What a great game!

[jmkbr]

I've had it for a week and I'm completely hooked. Here are a few things I would bounce off Arlie and the rest of the gang where future versions or upgrades might be concerned: 1. I saw a thread on here before talking about in-state recruits and how it can be really difficult to dominate one's recruiting area at times. Specifically the poster who was bringing up the topic was talking about coaching South Carolina and how he was losing in-state players at an alarming rate to out-of-state schools. I noticed something similar with respect to LSU; I had my prestige rating up to 86 and was coming off a national championship, pegged the top seven players in the state absolutely perfectly with respect to what recruiting pitch I was using and spent the maximum recruiting budget available on them as soon as their "most important" was identified. And yet I got two of the seven. That made no sense. 2. Also, is there any particular reason why we're only carrying 66 scholarship players on a roster? Seems a little 1-AAish, and it plays absolute HELL with depth. 3. And another thing on recruiting; in real life a great many schools will hold a camp in June or July for invited recruits, and it is very common to have several players make early commitments out of that camp. Several other schools will also host a Junior Day in February or March where they'll invite players in. Would it be possible to perhaps incorporate these items into the game? For example, you could hold a summer camp in, say, the first week of training camp and spend a certain chunk of your budget on the camp - which if you're a small school or a mid-major you probably wouldn't be able to do to enough of an extent that you'd be able to get anything out of it. I can see how a Junior Day might be problematic or even redundant, but an early-commitment process revolving around something like that could make for an additional amount of fun as the season goes along. Maybe you could even get an e-mail periodically during the season telling you the updated stats and also maybe academic updates from your early commitments. 4. There was a thread on here as well about upgrading the choices of offensive styles and formations, and I'm in full agreement there. I really like the way the game is built from a playcalling standpoint although the PBP can be a little repetitive, but just having a little more customizable playbook with respect to the various styles would be a nice improvement. 5. Another idea I was thinking of - why not have some plays that are identifiable as "bread and butter" plays? The deep cross for Spurrier's old Florida teams, for example, or LSU's Bubble Screen, or USC's old Student Body Right, or the zone option at Wake Forest or Air Force. The idea basically is that if you can run a play with enough success over the course of a season or two, or maybe if your offensive coordinator gets known for it, then you can make that play gain some kind of bonus and it's harder for defenses to stop it. 6. Also, how about an NFL Draft? We have guys going out early for the draft, but I don't see anything that says where they get drafted. In TCB and TDCB we had that and at least in TDCB it was part of your coach's rating for development of players. Bring that back into this game and you can get something going along the lines of my next comment, which is... 7. ...developing tradition at a given position. Put some QB's into the NFL, for example, and all of a sudden you've got lots of high-school stud passers who (1) want to go to your camp every summer and (2) will look at you extra-hard when you offer them. Probably the mechanism to do this might be that you can get extra prestige points to recruit at given positions when you've put players into the draft at those positions. Or maybe you could add a 7th recruiting pitch, which is "Prepare for the Pros" or some such and if that's the most important thing to the recruit then if you've put the most kids into the Show at the recruit's position you've got a big advantage. 8. Fundraising and facilities. I don't have any specific suggestions on this, and I know those things can improve if you push your prestige number over time, but it seems like that's a whole element of the game which could be developed; whether it's stadium additions for prestige and even home-field advantage bonuses, luxury suites which can add to your budget, academic facilities which improve prestige and keep suspensions to a minimum, weight rooms and practice facilities which can give a bonus in player development in the offseason, or just plain old cash fundraising to add to your budget. How exactly to do the interface for this I'm not sure about; maybe scheduling speaking engagements with the boosters some kind of way or even having some kind of role-playing aspect wherein if you play the 6-7 most influential boosters just right they'll fork over the heavy coin for whatever improvement you want to make. I dunno. I do know that getting big chunks of money out of the boosters is something that no coach in the last 20 years has been able to build a program without. 9. OK, last one, and this is more of a question than a suggestion; can coaches develop? In other words, if you hire an offensive coordinator who is, let's say, all reds and pinks on scouting and development but you stick with him and have some success because you're pumping talent through your roster, can he learn something and become a good coach? There are good coaches in real life at some of the smaller and mid-major programs who obviously don't have the budget to attract high-profile assistants, but end up developing them and shipping them off to higher-profile programs (like Dennis Erickson did at Montana and Washington State, for example, or like John L. Smith did at Utah State and Louisville). Building a "coaching tree" of assistants seems like one way to perhaps equalize things where budgets are concerned, particularly if you're running a smaller program.

[cameronhalsey31]

I like. Especially 7 and 8.