My elaborate Dynasty improvement plan

[Hassan Darkside]

Dynasty/Franchise makes or breaks a sports game for me. It's the reason why NBA 2k dominates my xbox, even in the off season. It's the reason CH2k8 still gets burn. And it's the reason my copy of Madden 11 has a yellow used tag on Gamestop's shelf. As a long time arm chair manager, here's my suggestions for future iterations of NCAA Football...

Coaching

I was going to float an idea about being an athletic director and having full control of decisions that go on with the program, but that may be too complicated. They should base Dynasty off of CH2k8 in this aspect. You're a head coach, you can either pick a small school to build up and move up based on reputation and job offers (EA already has the core of this in place) or you pick to Coach whatever team you want.

As a coach you should have performance goals you have to meet each year (core of this is already in place as well). There needs to be assistant coaches. You get full say on who you want as your assistant coaches. All coaches should have a "coach card" which shows their past jobs and ratings. As far as ratings go, there should be basic ones such as Scouting, offense, defense, discipline, experience, ambition (coach potential).

As your assistant coaches gain reputation and respect, they should be offered other jobs. You should be able to have a conversation with them similar to with recruits where you can make them promises.

These coach ratings tie directly to program pitches like Coach Prestige, Coach Experience, Program Tradition, Program Stability. If you're constantly hiring and firing coaches, Program stability should take a hit.

As a coach you should be able to schedule weekly practices. I don't want to make it too complicated, but you should be able to decide if/when you want to have a film day and how many, if you want to practice in pads or not, if you want to give your players a day off, etc. Each should have their pluses and minuses. If you practice in pads 5 days a week, your players should receive attribute boosts but lose points on stamina and durability. If you watch film 5 days a week, you should receive boosts on awareness ratings but lose points on physical attributes.


Now as far as hiring coaches go, you need to have a...

Budget

What's just as important as Ws? Dollars! You should have a budget each year. The more successful you are, the more revenue your program generates, the bigger your budget. With your budget you can use it to hire and retain coaches/trainers, tutors for your players, buy new equipment, improve facilities, buy new uniforms.

Your budget should be tied to the following pitches:
Academic Prestige: Spend money on tutors, increase academic prestige.
Athletic Facilities: Facilities should need to be updated/improved every few years. If you sink a lot of money into them, your facilities rating should go up.
Campus Lifestyle: If you consistently generate a lot of revenue and become a football powerhouse, Campus lifestyle should receive a boost every now and then.

Recruiting

The recruiting aspects definitely took steps forward this year but there's still some issues.
1.) Speed+Acceleration. Fast don't lie, I know. But there's no reason why the fastest players on your team should consistently be linebackers. It's very difficult to find 3* skill players with A speed and/or A acceleration. There definitely should be more but other attributes should lack more so people aren't only recruiting speed.

2.) Scholarships. You should be able to revoke a scholarship from a committed player. If you do this often, though, it should take a hit on your coach prestige.

3.) Player size. If you're looking at a 5'8 165 lb WR, there's no reason he should have B- or C+ speed. The bigger the receiver, the slower they are with the exception of top recruits.

As far as the process of recruiting goes, your assistant coaches should tie into this. You should not have to send your head coach on every recruiting visit. In fact, you should gain bonus recruiting points for sending him to see a player in the offseason, however he should not be able to see every player on your recruiting board. But for the most part your assistants should handle this. You should have to break up your 10 hours of recruiting amongst your coaches.

Discipline

I want this to be added (back) to the game. Every player should have a discipline rating. This ties directly with their potential. Players with high discipline and high potential should progress the best while players with high potential and low discipline ratings should progress more slowly. These low discipline players should also struggle academically and negatively affect academic prestige. They should be more likely to skip classes, celebrate on field, commit penalties, and cause off the field issues.

As a coach, you should be forced to discipline them. You can not start them, suspend them, or kick them off the team. Coaches with a high discipline rating should be able to negate some low discipline players. Low discipline players should be able to affect these pitches:

-Academic Prestige: If you don't discipline them and they slack in their studies, Academic prestige should suffer.
-Coach Prestige: Another push-pull affect. If you never discipline them, they should decrease your coach prestige. However, if you do discipline them consistently, your coach prestige should rise as should your discipline rating. Keep in mind, if you suspend them, you don't get to play with them.
-Campus lifestyle: Maybe minor affects here, but low discipline trouble-makers should decrease your campus lifestyle.
-Program Tradition: Minor affects again because of the lack of frequency. If you're 10 years in without ever disciplining players, your program tradition should definitely take a small hit.

Also it would be cool if the NCAA would investigate a player every now and then. If you run a tight ship with low tolerance for stuff like this, it shouldn't happen very often.

Progression:

Less random progression. Progression should be somewhat tied to performance, but not fully because I know how people get in Dynasty with absurd records and numbers.

Progression should also be tied to coach ratings. As of right now, it's hard to find 3 star players that really amount to anything. In reality, VaTech for instance, only grabs a handful of 4 star guys each year and fills out the rest of the class with 3 star players, however we're perennially a top 15 team (in a crappy conference, I know). In this game if you put together classes like that, your team is lucky to be ranked at the end of each season. Certain coaches know how to maximize players potentials.

Drills: Go back and steal those Madden mini-games. You should be able to do a few drills a week for a few boosts.

Online Dynasty:

-There should be an 'auto-advance' feature where if everybody readies up, the week advances.

-You should have the ability to appoint an assistant commish if you want to that has whatever rights you want to give him from being able to just advance the week to being able to make slider changes.

-You should be able to have friendly games within your online dynasty that don't count towards your record.

-You should be able to create recruits if you really want to.

-You should be able to change CPU playbooks.

Other stuff:

-Team builder should be able to be used to redesign uniforms, logos, your stadium if you want in your dynasty. It should tie into your budget as well.

-Medical redshirts need to be in the game.

-The 70 player roster limit needs to be thrown out.

-CPU needs to not just reorder depth chart based on who has the highest rating with no regards to natural position.

-Why is there no export team?

-You should be able to choose your captains in the off-season.

-You should be able to export your coach to Madden if you want.


Sorry if that was long. Just wanted to get my thoughts out there. Props if you read this entire thing. There's probably stuff I left out.

[BigBrianC]

I love it. But you should have the option of picking any school to start with, or starting from the botton and moving up, you shouldn't have to start from the bottom and move up. And the budget should be used to build onto the stadium as well.

Combine this with my RTG idea, and that would be an outstanding game.

[ManWithBag]

Great ideas! I really liked what you had to say about progression being more in line with on field performance.

For example, Cam Newton is rated 84 overall on the default rosters. If he had the same season in the video game as he did in real life, he'd be lucky to break 90. But if he decides to stay in school another year, I have no doubt he'll be rated 99 in NCAA 12. Same thing with Justin Blackmon at Oklahoma State.

I think if they had a system with experience points, similar to the NHL series, progression could improve a lot. The could combine that with a series of game and season goals for each play. For example, a left tackle would get experience points for every game he doesn't allow a sack or gets X number of pancakes.

I really like you idea about assistant coaches and having them involved with recruiting and the budget.

Great post!

[Black4track]

Well thought out. You left out medical redshirts, other than that perfect. ESPN needs to have a much bigger role in the next installment. But thats another topic. I will follow this thread.

[Hassan Darkside]

Quote: Originally Posted by Black4track

Well thought out. You left out medical redshirts, other than that perfect. ESPN needs to have a much bigger role in the next installment. But thats another topic. I will follow this thread.

Oh yea you're right, dang it. I'll edit the first post.

[sra9888]

One main thing to go along with this would be to use a calendar type format. I think if EA were to do this, we could have more realistic schedules and recruiting would work more efficiently. The idea I have in mind would be similar to College Hoops 2k8. Instead of just recruiting every week and then 5 weeks in the offseason, make it mirror the real life recruiting periods and practice periods etc.

[billyboy316]

Yea those things would make the dynasty amazing in my opinion.

A few things I would like to add to your list.

Custom Conferences: I know we can change teams from 1 conference to another but I want to be able to completely change the conference like what the Big Ten will be doing next year. I would like to take a conference like the Pac Ten and add a few more teams to it. Then divide it up into two sub conferences and let them have a championship game.

Communication: I would love to have more communication with my players and recruits. I have always wanted to get a few recruits together (QB,RB,WR) or (DE,MLB,CB) and talk to them about how great this team could be with the three (or how ever many we could choose) of them on this team. Also I would love the option to send either a current star or even a former star (think of the movie The Express when Jim Brown talked to Ernie Davis) to try and convince a recruit to play for me.

With the current players I would like more options for persuading them to stay. The ability to promise them something needs to be there. Also it would be great to be able to have a few players try and talk them into staying.

Online Dynasty: I absolutely HATE having to do the offseason. I wish it could be done in 2 weeks and not have to advance 11 times. The only problem I could come up with is the recruiting part. My solution to the problem is you make the off season last from Players leaving to Week 5 recruiting. Make that one week and make it to where no recruit will commit until signing day. Then you have another off season week where it is signing day, position change, training results, cut player. That will also eliminate my other problem where I hate having to do position change before seeing the training results.

That is all I can think of now.

[jbrew2411]

Nice post. We share some of the same ideas. The way the coaching legacy is handled in Choops2k8 is hands down the best in sports games. The coach matters more then an AD. A few things I would add are......

1) A National Signing Day: A player should not hard commit until this day in the off season. Until that day you should have players changing like real life. I know now you can sway a "soft" but once a guy goes "hard" it is a done deal.

2) Recruits: I will add on what you said about size and star grades.
-First on size, the ratings need to match the player. Taking your example of the 5'8" 168lb guy, if he had a speed rating in the low 80's or high 70's then that kid is not playing FBS football. How ever does the recruits should make sure they are not just making random players but players that have ratings that match their build. Another thing I have seen is the 6'5" 210lb DE's with a strength ratings in the 90's. There is no way in real life a kid like this can push 300lb linemen around like rag dolls.
-The next thing is how star grades are used. Like you said the 3* players are the back bone of college football. The reason a kid is given a 3* vs a higher grade is not because that kid is so much worse. It can be because of the school he goes to is small or not well known, has not played football that long, or just came into his own. I have coached high school kids the past 8 years of my life (out of work now due to the private school I was at closed) and I can tell you some kids get over looked. I may be wrong but Sam Bradford, LaShawn McCoy, Damarcus Ware were all 3* players. I'm not saying make them stars and not all 3* players become good players but the lack of depth of players below 4*'s is bad in NCAA 11.

3) Progression: This is something that needs to be addressed. This is 2010 and when NCAA 12 comes out it will be 2011. We need a much improved progression system. There needs to be training features added like 2k has in their games. They need to bring back the spring game. Their needs to be in season progression and regression as well. If a player is seeing more playing time and making an impact then they should improve. At the same time if a player is not playing well and losses playing time then they should regress.
Like the OP said coaches need to have an impact here as well.

4) Added effect of the coach: This goes along with recruiting. If a coach is fired or leaves for another job then it should have a effect on recruiting. In Choops2k8 when your coach leaves for another job you can go back and get some of the guys you had been recruiting. Some of the players at your new school will drop you in interest. This happens in real life. Look at what happened to Miami. They had a bunch of guys drop The U from their list of schools. Same goes for when a coach is in fear of being fired. A few of Rich Rod's recruits are playing a wait see or just moving on like the Hart kid from Florida.

5) I will add improved ratings to the list: Some may know this or not but I found this out from reading post made by Killiab (I think that is his screen name), YouAlreadyKnow, and Pocket Scout that the ratings now are based on a 70-100 scale. So the system can't handle lower rated players. That is why they play so bad in the game. Also the field size plays a part in this. NCAA uses a smaller field size then Madden so that throws things off as well. I hate to keep going back to 2k on this but they do ratings very good. In Choops2k8, you can play as a player rated 61ovr and still do the basic things like shoot the ball. I have had guys that were rated in the low 60's still be able to run the court, shoot 3's, and function in the game. They were not stars but they didn't kill you when in the game. Now back to NCAA, you use a 60ovr player who will have low speed ratings, and week position ratings for what ever position they play. They are a liability on the field. This is all due to the scale used in ratings.
I would also like to see the non-position ratings for a player hidden unless you view a players card. This way when you are setting a depth chart you don't have to go through ratings that don't matter just to see what the player is good at for his position.

Anything the NCAA team does is meaningless if they kill parts of the college game that make it special. If the spread, spread option, pistol, and triple option is not ran like it is meant to be ran. There have been attempts by some very smart people here at OS to correct this issue. You can improve the running QB's only so much. The logic is for all QB's to become pocket passers. I loved the wide open play from NCAA 09 but many hated how easy the offense moved the ball. Learn some stick skills and that game was bad a** as far as game play goes. It was just a shell of a game as far as features go.