What do you get when you take an extremely popular sport, an awesome concept of a football management sim, and put it all online for people to compete against one another in online leagues?

You get the new football management simulation MyFootballNow.com.

We recently sent some questions over to Jon Baker, the Bill Bellicheck and Robert Kraft personality behind the game. He is very excited about the game, and we feel you might be too after reading about it. Check out the interview after the jump!

Operation Sports: For those who aren't aware of it, what is MyFootballNow.com?

Jon Baker: MyFootballNow.com is a web-based professional football management simulator.  You take ownership of a team, and have several responsibilities to perform during the course of the season.  The game is first and foremost a strategy game, which just happens to be in the football management genre.

OS: How does the game work versus other simulations?

JB: We wanted MyFootballNow.com to be a web-based game instead of a console or PC game. This was mainly because we didn't want your gaming platform to determine whether or not you could play; the game works whether you are on a PC, a Mac, a Linux box, or even a smart phone or tablet.  Being web-based also allows the sims to run without a human being having to manually collect files and run the simulation.

In addition to this, we made an effort to make sure that the game makes sense visually, and by that I mean the design doesn't encumber the gameplay process.  Many text sim style games fall into the trap of giving you a series of mindless tasks that must be performed, requiring you to repeat the same task over and over, often times making it difficult to get to areas of information that are critical to the game play.  

Our goal throughout the development process has been to make sure the actions that you take really do count, that what you have to do really does require some thought, that you are presented with the information you need to make a decision, and to be as transparent about what the tasks you perform translate into what happens in the game engine.

The games are simmed in a 2-D game engine, and the end result is viewable in our game viewer.  Each virtual player is an autonomous agent capable of making thousands of decisions during the game.

Another point we wanted to focus on was making sure that the playing field stays even for all players.  To this end, we have not implemented any kind of pay-to-power-up concepts.  If you play in a league, you have exactly the same tools as every other player in that league.  We've also worked hard to make sure that if you take over a bad team, you aren't stuck with a permanently bad team; bad decisions by a previous owner may take a season or two to get over, but even during that time you're not completely debilitated and can still field a competitive team if you work at it.

OS: What management options are there for players?

JB: A player can take ownership of one team per league.  They can be in as many leagues as they would like.  All owners have the same responsibility for their team.  You are responsible to manage your roster to stay under the salary cap by signing free agents and re-signing your star players; hire your coaching staff; manage your draft war room; and prepare your depth chart and game plan for each game, including scouting your upcoming opponent.  We spent a lot of time to make sure that you can do those steps without having to spend hours logged in and working on it, but at the same time if you wish you can dig deep into your team, the stats, the other teams, and in general immerse yourself into the MyFootballNow.com universe.  Because the game is web based, you can also jump on any time that you have an internet connection and play with various aspects of your team or game plan.

OS: The game planning options seem very in-depth. What are the options players have?

JB: Game planning is definitely one of the biggest aspects of MyFootballNow.com.  Each head coach comes with his own offensive and defensive playbook, and during each game stage you install 40 offensive plays and 30 defensive plays into your week's game plan.  These are the plays that your team practices during the week, which in turn increases their familiarity of the plays and helps them to perform better.  You also can scout 10 offensive and 10 defensive plays of your upcoming opponent, which increases your team's familiarity with those plays and helps them perform better against them.

Then, you can choose your distribution of play types based on your location on the field, down, and distance to go.  On offense, this is broken down into inside and outside runs and short, medium, and long passes, plus personnel groupings.  On defense, this is broken down into defensive back and linebacker play styles (man-to-man, zone, blitz, etc). All these sources resolve into a weight setting for each play (which you can view in the game planning screens) to determine which play will be called during any situation in the game.

If all this sounds overwhelming, you can load a game plan customized by your coaching staff that will consider your upcoming opponent's abilities versus yours.  You can then just leave your coach's recommendations, or you can further tweak them to your liking.

OS: How do the leagues work?

JB: Public leagues are automatically generated as existing leagues fill up.  The leagues are fictional leagues, with player names being randomly generated.  Each league has its own forum, in addition to a community forum that spans all leagues.  We plan to roll out the ability for players to create private leagues, where the creator will have more control over the teams in the league, in the near future.

The games sim automatically six days per week (with a day off on Sunday), and you are presented with a countdown to see when the next sim will run.  During the season, sims alternate between midweek stages and game stages.  Midweek stages give you the opportunity to make any roster adjustments that you may need to make because of injuries, and game stages actually simulate the games themselves.  During the offseason, the game stages are first of all free agency weeks - an early set before the draft and a late set after the draft - where you can bid on available free agents to build your team.  In between the early and late free agency stages is the draft, where you build your draft board and choose players when you go on the clock.  Right before the season starts is the training camp stage, where you have your last chance to get your 60-man roster in place and players assigned to the position they will be in during the season.  The training camp stage is where your team develops the most.

Coaches can be hired at any time; hiring a coach will fire any existing coach in that position.  During the early free agency stage, you can hire a coach away from another team as long as you are offering him a promotion.  Coaches impact player development; a quarterback, for example, will improve his quarterback-related attributes based on the skills of his quarterback coach, his offensive coordinator, and his head coach.

It takes about 11 real-time weeks to complete a full season cycle.  A league must be at least 50% full in order to start a new season.  Each player has until the end of the current season to renew their team for the following year, if they don't then their team will become available.  If a player joins a league after the games have started, they are automatically extended for the following season.

OS: How do people join, is there a cost?

JB: New players can sign up at www.myfootballnow.com.  The sign-up process is very simple, we only have you enter your username, password, and e-mail address.  You just need to verify your e-mail address to get in.

Each season you play requires a payment of 5 game credits.  When you sign up, you are given a bonus of 5 credits to play your first season for free.  Credits can be purchased for as little as $0.37/month per league.  Bonus credits can be earned as well by using your referral link to sign up your friends.

OS: Is there anything else you'd like the world to know about MyFootballNow.com?

JB: We're excited about MyFootballNow.com and hope that you all find the game as enjoyable as we do.  We try to be very open to suggestions from the players - we've gotten a lot of good ones so far - and we're constantly working to improve the game experience and immersion factor.

OS: Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions Jon!

JB: Thanks again for giving me the opportunity to share a little bit about MyFootballNow.com!