For those of you who did not play NFL Head Coach 09

[KalimbeNaire]

Josh Looman is the head honcho of Madden 12's Franchise Mode from what I can gather and he was one of, if not the lead, designer of Head Coach 09. What I thought I would do is help explain some of the features in Head Coach and just what those people can look forward to in Madden if they include most of those features.

Please help me out and include anything you think should be in here. For the interest of trying to keep this a little less muddled, I will try to type one reply for each topic I will address. So, here we go. First up, I think I will start with the coaching staff.

[KalimbeNaire]

Coaching Staff:

General: Each position of coach had a rating of 1-5 for each category that pertained to his job. For instance the runningbacks coach would have a 1-5 rating on physical development, intangible development, and the learning development of your running backs. He would also have ratings for performance, strategy, and things in case he were ever to become an offensive coordinator. Every coach had access to certain special abilities. For the same example of the runningsback coach, he had special abilities you could unlock for better speed, better strength, better elusiveness, better ball carrying, and better tackle breaking, etc.

GM: A general manager in Head Coach was essentially the man who was in charge of your draft. A great GM could have special abilities unlocked where he was a "small school insider" where before you even assigned a task of scouting, every player from a small college would be scouted to a 33% degree. That would give you a base OVR score (which might change a lot once you scout them further), and a current NFL player comparison.

A great GM would also have more scouting sessions available to him, be able to look at more Pro Days, and be able to scout more players at every position at the combine. A poor GM wouldn't have access to much of this at all and it would really handicap you on draft day, leading you to take more risks and gambles with your picks simply because you didn't have as much information.

GM's also handled signing your picks and negotiating contracts with players. A poor GM would wind up having you signing long term and inflated contracts. Players sometimes wouldn't want to resign with you, or they wouldn't negotiate at all. They would make a deal they would want, and you would try to negotiate something better for you, and they would refuse and walk out of negotiations. Great GM's would allow for more team friendly contracts and the ability to really haggle on contract negotiations.

GM's and players also had personalities that would play a factor in these negotiations as well. Players and coaches with similar personalities would get along better and it would be easier to work with and sign these players.

Your Coaches all have an OVR rating and as you play games and do things during the season, they all would earn points in which you could invest to further their skills or unlock special skills. All the coaches have different potentials, so perhaps your GM only has QB draft evaluation to 3 out of 5. Some GM's might have that 5th level, you just need to unlock it. Others will only max out at 3. Some might not even be that good.

Not sure how much of this if anything will transfer to Madden, but as you can see, just on this one topic how much detail there would be involved.

[KalimbeNaire]

Head Coach:

Since the game was called Head Coach, the Head Coach had access to the most base skills and special skills.

He had strategy, team chemistry, offensive and defensive play calling skills, the physical, intangible, and learning development of ALL of the position players on defense and offense. On the special skills side he had the ability to make all of his coaches around him better (increasing their base level maximum by 1, so if your QB coach was at QB physical development of 4 max, unlocking that skill would boost his max to 5...for every single skill, for every single coach!) He had access to things that would help with team chemistry, better player performance, and player learning.

He could do it all, and building up a great head coach from scratch took some pretty careful planning and quite some time to build up the points, but it would be worth it in the end.

[KalimbeNaire]

Offensive/Defensive Coordinators:

Essentially these coaches were next in line in terms of what they had available to them since one day, these coaches might want to become head coaches.

They would have access to all of the development skills associated with either the entire offense or defense (QB, RB, WR, TE, OL for the OC), (DL, LB, DB for the DC). They would also have team chemistry and player performance skills and play calling skills. On the special skills side they would have access to things that would make your players a bit better on whichever side of the ball they played on. For instance, the DC might have the special ability of making your players tackle with more power to create more big hits and/or fumbles. He might have the ability to help your defensive backs play better coverage or to be able to intercept the balls better.

These coaches make a big impact on the field. You have a poor defensive coordinator and he is less likely to call a good play to stop the offense. Players probably won't perform quite as well as they should. Essentially if you look at the team rankings and found a poor offensive and defensive club, chances are they have a pretty poor OC or DC.

[KalimbeNaire]

Position specific coaches:

QB, RB(includes FB), WR(includes TE), OL, DL, LB, DB, STC.

These coaches don't have access to the strategy and game calling skills that the OC and DC's would have. Essentially they have skills related to their specific position. For example, a QB coach would have basic skills to physically, intangible, and learning development for the QB. He would have a performance skill as well for the QBS. Some of the special skills he would have would be related to throwing accuracy boosts, being able to read the coverage better, and things of that nature.

The great thing about Head Coach was that your abilities stacked. For instance:

If your quarterback coach had a rating of 2 in physical development, that would be factored in with your offensive coordinator's QB physical development rating, and then that would apply to your Head Coach's QB physical development. So say you draft a rookie QB with a really high potential, but his OVR is a 70. Well, if you have a great QB coach, your Offensive Coordinator is well versed in the QB skills, and then your Head Coach is also well versed with QB's...that kid is going to progress a lot quicker than he would with a team that is inept at developing the position.

[mjhyankees]

Nice stuff....

[KalimbeNaire]

That is just a brief description, and that is just the coaching.

There is still how this game handled the draft, player progression, free agency, RFA, trades, and resigning/signing players. I am trying to be as informative as I can, but also as brief as I can. Hard to do with a game like NFL Head Coach.

Again, I am not sure how much of this will be fed into Madden 2012, but since Josh is on the job and those of us who played and loved Head Coach so much, this is why we're so excited.

[KalimbeNaire]

The Draft:

Probably one of the most well-handled versions of this part of a franchise I have seen. Instead of having a limited number of mini drills to do and needing to achieve a "GOLD" in order to unlock a full scouting report, NFL head coach had it broken down into many, many different sessions.

First of all right after training camp there would be a little pop up announcement (fully voiced) by Adam Schefter telling you about the potential Heisman winners of that draft class. He might drop the name of a couple of other players to watch out for. Every few weeks he would update this list and say whether a player was dropping in stock because of an injury, or if he was rising in stock because he had a huge showing in a big game. It really let you have an idea on who some of the top draft picks might be before you even looked at anything.

There would be a page to pull up called the Draft Preview. It would be a simple little thing that had a listing of all of the positions (I think Kicker and Punter were omitted though) and rank them on a scale of 1-5 on how deep or strong the draft class was at that position. It would then give you a name of an over rated player and a sleeper player at the position. Generally speaking, that over rated player might be a bust...or he might be for real. That sleeper pick was usually always a dead on very solid or better player.

After a game you'd be presented with a pop up announcement saying, "Scouting College Players." From here another menu would pop up and give you the choice to scout small, medium, or large school players from every position on the field. You could only do one at a time. So say you want a QB, but you are looking for a back up and not a starter right now. You'd probably want to scout QB's from a small school to see if there is a diamond in the rough.

After that you'd get a report back on your scouting results. Depending on the level of your GM's scouting ability for that position, you could have had anywhere from 60%-100% of all those small school Qb's scouted. If you had the special skill for your GM of "small school insider", all of those small school QB's would already have scouted 100% of those QBs, you could use the option of where to scout elsewhere.

Generally speaking, the most you would unlock of a player at this point would be about 33% done. This would give you at least a vague idea of what the OVR was, give you some plusses and minsuses to the player (up to three skills in each column) for instance a QB might have:

+++ Strong arm
++ mobility
+ Football IQ

- - - System QB
- - accuracy
- toughness

It would also try to compare this player to a current NFL player, so the player in the example above might be actually compared to Micheal Vick. Doesn't mean he will be a clone, just means that he can scramble pretty well and is probably fast for a QB, has a strong but wild arm like Vick, and because he scrambles and exposes himself to hits, maybe he is a little banged up and gets hurt easier.