impact talent.. for example he was able to acquire WR Bob Hansen last year at 1.7.. it would be great if you guys can talk about the philosophy of team building in additional to GPing.

You still need alot of luck to win championships.. thats what makes NUTAH's run soo crazy amazing... but we at BKL are trying our best to stop that run.

Thats my 2 cents.. not sure if its useful.

[mike17]

Here's where I expect some hearty discussion, because most people regard defensive gameplanning as the toughest thing in FOF.

Defensive Gameplanning Tips:

My provided defensive gameplan is a fairly heavy pass defense that has the added benefit of being average against the run. I achieve this mostly with a specific roster build, but there are a few wrinkles in the gameplan which help.

Disclaimer: I don't have as good of a handle on defense as I do offense, but I generally do have one of the top 10 defenses in my leagues.

Basic Principles - Very similar to offense in principles. Balance, and use basic formations. Also, avoid exotic coverages. I try to avoid using more than 60% in play calling situations so that the defense is not too heavy against the either the pass or run.

General Playcalling - Gameplan to cover up your weaknesses. On my teams I generally have very small run defense bars. Nobody on my D can defend the run at all. So, I play quite a bit of agg. run defense (on 2nd and less than 8 mostly) to cover up that weakness in my roster talent. I think you could do something similar with excellent run defenders, and sit in aggressive pass defense 50% of the time.

1st and 10 - Same idea as offense... 1st and 10 is called far more than any other situation, so your choices here have a big impact on your defensive philosophy. With my gameplan, I try to stop the pass 59% total, and stop the run 41%, which reflects the philosophy of being pass D first and foremost.

Personnel - I am in base defense nearly all of the time. The idea here is the same as using normal formations on offense. The base personnel do not give away your intentions to the opposition, and they also tend to be you best defensive players (I don't see too many teams with a stud nickle corner, for instance.) I use 100% goalline in agg. run, but Jim has put a wrinkle into the game that only allows goalline formation where it's appropriate (I'm assuming that's in short yardage situations.) I keep my goalline at 100% so that when those short yardage situations arise, my goalline package is always used.

Blitzing - I don't do it much. (25% on passing downs) I like my linebackers in coverage, and I don't see much difference in pass rush production when you blitz a lot, so I'm not sure there's a benefit to blitzing.

Double Coverage - I always double up on the best receiver. Most teams can only get one great WR, so it makes sense to double their top guy. But, since there are 2 boxes there, and they don't appear to be mutually exclusive, I put 100 in both. My take is that in situations where the top WR is not doubled, then it looks to see if it should double the 2nd receiver. So, I always want a receiver to be doubled up. As far as I can tell, there is no detriment to using double coverage, and if it takes targets away from the best WR, there is a huge benefit.

Pass Coverages - Here's the rub. The way I see it, there are 3 main coverages: 2-deep Man, 2-deep BnR, and 3-deep Zone. I treat these 3 like I treat my normal formations on offense. (65-85% of my total coverages are in those 3.) I mix in some of the other coverages, but no more than 10-15% in any one of the others. The reasoning being, that the 3 main coverages do reasonably well against both the run and pass, so why introduce weaknesses when you don't have to?

- Strong-side-man/zone is all about covering the TE. You should look at your SLB's coverage skills when deciding which to use. I generally get M2M coverage OLBs, so I use strong-side-man coverage quite a bit.

[mike17]

The rest of the Boston strategy lies in keeping players around forever, and making sure that my QB has affinities with all of the offensive leaders.

Cohesion, Chemistry, and smart gameplanning allow you to get studly numbers from average players; and that's why Boston has been doing so well for the last few years.

I hope that this thread was helpful to somebody.

[Guest]

Great stuff Mike. What made you want to write up so much this weekend? random..

[Aston]

One thing I like to do is to use 4-deep as a means of adding variety. Some pesky teams (cough, cough) compel me to use a lot of 3-deep in earlier downs. If they do nothing but pass long on 3rd & 10 I'm comfortable using a lot of 4-deep there and it helps with not ending up with too much 3-deep on the day.

On the TE coverages...the manual says WSM/SSZ is simply better and SSM/WSZ is simply worse vs TEs, and both are merely for variety.

[Guest]

One thing I like to do is to use 4-deep as a means of adding variety. Some pesky teams (cough, cough) compel me to use a lot of 3-deep in earlier downs. If they do nothing but pass long on 3rd & 10 I'm comfortable using a lot of 4-deep there and it helps with not ending up with too much 3-deep on the day.

On the TE coverages...the manual says WSM/SSZ is simply better and SSM/WSZ is simply worse vs TEs, and both are merely for variety.

I used to run some 4 deep but it (anecdotally, just from watching solevision) seemed to be worse against anything but a deep pass that I started running exclusively 3-deep in situations where I used to sprinkle in 4 deep. I haven't felt like there was any dropoff in 3-deep vs 4-deep that was substantial in deep throws. If anyone has any stats I'd love to see them though, because I'm obviously not completely sold on it vs anecdotal evidence.

Differences from Mike, for me: 1) I run a lot less base defense. If it's a passing situation I'd rather be in nickel, and sometimes dime. I tend to have a good CB3 but I don't always have one.

2) I used to not run ANY agg run or agg pass, but Julio especially has convinced me that it can be good sometimes.

3) I tend to have a more balanced run/pass split on 1-10 than Mike.

4) I agree with Mike on blitzing and its effectiveness, and I tend to do it even less than he does.

5) I don't put 100/100 in my DC boxes on defense. I suspect it is mutually exclusive and I tend to want to eliminate one receiver from the opponent's team by DCing him. (Whoever the more dangerous one is.) The opposing QBs' read defense bar AND the endurance of the top WRs on the team decide who I am more likely to DC in any given game. That said, if a QB's RD is high, and one WR is REALLY better than all the rest, I'll DC him anyway, hoping to limit his effectiveness.

[mike17]

One last trick that just occurred to me:

Playing Time:

I never set playing time higher than 85%. Most of the time it's at 80% for everybody. I think that high playing time causes guys to be tired and play at a lower effectiveness than if they got some plays off. I also think that being tired causes more injuries.

You may notice that when a backup gets into the game, they will play at a very high level because they are fresh. I take full advantage of this by getting all my backups into the game for at least a few snaps.

YMMV, but I do notice that my teams seem to have fewer injuries, and they seem to really turn it up a notch late in the season. My hypothesis there, is that my team is still fairly fresh later in the season, where other teams with 100% playing time have tired starters.

[Sharkn20]

I set 100% always unless I like my back-up, also if player have * in his status...