I envy the heck out of Greg Barath and Mark Zarb.  They are true APBA grinders, replaying entire seasons.  I have attempted to do this about a dozen times, and have never made it past week four . . . so, I know that it is just not in my future to play an entire season replay.

Still, I love the football game and, since I pay for every team when I purchase a card set, I want to use every team!  So I typically will play a single-elimination tournament and end up with a “Super-Bowl” at the end of this exercise.  This year I decided to mix things up a little.  I spend a good hour and a half to two hours per team before I even play a game prepping for these games by doing all the player quotas, and that’s a awful lot of time, especially when I see half the teams play only one game.

So, instead of a single elimination, this year I will do a double elimination until I have 16 teams left, and then it will become a single elimination tournament.  I seeded each team in each conference based on their 2017 NFL won-lost record and the #16 team will play the #1 seed, the #15 seed will play the #2 seed, etc.

Each winner will play another winner . . . . and each loser will play another loser.  This will eliminate four teams in each conference because they will have two losses.  The teams that finish 2-0 will automatically qualify for the single elimination tournament.  The teams that are 1-1 will play each other, eliminating another four teams in each conference.

In total, I will play 55 games between August and February – about two games a week.  This works perfectly with my schedule and is, I think, a very accommodating way to use all 32 teams and to see each team at least twice.

In fact, I would urge anyone out there who knows that they will NEVER complete a full season’s replay to give this format a try.

I will be reporting my results here – and, as always, I welcome any and all comments and suggestions.

Ray Dunlap