you might be wondering how the simulation we are playing compares to RL NFL football plays, performance, and strategy, here was the Ai response to the question about how many plays are used in an average NFL game.
AI Overview
While NFL teams have massive playbooks with hundreds of options, they often rely on a core set of 15-35 "stock" plays for 80-85% of their offense. In a single game, specific passing or running plays may be called several times, occasionally repeating basic concepts with different formations or personnel, while base, trusted plays are run frequently.
Game Plan Volume: A typical game plan for an NFL team includes roughly 75-100 pass plays and 15-20 running plays.
Total Plays: An average NFL team runs roughly 45-60 offensive plays in a game, with about 153 total plays occurring across both teams.
Repetition: While rarely the exact same play call consecutively, teams will often run similar concepts throughout the game, with core plays frequently revisited to exploit defensive weaknesses.
Playbook Size: Playbooks are complex, sometimes containing over 1,600 pages, with roughly 4,000 calls and 6,000 variations, ensuring high, but varied, usage.
The "85-10-5" rule is often cited, where 85% of the offense comes from a set of "stock" plays, while 10% are situational, and 5% are unique "trick" plays.
Specifically Defense ....
Defenses have much fewer play calls than offenses, but also have a lot of rules and adjustments that they have to make to suit each play/situation.
It's not like a video game where you have a menu and play slots and fill it with X number of plays. Defensive play calls are much more fluid...amoeba-like. The amount of plays or calls used on defense will often vary wildly based on the week to week game-plan and what the offense is doing. You could potentially call 20 different things in one game, then the next game, call only one. Defense is reactive in nature, so while they can call plays like offense too, they also need to wait and see the offensive formation first, along with any shifts and motions, to complete or finalize their calls.
What typically happens is you'll get a base or primary call. Say for example "Base Cover 3," or something like that. A team lines up in their base front, using their base stunt and Cover 3. The front, stunt, and coverage has RULES that instruct defenders how to play against the offense based on things like formations, motions, etc. Those rules also include all the calls and adjustments.
Front: The defensive line alignment. The front has RULES that tell defensive linemen (and sometimes linebackers) how to line up based on different formations, how to respond to motions, etc.
Stunt: The primary movement and gap assignments of the defense (which will also include things like blitzes and stunts like twists, loops, etc). The stunt has RULES that tells each defender which gap they have, what gaps to exchange with other defenders in different situations, what techniques to use against different types of blocks reads the offense gives you, etc.
Coverage: The primary rules for defending the pass. The coverage has RULES that help the secondary and linebackers how to align to the offensive formation to maximize the coverage's effectiveness, how the secondary and sometimes linebackers respond to motions, different adjustments or "tools" in the Cover 3 "toolbox," to use in various situations, and guidelines for when to completely get out of that coverage and go to a new one (common against things like trips, quads, and unbalanced formations).
So, they don't really run "plays," the way most fans think of. It's much more about responding to what is in front of them, and the play calls the DC/play caller sends in is more like the "instruction manual" for the next play rather than a strict play call.
Other than kicking, punting, draft, and salary management. We are playing PWFN. Long passes are nerfed, so being able to throw a long pass does not come into play, youth football distance is what we have.
My opinion, would like to see the game get the Ai coaches more involved and more important than they are currently and up till now. The HC is the only coach that matters, and only for the playbook. Take the play calling and exploits out of the hands of the team owners, no speed gain or loss by position, a players speed is what it is, regardless of position. And limited position conversions based on RL numbers, no weight gain or loss. Minimal roster requirements to simulate a NFL roster and Ai management steps in when roster does not meet requirements, same as for total # of players and salary cap. I see so many spending as much time on hiring new coaches during early FA, what for? JMOp
Youth football is fun, I coached both tackle and flag, also high school. Its not college or NFL, but no less competitive. My point is that we are playing a youth football simulation in the current game version, not NFL.
