I chose 1981 to replay mainly due to it being one of the few memorable years for this long suffering Bengals fan. I was lucky enough to have season tickets to the Bengals games in 1981. It was the beginning of “The Jungle” and although the were not really high hopes at the beginning of the year the season ended up being quite a memorable here in Cincinnati.
My method of play is as follows.
I plan to replay the entire 1981 NFL season. I’m using an Excel spreadsheet on my own creation to do all board lookups. I also have the spreadsheet refined enough to do all the stat keeping for me.
Mark Zarb’s most recent floating index will be used as well as the Fletch 67 system.
I’ll call offensive plays for both teams.
My spreadsheet is programmed to call the defensive formation based on what formation the offense has chosen. The defense is fairly vanilla but my playcalling is not geared to outthink the defense. The defenses will blitz very infrequently.
My keying is a modified version of Oguard’s. Better defenses will have a higher percentage of keyed plays. I expect the keying percentage to run between 10 and 20 percent over the course of the replay.
I am also using a modified version of the team Sack, Interception and Special Team ratings that Maz created.
Defenses have been rated on their ability to force fumbles. This is similar to the FFN innovation on the site. I chose to not rate teams for the ability to recover fumbles. I’m allowing the recoveries to be random. I’m not convinced that recovering fumbles is anything more than a random thing anyway. Forcing fumbles does seem to be a skill that some defense do have from year to year.
I’m using my own Yards per Catch ratings which Greg posted here a few months ago.
These are the major method of play options that I will use. I hope to describe a few more of my minor innovations as we move along.
This replay will move at a much slower pace than Greg’s. Although I already have almost three weeks completed at this point. I will post summaries of the first three weeks soon.