Mike Lowe

We are checking the pulse on the BBCF community to see who might be interested in getting a new league off the ground this month. We have a bunch of leagues over at simsportsgaming.com and used to have a BBCF league that ran for about 6 years. Time for a fresh start! The way we *used* to run the league was in real-time, so a year in the game took a year in real-life to coincide with the actual real college football season. Was actually a ton of fun that way to build up suspense and also allowed time for guys to be in other leagues/games. However, we could definitely speed things up a bit if that's the general consensus. If you're interested, head on over to our Discord and check out the new-league-creation channel. https://discord.gg/Vc7P7kHQbT Here are some questions we are debating on now: What sort of sim schedule are we interested in? Do we want to mirror the craziness of the real-life NCAA conference alignments, or blow it all up once and for all with our own unique setup? Can users have multiple teams? What can we do to help make this league a living and breathing experience, such as podcasts, articles, etc? Are any of you interested in that sort of detailed commitment?

I'm a bit late to the party, but this is great to hear! Arlie, please reach out if you'd ever need assistance with this. Our community over at Sim Sports Gaming would have a lot of feedback to share which might help make the game even better. I was an original beta tester, and I'm still excited about this game and its potential.

Sorry for the late reply. I was receiving notifications! Glad you're enjoying it and that it's working well for you. I don't recall whether there's something in the editor where I can set teams to play 11 games. I figured everyone would want the conferences to all have a balanced schedule. And yes, the quality of the coaching staffs, players, etc. is set on the school's reputation. There are a handful of school ratings in the editor that impact this. You can and could start new games and we'd have totally different players, but Georgia, Michigan, OSU, etc. would likely all still be Top-5 teams. I'm not sure about your last question on staff delegation.

Uploaded a new version of the zip that now contains a psetup file (for the new cities needed) as well as a couple of small errors I found in the original mod.

Hi all, This is a psetup/pstats collection I put together that is based off of this hypothetical "New Beginnings" conference realignment/balancing from Sports Illustrated Details The base of this was created using JaCeLo3's 2020 NCAA Mod (so teams like Liberty already included) 11 conferences each with 12 teams. Southwest Conference added to replace independents "conference" Each conference has 2 divisions and a conference championship game James Madison and Sam Houston added (as well as their correct cities) SDSU Snapdragon Stadium and UAB Protective Stadium added Prestige updated to end of 2021 season All conferences get an auto-bid to the tournament of 16 leaving 5 at-large bids Tournament seeding is set based on overall ranking, so a conference winner can and will sometimes get seeded lower than an at-large bid. All team rivalries edited so that they are aligned with an in-conference opponent for rivalry week* For now, no other rivalries (classic or otherwise) were left in. These can be added back in obviously (so games like ND vs BC or Army vs Air Force), but to keep it simple and clean, I just have 1 in-conference rival per team. It's a known issue that bowl logos do not work when using the tournament options in this game *Note: Seems about 90% of these rivalry games work, but some still don't get scheduled for whatever reason. I've read through all of the theories on this, but we can dismiss the "conferences can't be larger than 12 teams" as well as dismiss the "you must clear the schedmatch database" which I have ensure has happened on both accounts. My best guess is that teams that have switched conferences from the hard-coded 2015 update are the teams that mostly seem to have issues getting that new rivalry game scheduled. A good example is the LSU/Clemson rivalry I made. However, rivalries such as Michigan/Ohio State are working properly. Another theory is that the start year being switch from 2015 to anything else creates some issues as you'll see scheduling errors later on even if you start in 2015 with the default pstats file. For some reason, setting the rivalry week to 15 in the team database page has the games all being played in Week 14. This might be hard-coded as usually that Week 15 is left for Army vs Navy I believe. For any team that seems to have trouble getting the rivalry game scheduled, I switched their rivalry week from Week 15 to 0 for easier tracking in the pstats file. My Recommendations 16-game tournament schedule Do not include post-season stats Turn off conference realignment in league options (after creating the league) For now, I've only included the psetup.dat and pstats.dat files as well as the helmet and team logo for Sam Houston State and James Madison. I have not created endzones or fields for these two teams. The rest can be found in JaCeLo3's 2020 NCAA Mod. If you have any requests or suggestions, please let me know. I know this isn't a flawless file, but it's 95% of what I was hoping it to be and I think it turned out really great--it's really cool to see the tournament take shape, for instance. Thanks for checking it out. Cheers to us seeing an update of this game from Arlie at some point. It's still a great one!

disregard

JaCeLo3 or anyone else, where I left off was just messing around with updated the project conferences with SEC adding Oklahoma and Texas, etc. It seems to work (and I move the 3 remaining Indys to CUSA to give it 10 teams minus JSU and JMU while leaving Notre Dame as the only Indy), but the schedules for those moved teams seem really messed up. For instance, Oklahoma and Texas seem to generate a schedule (before invites) that looks like an INDY team. Aside from the conferences and teams tabs in stats.dat, is there someplace else this should be aligned? Also, when I tested a move of Notre Dame to B1G East (with Indiana going to the West), it created similar indy-looking schedules for all B1G teams. So that ended my testing

Quick question: Is it possible (and safe?) to add teams to the database? So go from x amount of teams to like x+3? I wasn't sure whether that would blow stuff up. Obviously we'd update the conference info and add in the details of the teams in the stats.dat.

One thing I tried but haven't had any luck with yet was swapping the entire B1G with another 14-team conference in the hopes this would get OSU/MICH to play each year. In the editor I just switched the conference number for those teams and it works, but the game still doesn't get scheduled that way. Perhaps someone with more know-how can try something different with that info. Also, would it help to expand or contract the B1G?

To follow-up, I'm able to edit the pstats file (in MS Access) to "force" Michigan and Ohio State to play, but they always seem to play in Week 1. I'm not sure how to get that game to auto schedule any other way. They are both listed as each other's rival for Week 15 in the Teams section of the database. Not sure why it doesn't register though.

I have this problem too, but I don't necessarily think it's tied to the mod as we had it happen in our online league where OSU and Michigan would always play in Week 1. My guess is that it has something to do with the modern conference alignment/rules. There's a way you can go in and set this game manually via MS Access, but I forget how exactly and it didn't always work that great. Does it sort itself if you sim ahead 2 years as a test?

Is there a way to edit your coach's age either in-game or with an editor?

There is such a great opportunity for an update to this game as well as a pro game from GDS. I would love to offer to help out however I could. I was an original beta tester prior to the 2005 release and also recall chatting with Arlie to tweak a few things when he updated the game last back in 2017 for steam. Still a great game that just needs a bit of modernization to playcalling/playbooks among a few other elements.

What changes would one need to make to get this up to the 2021 season?

I was able to fix this by placing the file above in the GAME directory itself. Worked fine after that.