The Lake Erie Challenge
Ahhh… the good old days. Taking the Cleveland Browns, the NFL’s expansion club, from the ground up and building a dynasty the old fashioned way, brick by brick. I remember it like it was yesterday, back at the old Sideline…
Anyway – I’m finally cracking open FOF 2004, and am going to give this game a whirl. My plan is to use TCY-generated draft files, and try to follow this career fairly closely. I’ll be using the game files generated from my
Akron Zips career, which has been a semi-amusing sidelight of this project already.
The quickest way to effect the “empty cupboard” scenario in this game (unfortunately) seems to be to start a new career, QuikSim through a full but pointless season, cut your whole team, and start from the ground up.
(When using HR’s game files, you have to be careful – if you cut absolutely everyone in year one, you may eat up your entire salary cap for year two by accident, and run into impossible number problems) You’ll see lots of your pissed-off former players in the free agent pool, but if you follow my original standards for the true “Empty Cupboard,” that won’t be a factor. In my case, I won’t be considering any players who were in the league prior to the 2004 rookie draft.
For my initial settings, I’m going to try to run this career without any inflation – so I set that to zero/zero. This might cause some disruption in the initial player market – but it won’t affect my team, since I’ll only be signing new players starting next season anyway. And, I’m using a fictional player pool, generated by HeavyReign’s snappy utility. I hope that will work out fine, but it should be pretty transparent to me – I’m not going to be using those players, just competing against them. (But I loathe the presence of real-world players so much, that I welcome such a tool – it’s a great addition, I think)