2024 NFL Season Thread

[albionmoonlight]

It's the Jets. Rodgers merely being bad after his injury would not be nearly enough dramatic WTF pain for those poor fans.

I think that instead, he'll start playing like an MVP and the Jets will be in contention for the #1 seed, and then he'll suddenly retire from football in protest of, like, RFK not getting enough votes so Rodgers does not believe in America anymore or some shit like that.

That would be Jetsy!

[flere-imsaho]

There's no way this ends well for Jets fans:

Trump wins: RFK convinces DJT to nominate Rodgers for Secretary of the interior and so he retires from football in early January to go through the nomination hearings.

Harris wins: On 20 January, Rodgers leaves for a month-long mental health retreat in a cave in Borneo to "cleanse his aura".

[Ksyrup]

I believe Malik Willis has already gained more yards against the Titans than he did in his entire Titans career.

[Ksyrup]

Looks like the Vikings and Darnold are for real.

Also, while I'm not at all a fan of how the NBA manufactures chaos at the end of games with the TO and advance the ball to half court nonsense, I feel like the NFL has gone too far the other way by making comebacks almost impossible with the new kickoff rules and even more neutered onsides kick rules. I don't think anyone has tried an onsides kick despite a couple of teams being in a situation in which you almost certainly would have done so in previous years. I don't think I like that.

[dubb93]

I really don’t know why I still play fantasy football. I have Tua, McCaffrey, Puka, and Evan Engram in a 12 team big money league if you want to know how my season is going.

[Solecismic]

It's interesting to see three QBs in new situations this season, Darnold, Fields and Willis, all in action in the early games and all putting together solid winning performances. All three are games that they probably wouldn't have won for their original teams.

Fields in particular, as that game was on here and he wasn't a running threat. He was throwing quite accurately, though I'd hesitate to say he's completely turned the corner on decision-making. Just that his motion looks very clean now.

Given that quarterback play drives football and being able to make decisions quickly is as important as being able to make throws, I'm wondering how to process this. All three are guys I had pretty much written off as backups... if that.

As far as how that translates to the engine, what I did with 9 when I rewrote it was I tried to assess contribution based on the percentage of salary cap going to established starters at each position. I figured the guys who do roster for a living have much more information about this than I could ever process. For example, last year, the cap, minus dead money, was about $210 million. A reasonable starting quarterback averaged about $30 million (figuring in the young ones on rookie contracts) and you're spending about $90-$100 million on offensive starters. Give part of your offensive line and your running back to the running game, take a shade off of quarterback for that, since it's part of that, varying by team. Rushing offense is about a third of your offense. So it's reasonable to say that maybe 40-45% of your passing game is the quarterback.

But... that does not factor in coaching. And how do you do that? Let's say Tomlin is the reason Fields is looking like a new man this year. How do turn that into a simulation without it seeming absurdly random and not fun at all? Because if that's the case, it would be an entirely different game to get a coach like Tomlin on your team - or realize that Fields is a quarterback who needs a coach like Tomlin to reach his potential. If you go too far, FOF starts to resemble one of those old-time war games with thousands of little squares of cardboard and charts.

Reality is difficult. Thousands of decisions to make when deciding what should be in a sim and what should not.