2037

It's bad karma, man... :)

CM

Got it. Overuse controls karma.

Actually, no. The 'overuse' play-by-play text means that something did trigger a penalty based on the overuse penalty and the result of the play was not positive for that team. The game engine has no way to know whether the penalty actually is the cause of the bad play or not. Further, the penalty is actually applied by boosting the other team's attributes, not by decreasing your team's attributes, so it is unlikely that a drop will be a result of play overuse. A drop is usually reported if there was no defensive back influencing the drop, and can include a drop due to a poorly thrown ball. It is definitely possible that the attribution of a drop is too broad.

can we get rid of play overuse

Would it be better if play overuse resulted in plays getting more yellow flags. Eg in the wide open receiver drop he gets called for a push off (thus creating the space). Would result in more catches being made but called back for penalties and force the owners that only run 15 different plays all game into expanding the playbook.

This would also indicate that the defense has made an adjustment to the overused play to draw the foul.

To balance somewhat an overused offense play could be picked up prior to the snap with a timeout, or a defensive offsides.

In saying that no-one wants to see 20 yellow flags in each game. But it would force teams to expand the playbook.

No.. The idea is that the more you run a play the BETTER your team gets at executing it. The term "play overuse" is a misnomer. It's actually the defense adapting to a play it has seen before. IMO, it would be better to have the defense adapt faster and thus force teams to "expand the playbook", as you say.

CM

The problem with expanding the playbook is that the AI doesn't call plays equally anyway. I have 40 plays always, and most of them have an equal chance of being called depending on down and distance. But I always end up with one short pass being called 6 times (will cause overuse) and other short passes being called 0 times ... etc.

Good point. I think what real NFL teams do is have a list of plays they want to use in different down and distance situations. You see coaches on the sideline with those laminated play sheets in NFL games. Maybe this game could have play scripts or some other mechanism that says "don't call this play in this down & distance more that x times". I think it's hard to knock the concept of play overuse "penalties" overall. In the NFL, if a defense knows what is coming they almost always stuff it. I would think that would be an important realism feature..

CM