The Idea

Like many football fans my age, I am a student of the history of the game. I will gladly spend my money on any piece of the story from 90 years of pro football. Just this week I spent about 40 bucks on 3 books from Amazon about the NFL, one about the 70's era Oakland Raiders and 2 books about Vince Lombardi (see...I recognize there's more to football than the New York Jets). I may be one of the few private citizens with original issues of both the 50-year NFL anniversary book and the 75-year NFL anniversary book. I am lucky to have grown up immersed in the game.

Ever since Super Tecmo Bowl came out for the Nintendo (remember that?), I've been running football seasons through simulation, searching for a fairly statistically accurate way to reproduce a particular season, or a particular era. Unlike baseball, which has had and continues to have several reliable methods to simulate history through games like OOTP, football sims have been few and far between; the ones that have been released demonstrate their relative limits and inaccuracies fairly quickly. Part of the problem with pro football is the way they distribute and police their licensing agreements. The Madden franchise and Electronic Arts have had an exclusive deal with the NFL and the NFLPA to license anything related to pro football video games. If you want to use real NFL players in a video game or a simulation, you're out of luck unless you purchase Madden, because only EA has that option. As a result, when Madden comes out with an inferior product, they don't have to change what they do or offer a lot of customization with their product to satisfy their customers. If you don't like the product they're offering, you essentially have no place else to go.

One of the greatest aspects of OOTP is the ability to play by just about any rules you'd like. Want to play a 100-game season? Check. How about two 15-team leagues, with the pennant winners meeting in a winner-take-all World Series? Sure, why not...how about adding an extra playoff team and an extra round of playoffs? The last time I played OOTP years ago, all of these options were on the table. So...why not try the same thing with pro football. If you were going to recreate pro football history in a simulation, why not rethink the whole premise and introduce different rules and see how it would have played out? That's what interests me, and, if it interests you, then you'll like this blog.

Thanks to What If Sports, every pro football team that played from 1941 to the present day, whether it's the AAFC, the AFL, or the NFL, is available for simulation. All you have to do is create the structure and any idea you can think of can be actualized. This idea is to start in 1941 and apply the modern idea of a playoff format to history, with a few tweaks for good measure.