Creating an Offline Madden Franchise League at Work - Advice Needed

[armando2002]

Hello Everyone,
I have signed up to start an offline Madden Franchise league for the 2010-2011 season using Madden 11 and could use some advice. I've never run a franchise league before, so any pointers would be great.

First things first:
1. Our office will provide either PS3 or Xbox 360 copies of Madden for this. I can make final decisions. I would like to keep rosters up-to-date with the online rosters if possible, but our office Xbox does not have a Gold account or the necessary Wifi access, so I am leaning towards the PS3 version.

2. There will be approximately 24 players in the league. My intentions are to allow players to draw numbers and draft an entire team. I will not be allowing trades or FA pickups to keep the league fair and simple. I'm thinking that I will just track the entire league itself through a spreadsheet instead of using the built-in Franchise feature. If you've had any success tracking 24 separate user-controlled teams in a league, please lay the advice on me.

3. I would like to emulate the actual NFL season, so I am planning on following the schedule exactly. If a player's team plays the CPU that week, they must play the CPU.

I've not had much luck in figuring out how to run this league or how to configure such a large franchise in Madden 11, so any advice would be great!

[huskerwr38]

Are you just doing one season, if so, why not use Franchise mode? It will be easier to schedule, keep track of wins, stats, who plays who, etc.. Then you wouldn't have to worry about how to set it up. It's all done for you.

Also, if people are drafting teams, you can just use the fantasy option and the draft order is randomly chosen so you won't have to draw numbers.

I think that you are over thinking this. Just use Franchise, no real thinking or setting up required to run the league.

By the way, you can still download roster updates, patches, etc without a gold account on the xbox.

[armando2002]

Thanks for the input. Here's the kicker...
Our work has several Xbox 360s and several PS3s in the break room, so I'd like to get multiple copies of the game to allow all of the folks to play in one franchise (more player-controlled teams), which will also allow multiple matches to happen at the same time (to avoid scheduling conflicts). I'm guessing that the standard Franchise mode will not account for this, but I'm always open to suggestions. I'm guessing that people did things like this before Franchise mode was around...