Bill Walsh College Football Roster Ratings by Positions

[tommycoa]

Cool find. Check out how lowly rated the positions were.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/genesis/5860...all/faqs/34241

83 Auburn with Bo Jackson. The Running backs as a group are rated 89.

Why and when did EA start overrating players?

[Art01]

Tommy, this is indeed an interesting discovery. I suspect that EA chose to boost player ratings for two reasons:

(1) To create more spectacular play in the belief that spectacular play is what their target market most wanted.

(2) To create more of a challenge for arcade style play, which is the predominant play style as opposed to Coach Mode or CPU-CPU play.

It is perhaps unfortunate that EA did not also invest significant effort in developing much better AI to provide the game-play challenge. EA chose instead to rely on being able to manipulate game play difficulty by dynamically boosting and lowering ratings during game play.

When I resume working with NCAA 14, I might use the Editor to create a Roster with a much lower ratings spread and the try to find supporting settings to play interesting Coach Mode games.

[hellbent]

Very cool - I remember using Hawaii extensively in BWCF and blistering the CPU with their mobile, strong-armed QB. The QB group is rated 83 for Hawaii on the list. I'd say the ratings showed up pretty accurately in the game.

Sad that we aren't getting a NCAA Football or Basketball game on any platform this year for the first time since 1992, I believe. That was the year before Bill Walsh College Football and the year after All American College Football on DOS. The way things are going, the NCAA might not even be regulating the major football conferences in a few years. My, how things have changed.

[tommycoa]

Bill Walsh was my gateway drug. Then came College Football's National Championship on Sega. They had a feature on that game that I've yet to see again. You could shift formations before the snap. I really wish you could still do that. The Sega game had some of the first really good playbooks in a football game. A few years ago I found the ROM for it and played the hell out of it.

Like I told Playmakers, back then the games were what they were, No sliders. No customizable rosters. You just had to deal with it. I played a lot more games back then.

[goillini03]

Quote: Originally Posted by tommycoa

Cool find. Check out how lowly rated the positions were. http://www.gamefaqs.com/genesis/5860...all/faqs/34241 83 Auburn with Bo Jackson. The Running backs as a group are rated 89. Why and when did EA start overrating players?

Great find but I think that this game out well past Bo's days at Auburn if I remember correctly.

[BROman]

Quote: Originally Posted by hellbent

Very cool - I remember using Hawaii extensively in BWCF and blistering the CPU with their mobile, strong-armed QB. The QB group is rated 83 for Hawaii on the list. I'd say the ratings showed up pretty accurately in the game.

Michael Carter- that guy was awesome on BWCF. I liked (but didn't like it when I was playing) how he'd get tired and slowed down if you ran him, or any other mobile QB, too much. They get tired now, but it seems that fatigue has no effect on their performance.

[tommycoa]

Quote: Originally Posted by goillini03

Great find but I think that this game out well past Bo's days at Auburn if I remember correctly.

It was 83 Auburn.

[Playmakers]

I think the lower overall ratings is a direct result of EA just not having that many ratings in the game at that time.

In fact if you still own NCAA 07 you'll see that there were a few ratings missing from that game that we have today.

NCAA 07 also had lower overall rated players and if you gave a RB like 60 strength in that game the game would automatically calculate how high his ratings could be in Trucking and Break Tackle.

Same thing for Defenders on the DL if they didn't have great strength the game would not allow you to increase their Power Move rating too high.

But I do like how Bill Walsh College Football would assign an overall rating for each position. Plus i don't think that game incorporated ratings triggering certain animations you would see like they do in today's game.