Pre Off-Season Discussion Topics

[tino38]

Well I did not raise this question on just Flacco alone. I used him as an example to see what everyone is thinking as well. Mark Sanchez numbers increased as well but he had a much much better team in some leagues than he ever did in real life. One question I do have Troy, do you keep the stats from year to year or are they overwritten once the new season begins. Be interested to see if this years passing stats are similar to last year or if they are skewed one way or the other.

[Goodell]

One question I do have Troy, do you keep the stats from year to year or are they overwritten once the new season begins. Be interested to see if this years passing stats are similar to last year or if they are skewed one way or the other.

I do try to keep everything. I basically make a copy of the various data tables, rename the copy including the season year, and then wipe clean the "live" table fresh for the new year.

So I should be able to eventually have more access to historical data. The one thing I have to do for the complete picture is taking the first AFFL data and getting it into the new data structures as we changed things around a bit with data once moved to a multi-league setup.

I'll try to have more of that historic data available this off-season.

[Ben C.]

One question I do have Troy, do you keep the stats from year to year or are they overwritten once the new season begins. Be interested to see if this years passing stats are similar to last year or if they are skewed one way or the other.

I do try to keep everything. I basically make a copy of the various data tables, rename the copy including the season year, and then wipe clean the "live" table fresh for the new year.

So I should be able to eventually have more access to historical data. The one thing I have to do for the complete picture is taking the first AFFL data and getting it into the new data structures as we changed things around a bit with data once moved to a multi-league setup.

I'll try to have more of that historic data available this off-season.

I would certainly LOVE to see the historical data. If you're only able to make one change to the site/simulation all off-season, I think it should be adding a historical archive.

[tino38]

Yeah I agree with Ben. If you were able to put that on here that would be really interesting and cool to see! In no rush to have it, but definitely look forward to it when possible!

[RebelFan]

Speaking of stats, there are a few areas I would like to see changed/improved.
Team stats - it would be nice to have cumulative team stats available and listed just like individual player stats.
For instance, in DFFL, I had to go through and look at each game by game to determine that 49ers only allowed 1 rushing td this season. As opposed to being able to look at one page, I'm going to 16 pages to verify that info.
The other improvement I'd like to see incorporated is a full team schedule for each team, mainly so I dont have to visit another site to see who my opponent's QB goes against in reality. For instance, if my sim team plays Aaron rodgers next week, I want to know who Rodgers & the pack play in reality to have an idea of how things are gonna go. Same goes for my running backs as I don't always necessarily remember that kind of thing from week to week. As this full team schedule moves through the season, the final scores should fill in and I think that would make it much easier to figure out playoff tiebreakers.
Another feature that I think would be awesome is a graph on player pages that keeps up with their madden graded increases & decreases over the course of the season. This could be done with teams as well and I would be keenly interested to know which teams would have the most improvement. That, I believe is a true indicator of a successful GM.

[tino38]

All good ideas Rebel. I am in favor of these as well. May take a lot of work though. Always available to assist in anything, Troy.

[DavidK]

also a reason for the high passing yards may be the fact that teams face incredibly weak teams as compared to NFL teams. for example if you were to play the San Diego Chargers, and the New Orleans Saints in the DFFL, which are obviously trying to rebuild shown by the 20 1st and 2nd rd picks they both have (which never happens in the NFL) you may receive max boasts for those games and players can really pad their stats in games like those.

No offense to either San Diego or New Orleans.

[tino38]

Might have missed this from a conversation in the past, but is it dead set that we play the actual NFL schedule? In real life when a team in a division takes on another division opponent based on seeding in their respected divisions, it's due to how they finished in the year prior. Curious about if we absolutely must stick to the original schedule. For instance in the NFL I can already tell you the Jets play Oakland in New York because they both finished 3rd in their divisions. However in our league say DFFL I finished last, so instead of drawing Oakland, I'd actually draw San Diego instead because they finished last, in the same spot where the actual jets play Raiders. Perhaps it is too much tampering, I was just curious.
(This comes from http://www.johnnyroadtrip.com/schedules ... e_afce.htm )

[Royce R]

Might have missed this from a conversation in the past, but is it dead set that we play the actual NFL schedule? In real life when a team in a division takes on another division opponent based on seeding in their respected divisions, it's due to how they finished in the year prior. Curious about if we absolutely must stick to the original schedule. For instance in the NFL I can already tell you the Jets play Oakland in New York because they both finished 3rd in their divisions. However in our league say DFFL I finished last, so instead of drawing Oakland, I'd actually draw San Diego instead because they finished last, in the same spot where the actual jets play Raiders. Perhaps it is too much tampering, I was just curious.
(This comes from http://www.johnnyroadtrip.com/schedules ... e_afce.htm )

I dont think everyone plays that game on the same week. Maybe the 3rd place team that your suppose to play has a division game that week. I'd have to check, but I dont think that everyone plays that game on the same week. Which makes it impossible for us to change our to fit.

[Goodell]

If schedules are something people have more interest in discussing further, we can. Creating a schedule for so many teams with so many factors I imagine would be difficult and time consuming, plus lots of room possibly for teams questioning their generated schedule more if some teams got better scheduling breaks than others and we determined our own schedule.

There are some valid points on the other side to consider, though, even though I think scheduling is a little over-rated and difficult to forecast if a first place schedule really is super hard while a last place schedule super easy with so much turnover and change in the NFL usually from season to season with draft impacts and injuries.

Another difficulty in that is that I run each and every game manually at the moment across all leagues. So if there are 16 NFL games, I view a NFL schedule for that week in one window and I open my game simulator program in another window. I read the first NFL game on the schedule, then I plug in those same two teams and choose AFFL league. I click to generate the game results and once it goes through that, I click back button and keep the same teams but change league to CFFL. Generate that matchup for that game and then click back, keeping the teams the same but changing the league to DFFL. Then go back and see what the next NFL game that week was and going through it again.

If I manually run the games similarly in the future but each league has entirely different matchup schedules, the odds that I mess something up manually running the wrong game goes way up and takes more time to figure out and verify before running games. I do hope to someday not have to do that and just upload a schedule and have the computer run all the games for me, which may make different schedules in different leagues more feasible, but other factors to consider also with scheduling complexity.

It's a good topic in general to think about each off-season and see where we are in terms of interest in that and ability to implement.