Sim question

[Goodell]

no way the game should have been a blowout in the Sim like it was getting double the TDs and an extra FG while rivers was subtracted a TD eventhough he had a + update with the grades

I understand and I would again call for GMs who understandably are upset about "unexpected" results to speak up more in the off-season discussions about a suggestion I made last year to have the simulator do a couple versions of a simulated matchup and pick the most LIKELY result as the one that counts instead of just a one game trial.

You're in baseball sim leagues, right? You can take the very best baseball sim team and put them up against the very worst baseball sim team and sometimes the worst team will win if you just run one game. Odds are that the better team would win most of the time, but not all the time.

If we want the most "likely" events to always show up here, then more GMs should support that suggestion. Last year I think almost everybody was against it and just wanted to keep it to a one-game trial where upsets sometimes might happen.

There is currently no accounting for offensive line and defensive players who have GREAT grades having BAD games. I'd like to bring some of that in somehow but very difficult. We just go by grades and those grades don't have bad days they just are what they are. In this case, they had the stronger grades across the board for the most part and a couple max (or near max) advantages.

If I run the matchup a couple more times, there are some games where the result goes the other way and definitely some games where it's a much closer result than this one was.

One thing I've been wanting to do for a while but haven't been able to yet is bring in some real game context to these adjusted averages where it considers the grades of the supporting cast and opposition for the real updates also to put those in better context. That would help in some situations like this where many of the same players were on the field as reality. But still grades are going to matter a lot here and not a lot of ways of telling the sim that some players with great grades didn't play up to that in reality.

[TylerW]

It's hard to win Tyler when your OL is down .14 to a F7

yes it is but rivers got a boost as well yet lost a TD. take away the hedgecock TD, add a rivers TD, and even put in a blocked FG the chargers had that only counted as a blocked XP and the game is 26-21 a lot closer than the blowout and im giving you the extra TD from manning but he had that .14 boost. i just expected it to be a lot closer than it was. good win.

[TylerW]

something like IDP tackles/sacks/INTs/fumbles for defensive guys i think would be a cool fun wrinkle for the future to make the D seem more important on a weekly basis.

[Goodell]

It's hard to win Tyler when your OL is down .14 to a F7

yes it is but rivers got a boost as well yet lost a TD. take away the hedgecock TD, add a rivers TD, and even put in a blocked FG the chargers had that only counted as a blocked XP and the game is 26-21 a lot closer than the blowout and im giving you the extra TD from manning but he had that .14 boost. i just expected it to be a lot closer than it was. good win.

I agree it should have been closer and would be most of the time. This was just one of the cases where it was a more extreme outcome than most of them if you ran the game many times and charted it. Injuries really hurt there also for some grades.

I would like to limit "unexpected" results as much as possible in the future either by generating the most likely version of the game out of a handful of generated possibilities or keep working on trying to ensure that happens more within a one-game trial by tweaking the odds even more on a play-by-play basis toward the better teams. But we already have a lot of blowouts and that would exaggerate it even more. But will keep working toward a product that gets the best results as often as we can.

We have talked about (and even voted before to add) defensive statistics and I was meaning to this year but ran out of time. Still, though, those probably wouldn't change a grade of a player but just add a name to the play-by-play or increase odds of sacks happening if a lot in the defensive updates, etc.

What I was saying about the Hedgecock TD, though, is that it wouldn't just take it off the scoreboard. It would give the ball to Jacobs instead if not sharing as much with RB2 and he'd CERTAINLY score with a much better update than Hedgecock's mediocre default update. That wouldn't change if a different name of the RB. Sharing with RB2 just ensures that RB1s with weak backups don't get all the team's rushing touches and rushing touchdowns unrealistically but shares it with others (even if they get more than reality).

QB TD's are a matter of field position, though, as the sim doesn't have QB's throw 80 yards for a TD just because they don't have enough sim TDs to match update. It only looks at a QB's TDs once they are in the red zone where they become automatic scores, but the team has to get into the red zone for it to look at that. But a QB's completion percentage will go up 3% in the second half if he hasn't gotten his TDs yet as you'll notice Rivers's notes in quotations for expected percentage to work toward went up 3 points as the game went along.

[Dan R.]

Is it possible for a defense to return an interception/fumble for a TD? I don't think I've ever seen it in a simulation, but I may be mistaken. If not, is that something you plan on adding this offseason?

[Goodell]

Is it possible for a defense to return an interception/fumble for a TD? I don't think I've ever seen it in a simulation, but I may be mistaken. If not, is that something you plan on adding this offseason?

No currently. We wouldn't do that randomly because it would kind of suck if you got a return for a touchdown by chance only. But if we enter in defensive individual statistics next year that's a possibility if you have a defender who had a pick-6 in reality.

[Leb]

0:52 | 4 and 3 @ 6 (6)... Going for it on 4th down... pass complete to Johnson for 3 yards!
Ball turned over on downs.

Is there a inches situation or is three yards three yards?

[Goodell]

0:52 | 4 and 3 @ 6 (6)... Going for it on 4th down... pass complete to Johnson for 3 yards!
Ball turned over on downs.

Is there a inches situation or is three yards three yards?

There is definitely an "inches" situation and I've been meaning to change that in the play-by-play for a while. And definitely some small advantage built into those measurement situations for both home field advantage to become part of the game (as well as with penalties and some other random elements) as well as another way of exaggerating the differences in grades between the two teams to try to give the better units more advantages and more likely outcomes in the end.

Sucks to be on the other end of it (I know I was kind of in the same boat with my team this week), but an exciting finish there.

[RyanM]

I am curious as to why the max adjustment is capped at .15%. This is definitely not a gripe, as it's certainly helped me more than hurt me - just wanted to know the sim effects if it wasn't capped at that level.

[Goodell]

I am curious as to why the max adjustment is capped at .15%. This is definitely not a gripe, as it's certainly helped me more than hurt me - just wanted to know the sim effects if it wasn't capped at that level.

We can discuss and adjust those for next year this off-season, but the caps are intended to somewhat keep things from being overly exaggerated and not insanely far off the baseline of the real performance. We get blowouts here regularly, but without caps for teams with extreme grade advantages would probably get to even more lop-sided outcomes where teams with max advantages over weaker opponents might approach triple digit basketball scores.

I wanted to do a lot of sim testing last off-season but didn't have time, but that might be something to play with and examine the results of moving (or even removing) the caps around to try to get the best settings. Without any cap, though, there might be even more unrealistic blowouts than we get now with caps where the occassional 66-0 or 50-0 might pop up in extreme grade differences that might be more like 92-0 or something without caps.