TEAM SLIDERS ARE BACK!!!

[DanSF49]

Alright guys I saw the post by Joe3061 about a week or so ago and it renewed my interest in bringing back the Team Sliders concept, I have been putting these out there the last few years for Madden and NCAA. So I went into the Lab and tried coming up with a way to make this work this year. I have figured out a way to do it again based off of NFL Team Stats. I will continue to post updated team sliders weekly as long as the response it there. Here are the guidelines.

- I only play No-Switch on Defense, I pick 1 player each play and follow his assignment with no switching players during the play.

- I use Madden to call my plays on both offense and defense, but I allow myself to pick from any of the 4 plays he picks. But I do make my own decisions on 4th down, because of his idiotic way of wanting you to punt when you are in field goal range.

** Here is the big one, this is the way to use these. You only enter the sliders in for the team you are playing. So if you are using the Jets (Human) aganist the Titans (CPU) you enter in the sliders that are on the sheet for the Titans. Believe me guys this works. **


An example of 2 games I played yesterday:

Jets (ME) vs Titans (CPU)

I won 26-17. Tough defensive battle, never mind the score, it was all about field position and crucial turnovers. Jets had about 180 yards of total offense and the Titans had about 215. But they made a big mistake with an early INT for a TD thrown by Collins. Then with less then a minute remaining in the game while driving for the winning FG and down 19-17 they tried a screen to the HB and he dropped the ball but he was behind Collins when he did it, so it was a live ball that I picked up and returned for a TD with just seconds remaining. Both qbs had comp % in the low 50's!! With overthrows, underthrows and drop passes all over the place due to the tight defense.

Giants (Me) vs Cardinals (CPU)

I lost 20-17. Last second FG by Rackers ended it. Crazy game that had each team over 200 yards of total offense at the half. But I threw 3 INTS with Manning including 2 in the endzone after dominating all the way down the field with Jacobs and Burress. Warner threw for over 250 yards and Jacobs ran for 128.

If anything you can see each game with play differently from the last with plenty of excitement. Give them a try and let me know what you think and if I should continue posting updates weekly. Look at it this way, most people are about ready to or have already given up on this game, why not try a new concept.

[NoleFan]

I'm taking a look at your breakdown and how you come up with the sliders to do them myself and am drawing a blank.

[DanSF49]

Quote: Originally Posted by NoleFan

I'm taking a look at your breakdown and how you come up with the sliders to do them myself and am drawing a blank.

I know my breakdown is a little hard to understand but I will try to give you a better explanation of how it works.

For the Passing and Rushing Sliders you are going to be using NFL Team Defensive stats to determine them and for the Pass D and Rush D you are going to be using NFL Team Offensive stats.

Okay now take Pass Blocking as an example. What I do is go to ESPN.com and go to NFL stats and I go to Team stats not player stats. I click on Team Defense Passing, when this comes up I click on Sacks. This will now list the defenses sack totals from best "most" to worst "least" amount of sacks.

Now I usually copy this over into excel to make it easier but the question is how you rank them. So what I do is I give the 2 teams with the highest sack totals a slider setting of 30. Then the next 3 teams get a slider setting of 35, the next 3 teams a setting of 40, the next 3 a setting of 45 and so on till I get to the last 3 teams and give them a slider setting of 80.

As an example of what this does in game wise:
Pittsburgh and Philadelphia have the highest sack totals in the NFL, so they get slider settings of 30. So now when you are playing against one of these two teams your pass blocking slider will be at 30 and this will allow them to bring much more heat on you then when you are playing say Cleveland or Cincy which have the least amount of sacks in the NFL and have slider settings of 80.

I hope this makes it easier to understand now, if not let me know and I can go into a little more if you need me to. I have made 2 changes to which stat categories I use for a couple of slider settings. I forgot to update my breakdown page with it though they are the following. For (Passing) QB Accuracy and (Pass D) Reaction Time I use QB Rating for both instead of QB Comp%.

[Blazzen]

I'm a bit new to the NFL sliders but I used your MLB2K8 Sliders Dan and this seems like a very novel concept to have sliders vs. different teams to make the game feel more like you are playing against that team.

I'll give them a shot!

[joe3061]

Great post DanSF49, the concept you came up with is exactly what I was looking for when I started using my team sliders that I posted about, though yours are much more in depth, and would really give each individual team even more identity. I love the idea of what you did, and for the first season of franchise, not sure it could be done any better. I would love to incorporate this idea for myself, but I am stuck at how this would work when you start getting into multiple seasons and teams start to regress or progress. (eg. obviously, the giants running game in 5 years will be completely different than it is now)

I guess you could use the season stats for the franchise, maybe taking the prior years final stat as a baseline and then update them on a weekly or monthly interval. This just seems like a lot of work. Anyways, just thinking out loud, bottom line is i'm trying to use your idea, but in a way that will reflect on a multi-year franchise. (to be honest, I wasn't crazy about basing my sliders on team offense and defense rating, but the good thing was that it changed as the team changed., plus i was lazy and didn't put the time and energy you did. )

Love to hear your or anyones thoughts on this. But definitely great post and great idea and i'll be sure and try it out!

[DanSF49]

Quote: Originally Posted by joe3061

Great post DanSF49, the concept you came up with is exactly what I was looking for when I started using my team sliders that I posted about, though yours are much more in depth, and would really give each individual team even more identity. I love the idea of what you did, and for the first season of franchise, not sure it could be done any better. I would love to incorporate this idea for myself, but I am stuck at how this would work when you start getting into multiple seasons and teams start to regress or progress. (eg. obviously, the giants running game in 5 years will be completely different than it is now) I guess you could use the season stats for the franchise, maybe taking the prior years final stat as a baseline and then update them on a weekly or monthly interval. This just seems like a lot of work. Anyways, just thinking out loud, bottom line is i'm trying to use your idea, but in a way that will reflect on a multi-year franchise. (to be honest, I wasn't crazy about basing my sliders on team offense and defense rating, but the good thing was that it changed as the team changed., plus i was lazy and didn't put the time and energy you did. ) Love to hear your or anyones thoughts on this. But definitely great post and great idea and i'll be sure and try it out!

This is the same question that I have heard over the years now when using the Team Sliders based on real NFL stats. For people that like just playing 1 season at a time and are not big into franchise, these work great because you can replicate the way each team is playing in real life, in your season. Now for people that like to play franchise and mutiple seasons this gets tricky. The only solution would have to be doing the sliders each week yourself based on your franchise stats for each team, this could be very time consuming. I'm personally a 1 season at a time guy so this works great for me.

Can't wait to here your comments on how you liked the sliders when you try them out. Thanks

[Blazzen]

AWESOME sliders.

Played the Detroit Carolina Game from this past weekend.

I had under 100 yards passing and 250 yards on the ground as Carolina in a 17-10 win over detroit. AMAZING how accurate that was to the real life game.

Only played the 1 game so far. Going to try some more. Will post the results.

[Blazzen]

So what are the chances you'll update these sliders again - every week might be asking a bit much but maybe do it at the end of the regular season - then those sliders could be used for a full season.

I'm a single season guy myself. I play 1 game a week and follow the regular season with my hometown team (Carolina Panthers). I kind of live the season through the game as it is going on so its cool to have games play like they did in real life.

Thanks for the good sliders!