Welcome, GM#

Franchise GM: Football is a single-player football GM game. You run one franchise — roster, salary cap, draft, trades, coaching staff, season — against 31 computer-run teams. You're the general manager, not a player and not the head coach on the field: you build the team, set the plan, and watch what your decisions produce.

Everything runs on your device — no server, no online league. A brand-new game loads a real-shaped league of 3,441 players plus coaches and scouts, and hands you the keys to one of its 32 clubs. From there time only moves when you move it, and every step reports back what happened.

The year at a glance#

A league year runs the same ordered loop every season. You advance it phase by phase; the other 31 teams run the same steps in the background at the same time.

The offseason, in order#

The offseason is a fixed sequence of phases. You handle each one, get a report, and continue to the next.

• Contract aging. Every player and staff deal loses a year; deals that run out drop into the free-agent or hireable pool. You get a "what changed" recap first.
• Staff hiring. Hire and extend your head coach, coordinators, special-teams coach, scouts, and team doctor from a candidate pool. Rival teams chase the same names against their own budgets, so a coach you wait on may be gone. Who does what: Coaches, Scouts & the Organization.
• Re-signings & cuts. Apply the franchise tag, make extension and re-sign offers to your expiring players, and cut cap casualties. Teams may carry more than 53 through the offseason — the squeeze comes later. Cap math and offer mechanics: the Contracts page.
• Free agency, three waves. The market opens in three tiers — "The Frenzy" (the top names), then "The Market," then "Bargains." You bid against the AI clubs in each wave, and your results from one wave are revealed as you enter the next. Full model: Free Agency.
• The draft. An on-the-clock draft with prospect face cards. What you know about each prospect depends on your Scouting; pick mechanics are on the Draft page.
• Training camp. A development phase between the draft and week 1. It ships as a placeholder screen you continue past; the full mechanic comes later. IN DEVELOPMENT
• Preseason games. Three optional exhibition games sit here, off by default.

Playing the regular season#

The regular season is an 18-week calendar in which every team plays 17 games and takes exactly one bye. Weeks 1–4 and 15–18 are always full 16-game slates; the byes fall in weeks 5–14, so those weeks carry a few games fewer. Your core action is to advance the week — the whole slate simulates at once, you experience your own game, and the rest resolve in the background.

Each game week has three beats.

1. Planning. Before kickoff you set a gameplan against this specific opponent: run style (inside / balanced / outside), pass aggression (safe / balanced / aggressive), tempo (slow / normal / hustle), blitz rate (low / medium / high) and coverage shell (press / balanced / soft). Each tilts the odds for that one game only. Above the levers sits an opponent read: each of their units drawn as a bar either side of the league average, green to the WEAK side with a hint on how to attack it, red to the STRONG side telling you to respect it. There's a recommended plan you can apply with one tap or override, and every AI team plans against you the same way. It's a strategic tilt, not play-by-play control.

2. The game. Watch it or sim it (below).

3. Post-game resolution. Standings recompute across all 32 teams, injuries and suspensions are drawn, moods and holdout pressure update, the trade market moves (until the deadline closes midseason), in-season free agency fires if an injury opened a hole you can't cover, and needs and projected draft slots refresh.

It all folds into a Weekly Report: your result and a league scoreboard, injuries (yours first, with who replaces them and how many weeks he'll miss), incoming trade offers as actionable cards, suspensions, league news, and your refreshed needs plus projected draft slot. Player storylines land here too — a big game can earn a young player a growth bump, or talk a brewing holdout back down.

Your phone's inbox carries the league's own traffic alongside it, including the three mock drafts the League Office publishes during the year — see The Draft.

A player can go down before a game or during one; a mid-game injury shows as a red line in the play-by-play and his backup finishes the game — next man up, straight from your depth chart.

What actually takes the field#

The eleven bodies on each side change snap to snap, and that's where your roster construction cashes out.

Your offense picks a personnel grouping each snap from the mix its scheme prefers: a Quick Game offense lives in one back, one tight end, three receivers; a Ground & Pound team leans on two tight ends and two-back sets; a Vertical team spreads out with four receivers and no tight end. Short yardage pulls big bodies on; third-and-long pulls them off. The defense answers with a substitution package, and separately fields the front its scheme plays — which is why a 3-4 nickel and a 4-3 nickel are not the same eleven.

Extra bodies do real work: a second tight end or second back adds run blocking, while spreading the field for a fourth receiver costs you some. And the eleven on the snap are the eleven whose ratings decide the play — as starters tire they rotate out, and while a backup is out there the unit really is as good as that backup. See the roster page for depth charts and rotation.

Watching a game#

You can sim the week — the slate fills in score by score — or watch your game unfold play by play.

If you watch, you get the field with the ball spot and down-and-distance markers, the score and clock, and three live tabs: a scrolling play-by-play log (each play with the players involved and the result), a team box score comparing both clubs, and a player box score grouped by passing, rushing, receiving, defense, kicking and punting.

You control the pace, not the team: pause and resume, slow the sim down or speed it up across 1× / 2× / 4× / 8×, or hit SIM TO END and jump to the final. You never move a player. The game was decided the moment it was simulated; watching it is watching that decision play out.

The version where you call every offensive and defensive play yourself is a planned future layer — you'd still never steer individual players, only choose the calls. On-field animated visualization is further out; see the film room.

Playoffs, awards, and the next year#

When the last regular-season week resolves, the standings lock and the league advances into a 14-team bracket — seven seeds per conference, four division winners plus three wild cards. The top seed in each conference sits out the Wild Card round; every round after re-seeds, so the best remaining team always hosts the worst. Wild Card, Divisional, Conference, championship: one round per week, same watch-or-sim choice, same report. Postseason games can't end tied.

Then the year closes with a bookend loop:

• Awards. MVP, Offensive and Defensive Player of the Year, Rookie of the Year, and All-Pro honors.
• Hall of Fame & retirements. Veterans retire by age and decline; Hall inductions are voted in, and your retirees are called out first.
• Progression & regression. Every player ages along his development curve — young players grow, veterans fade. See the Development page.
• Your GM career. The season is appended to your record, achievements are checked, and your reputation updates.
• Stay or move. You're offered a handful of teams — about six, usually lower-ranked clubs — and you may take over one or stay. Choosing a new team simply moves you into that franchise; the league keeps rolling.

From there the calendar ticks over, a fresh draft class is minted, and you roll into the next offseason — starting again with staff hiring.

Deterministic, but alive#

Hold two ideas at once. The league is deterministic — one seeded simulation, reproducible to the play. And it is alive: 31 AI franchises act in every phase you act in, hiring coaches, bidding in free agency, drafting, trading, cutting, and winning or losing their own games. You manage one team inside a whole league managing itself right alongside you.

The rating model in three layers#

Every player's OVR is built from the bottom up, in three layers:

1. Raw attributes — a few dozen basic skill scores, each 0–99: how fast he runs, how hard he hits, how accurately he throws.
2. Role composites — a small catalog of blended scores that each answer one football question: how good is this player at rushing the passer? at getting open? at protecting the quarterback?
3. Overall (OVR) — a single 0–99 number that blends only the composites that matter for that player's position.

The important thing to know up front: the same role composites that produce the OVR you see also decide what happens on the field. There is one shared set of numbers. When the sim asks "did the pass rush win this rep?" it reads the exact pass-rush score that fed into that defensive lineman's OVR. That is why a high rating actually shows up in games instead of being cosmetic — and why the ratings scale is calibrated against real football rather than against itself.

Raw attributes — the building blocks#

Raw attributes come in two flavors. Universal ones apply to everybody: raw athletic tools — speed, acceleration, agility, strength, jumping — plus the mental side — awareness, vision, and decisions — plus toughness, which is how fast he heals and how likely an injury is to nag rather than how often he gets hurt in the first place. Every position carries these.

Position-specific attributes only exist where they make sense. A quarterback carries short-, medium- and deep-throw accuracy, throwing on the run, and pocket presence — feeling the rush before it arrives, which is a different skill from escaping it once it does. A receiver carries catching, route-running, catching in traffic for the contested ball, and release for beating a jam at the line. A lineman carries pass-blocking, run-blocking, impact blocking — the block he makes in space, twelve yards downfield, that turns four yards into twenty — and play recognition. Every defender carries block-shedding, tackling, hit power, pursuit (angles and closing speed, as opposed to finishing) and play recognition (diagnosing the play at the snap); the ones who are asked to cover — edge rushers, linebackers and the secondary — add press (the jam, the mirror image of a receiver's release) plus man- and zone-coverage. Interior linemen and base ends carry no coverage score at all, because a nose tackle never covers anybody. A kicker carries kick accuracy and leg power; a punter adds placement. The model knows the difference between "not applicable" and "rated zero."

Two of those are worth calling out because they are the ones most games leave out. Press and release are a matched pair — the same moment at the line of scrimmage, scored from both sides, so a receiver who can beat a jam and a corner who can deliver one are actually contesting each other. And leg power is separate from kick accuracy, which is what lets an accurate kicker with an ordinary leg exist at all.

Raw attributes have realistic floors and realistic ceilings. Even the worst starter in the league isn't hopeless at the hard-to-fake skills — a real passer can throw, a real cornerback can cover — while linemen and specialists are allowed to post genuinely poor athletic numbers, because in football they do. In the other direction, a position can't post a number its job never produces: left tackles don't run 4.4s and safeties don't shed blocks like defensive tackles, so those numbers top out where the real ones do.

Role composites — the middle layer#

The composite catalog is the heart of the system: a handful of readable role scores, each a fixed weighted blend of raw attributes on the same 0–99 scale. Pass rush leans mostly on shedding blocks and explosiveness, with strength and agility behind them. Getting open leans on route running first, then burst and straight-line speed. Deep accuracy is almost entirely the deep-throw arm, with a little decision-making. Each blend is fixed, so the score is a predictable read on the raw numbers below it.

The full catalog, and the one football question each score answers:

Two wrinkles worth knowing. Not every score in the catalog feeds an OVR: a running back's base run has no counterpart in the rating model at all — it exists purely to decide what happens when he hits the hole — and a handful of others (the jam, the release, pursuit, play recognition, blocking in space, punt placement) are live on the field but deliberately kept out of the number. More on why, below. And when you line a player up somewhere he doesn't belong, the penalty lands on these composite scores rather than being bolted on afterwards — see Playing Out of Position.

The 15 positions and their groups#

There are 15 positions, in nine groups. A position's rating leans only on the composites that matter for its job — the "flavor" column below.

Kickers and punters used to be the thin spot in the model — one accuracy number doing the work of two, so a booming leg and a precise one were the same player. They now carry leg power alongside kick accuracy, and a punter carries placement on top of that. Both a kicker's and a punter's rating is his leg plus his accuracy. Placement never counts toward the number — it is a role skill, so the coffin-corner specialist has to be spotted rather than read off his OVR.

Overall rating (OVR)#

OVR is a weighted blend of a position's own composites, plus a per-position baseline, rounded and capped 0–99. Because each composite is itself a fixed blend of raw attributes, the rating stays a straight, predictable read on the raw scores — nudge a number up and you can see where it went.

A position draws only on its own composites, plus two universal ones: all-around athleticism and football acumen. Everything unrelated counts for exactly zero. A quarterback's OVR never sees coverage or tackling; a cornerback's never sees throwing accuracy.

That masking is deliberate. It buys football-sane attribution — a quarterback's number moves when his accuracy moves, never because of some phantom blocking score. And because the recipe is fixed, the game computes OVR the same way for imported veterans, players you edit, and generated rookies, so everybody sits on one scale.

What the 0–99 scale feels like#

Higher is better, and the curve is steep at the top. An ~80-overall player is a run-of-the-mill starter — solid, unremarkable. The elite tier begins around 90. 99 is the ceiling.

The league is deliberately held to a fixed talent pyramid, so those labels mean the same thing in season 1 and season 40. The game actively defends it: if a decade of development would have flooded the league with 90s, growth gets trimmed until the shape holds. What that means for you is that a 92 is always genuinely rare, and hoarding one is always worth something. What a rating costs is a separate story — see Contracts.

How your own players' ratings change over time is covered in Player Growth & Aging, and the archetype labels that flavor a player's build live in Archetypes. What a player actually did — as opposed to what he can do — is the box score, and every column in it is spelled out in the Stat Glossary.

What OVR leaves out — the hidden edges#

OVR is a deliberately narrow "how good is he at his job" number. Several things a player brings never enter it, yet still shape games and careers.

That last group is deliberate, and it is the single most useful thing on this page. The rule the game holds itself to is that a skill only raises a player's OVR — and therefore his price — if the rating model names it. So a genuinely great open-field blocker, a linebacker who diagnoses everything, or a corner who can actually deliver a jam is worth more than his number says, and costs what his number says. Those are the players you can steal.

The other takeaway: two players with the same OVR can play very differently. One might tire late, jump offside, or miss games — none of which the overall would ever tell you.

Team overall#

The same per-player ratings roll up into a team OVR (0–100), split into offense and defense. It fills each lineup slot your scheme fields with your best man there, and weights each slot by how much it swings games — quarterback carries far more than anything else, then the pass rush, then receiver and corner. Depth inside a group counts, but falls away fast: your WR1 is worth roughly three times your WR4. Crucially it is scheme-aware: the same roster posts a different team number under a different scheme, because a scheme decides which skills it leans on. The full story — scheme fit, how the weighting works, and roster construction — lives in Schemes & Scheme Fit.

What an archetype is#

Every player on your roster carries an archetype — Deep Threat, Power Back, Pocket Passer, Press Man, and so on. It is a short label for how a player wins his position: not how good he is, but what kind of good he is. A Deep Threat and a Possession receiver can share the same OVR and be completely different weapons.

The key thing: an archetype is not a setting. You never assign it, and there is no hidden dial behind it — it is derived entirely from a player's ratings. Two receivers with identical speed, catching and route-running always get the same archetype, and the way to change a label is to change the underlying numbers, which is why the player editor shows it read-only. For what those numbers are and how they roll up, see Player Stats & Ratings.

Tap the little info marker beside a player's archetype and you get a card of its own: a one-line read on how that archetype wins, plus the schemes it thrives in and the ones it's a poor fit for.

How a player earns his archetype#

The game runs a small, fixed set of rules per position, in priority order, and takes the first one that fits. Each rule is a plain comparison between two of the player's own ratings. If nothing fits, he lands on the position's default — the well-rounded, no-strong-tilt archetype.

Because the rules compare a player's ratings to each other rather than to a fixed cutoff, the same test works for a superstar and a scrub: it's about the shape of the player, not his level. And with no dice involved it's perfectly repeatable — reload a save or re-watch a game and every player re-derives the same archetype.

The catalog — offense#

The game ships 52 archetypes across 15 positions: 30 on offense, 16 on defense, and three each for kicker and punter. The tables below are the full set — every archetype, how it wins, and the schemes that hunt for it or avoid it. ⭐ marks each position's default, the label a balanced player with no standout tilt lands on.

The catalog — defense#

There are 16 defensive archetypes, and all but two are some scheme's preferred body. The exceptions are the DE Power End and the LB Field General — both real, common bodies that no scheme singles out, so they're neutral everywhere rather than filler nobody gets classified as.

A few names repeat across positions on purpose — Coverage describes both an EDGE and an LB, Zone Blocker every line spot. The rules are separate per position, so the shared name just means "same idea, different spot."

The catalog — specialists#

Kickers and punters used to carry one label each, because there was only one number to split them on. Now that leg power and placement are real ratings, the classic trade-off has a name on both jobs. No scheme prefers or avoids a specialist archetype, so these labels describe the player without moving his fit — a Precision kicker is exactly as welcome in Ground & Pound as in Vertical.

What archetypes actually do#

Archetypes are not a hidden stat boost to the player himself. When a play resolves — a catch, a block, a pass rush — the outcome runs off the underlying ratings, not the label. What the archetype changes is distribution and fit: who gets the ball, who gets the credit, and how well your roster matches your scheme. Three channels:

Scheme fit#

Every team scheme names the archetypes it prefers and the ones that are a poor fit, per position — the two right-hand columns in the catalog above. On offense that match nudges how much a player is used — a preferred-fit receiver draws a few more targets, a poor-fit one a few fewer — and deliberately stays a usage tilt: it never reorders your depth chart, and a great player in the "wrong" scheme is still your best player. On defense the match now also pays a real, bounded on-field bonus: fill the role slots your scheme's identity is built on — the rush EDGE in a 4-3 Man, the rangy Zone corners and Free Safety in a zone shell — and your defensive unit grades tick up. It's a carrot, never a stick: an empty slot just forgoes its share, and the bonus is sized well below raw talent, so commitment is felt but never beats ability. The full picture, and the scheme catalog, live on the Schemes & Scheme Fit page.

Usage tilts#

Beyond scheme fit, certain archetypes bias who gets the ball in specific situations. This is why a Power Back and an Elusive Back behind the same line get used differently:

So a committee of a Power Back and a Receiving Back naturally splits into a short-yardage hammer and a passing-down weapon, without you setting anything — the archetypes do the sorting. The same is true on defense: two edge rushers with the same OVR will not put up the same sack total if one is a Speed Rusher and the other is a DE Run Anchor.

Two things this table is not. It never touches the play mix or your team totals — it only redistributes touches and credit inside a lineup you already field. And it is never a power boost: a Power Back handed a goal-line carry still converts it with his own ratings, not with a bonus.

AI roster building#

Every draft class is generated with a designed spread of archetypes rather than one cookie-cutter prospect per position. Each new prospect is dealt an archetype first — weighted toward the ones the league's schemes actually ask for — and his ratings are then shaped so he really classifies as that. The effect you feel: no archetype ever swallows a position, and none goes extinct. Quarterback classes come out spread across all five labels, and a coverage-first linebacker shows up often enough to plan around. So scouting the draft for a specific kind of player is a realistic plan, not a lottery.

The AI also reads archetypes when it builds rosters. In free agency, when two players are close in value, the better scheme-fit archetype is the tiebreaker for who signs where. When a team assesses its needs, it counts how many preferred-archetype starters it has at each spot and treats a shortage as a hole to fill. This shapes which players end up on which teams. The upshot for you: the league self-sorts, so you'll see Ground & Pound teams stockpiling maulers and power backs while Vertical teams hoard burners — which also means the free-agent market for a given archetype is thinner when half the league runs a scheme that wants it.

Archetypes can shift over time#

Because the label is read off the ratings, it moves when the ratings move. If a young corner's man-coverage climbs past his zone-coverage by enough, he flips from Zone to Press Man the next time he's classified — and editing a player's ratings is the intended lever for reshaping his archetype.

Normal development, though, is built to keep an archetype rather than drift it: as a player grows, the ratings that define his current label grow together, so a Speed Rusher stays a speed rusher across his career instead of quietly morphing into a run-stopper. Left alone, a label almost never changes across a whole career. In practice archetypes flip when you edit a player — not as a side effect of aging.

What a scheme is IN GAME#

Every team runs a scheme — an offensive style and a defensive style, plus a few dials for how it plays. It's not cosmetic: it decides which positions your team leans on, which players get the ball, how your OVR is calculated, and how your games unfold. You'll find it under Office ▸ Coaches ▸ Scheme.

Your offensive coordinator owns the offensive scheme, your defensive coordinator owns the defensive scheme — the team runs each coordinator's system for the length of his contract, and your head coach's own style is a perk when it happens to match. There's no scheme picker in normal play: you change what your team runs by changing coordinators, and the roster refits only gradually over the following years.

There are six offensive schemes and six defensive schemes, broken down below.

The six offensive schemes IN GAME#

Each offensive style leans a certain way on run versus pass and rewards specific player archetypes (the catalog lives on the Archetypes page). Across a league the run-pass spread lands inside a real-NFL band — no scheme is a gimmick.

Every scheme also wants a quarterback and five linemen; the table lists the skill positions where schemes actually differ.

That roster column is a demand list, not a lineup, which is why the counts run past eleven — and every scheme still wants a tight end, even the four- and five-wide looks. Beyond the run-pass split, pass-tilted schemes throw deeper with more explosive-play variance, while Ground & Pound leans on short play-action and inside runs. Archetype then overrides the scheme for individual usage: a Receiving Back draws targets even in a run-first scheme, and a Blocker tight end runs fewer routes even in a passing one.

The six defensive schemes IN GAME#

Your defensive style is a front (4-3, 3-4 or Hybrid) crossed with a coverage character (Man or Zone) — six schemes, each with its own identity and its own shopping list of archetypes:

The front decides the shape of your front seven and where the bodies come from:

Every scheme also has a dime package (six defensive backs, one linebacker) for obvious passing downs, and a goal-line package (a big body on for a safety) for short yardage. In nickel and dime the extra coverage slots go to whoever your roster fields best next — a corner-deep team fills them with corners, a safety-deep team plays big nickel — while the base secondary and the goal-line group are a fixed split.

The front decides who your sacks come from — both fronts lean on the same EDGE pool, since a hand-down 4-3 end and a stand-up 3-4 rusher are the same body in a different stance. So the real difference between fronts is felt in the interior and off-ball linebacker counts, not in who rushes.

Coverage sets your interception profile. Man trails the receiver and plays tighter underneath, giving up fewer picks. Zone reads the quarterback and jumps throws, producing more of them. On top of that your head coach — not the coordinator — calls the shell: Cover 1 is the man call, and Cover 2, Tampa 2, Cover 3 and Quarters are the zone ones. Two of them reward a different rare body: Tampa 2 wants a rangy cover linebacker in the middle, Quarters wants a pair of do-everything safeties. A coach with no shell on file defaults to Cover 1 under a Man scheme and Cover 3 under a Zone one. You can see the call in his staff profile. Coverage is only as strong as your defensive backs' and linebackers' fit for it: man wants man-coverage corners, zone wants zone specialists and a field-reading linebacker.

The defensive fit bonus IN GAME#

Building the roster your defensive scheme asks for pays a real, bounded on-field reward. Each week the game checks how well your fielded eleven fill the scheme's role slots — a 4-3 Man's rush EDGE, a Zone shell's rangy Free Safety, and so on — and pays a bonus into your defensive unit grades, concentrated on the units that scheme's identity leans on.

It's a carrot, never a stick: an unfilled slot just forgoes its share. Nobody is ever penalized, and a mismatched roster plays exactly as its talent deserves. The size is deliberate too — a fully built roster is worth about as much as a good weekly gameplan edge, and far less than raw talent. Commitment is felt; it never beats ability.

What actually lines up each snap IN GAME#

Your scheme is the look you play most, not the only one: personnel changes snap to snap on both sides, and it changes what your team is good at on that snap.

On offense you field a grouping, named the football way — backs first, then tight ends, receivers making up the rest of the five skill players. Ground & Pound lives in two-tight-end 12 personnel, Read Option keeps two backs on the field, the Pro Set and Quick Game families are 11-personnel offenses, and the spread family goes four-wide often. Situation tilts the draw hard, but never overrides identity.

That has teeth. An extra tight end or a lead back is another blocker and helps your run game; going empty with no tight end costs you there. Heavy personnel also dilutes your passing, since the receiving grade averages whoever is actually on the field. Nobody gets a free bonus — the effect is measured against the league-average mix, so heavy blocks better than light without making every offense better.

The defense answers you: three receivers pull a nickel defensive back on, four pull a dime, heavy personnel in short yardage brings out the goal-line group, and third-and-long bumps the package up a step by itself.

Because a scheme plays several looks, the bodies it needs to carry are the union across all of them, not the eleven in its base box — call it twelve to thirteen defenders to cover eleven slots. That flows straight into what the game tells you your roster is missing, what the AI bids on, and how your draft board is ranked.

Scheme fit — how well your roster matches IN GAME#

Scheme fit is a per-player multiplier for how well a player's archetype suits the scheme he plays in. His rating comes from his attributes; fit sits on top. A preferred archetype gets a real bump and a poor-fit archetype a real cut. On top of that, a head coach who runs the same system as his coordinator adds a little more — more if he's a gifted play designer, less if he isn't — and a head coach who runs a different one takes a little back off. An empty coordinator chair is simply neutral. Only the coaches who own that side of the ball count: your offensive coordinator's opinion about defense is never read.

On offense, fit tilts who gets the ball, not who starts or how good your team is. Your depth chart is still ordered by pure OVR, so fit decides which receiver is the alpha — a Deep Threat in a Vertical scheme soaks up looks; the same player in Ground & Pound gets fewer. That's deliberate: fit shapes the box score and your style, staying near-neutral on raw team strength, so a good roster is good in any scheme. On defense the same usage tilt applies — plus the bounded fit bonus above.

If you disagree with an automatic call, you can pin a player to a lineup slot from the depth screen. A pin is honored even when it's a poor fit — the game hands the slot to your guy, takes it out of the automatic assignment, and lets the rest of the lineup sort itself around him.

Team OVR is scheme-aware, though. It weights each position by the slots your scheme fields, top starter mattering most and depth falling off fast, so the same roster reads a different number under a different scheme — a Vertical team's four wideouts make receiver depth worth far more than a two-wide scheme would, and quarterback carries the heaviest weight of any position. A great staff that fits the scheme is worth real wins over a terrible one — see Coaches, Scouts & the Organization.

The team-level dials, and who owns each:

A coach carries a stored style for every one of these, including the side of the ball he doesn't own. Those off-role values are inert: a defensive coordinator's opinion about your run game is never read.

Playing the fit game as GM IN GAME#

Two levers, pulling against each other. Hire a coach whose scheme already fits your roster — the fastest path; a receiver-heavy roster wants a Vertical or Run & Shoot coach, a mauling line and a power back want Ground & Pound. The "Coaches Aligned" check tells you whether your head coach and his coordinators agree — and it isn't decoration: a misaligned pair is a small standing tax on every fit score on that side of the ball. Or re-tool the roster to fit the coach, which is slower and pricier since his scheme is locked for his contract — you rebuild around it through the draft, free agency and trades, and it takes a few seasons.

Either way, players have to learn the system. A man who has never seen your playbook gives up part of his fit edge and claws it back week by week; training camp gives everyone a one-time floor, and smart players under a good play-designer learn faster. Familiarity carries partial credit for a similar system — Ground & Pound and Read Option are cousins, as are Pro Set and Quick Game, and Run & Shoot and Vertical. On defense you're credited separately for knowing the coverage and for knowing the front, and because a Hybrid plays a 4-3 box most of the time, the two front families cross-credit each other a little. A familiarity chip in free agency shows how much of a head start a target would have; the AI prices it in too.

So a scheme change costs you a season of comfort on top of the roster refit — and costs less if the new system is a cousin of the old one.

The arc of a career#

Every player on your roster is somewhere on a curve. Young players climb toward their ceiling, hold near a peak for a while, then slide down the back side as age catches up. That whole arc is baked in before the player ever suits up for you — each player carries his own personal progression track covering the rest of his career, season by season.

You never see that track directly. Underneath, the game walks it forward every offseason, nudging each of his 0–99 skill ratings up or down, and only then recomputes his OVR from those ratings. Growth and decline are never applied to OVR directly — they happen at the rating level and bubble up, which is why a fading veteran loses speed before he loses anything else.

Two different indicators sit on the surface, and they're easy to confuse. The ±N badge beside a player's OVR is the observed change since this season started — history. The small growth arrow is a forecast: next season's projected move, bucketed into mild, clear or steep so you never get an exact number. The arrow is truthful about direction and rough size; only the bucketing hides anything. On the standard difficulties you see arrows on your own team only; the easiest setting starts you with the whole league visible, and Settings lets you change it either way — whole league, own team, or off entirely.

Positions age differently, in two ways at once. Every position carries a decline-onset age; once a player passes his, he sheds a little extra every year, and the penalty grows with each year past it — so a fading player fades faster the longer you hold him. The onsets are real football ages: running backs and corners start down in their late twenties, receivers and edge rushers around thirty, offensive linemen a year later, quarterbacks well into their thirties, kickers and punters longest of all. The rate is per-position too, not just the onset — a back on the downslope loses ground close to twice as fast per year as a quarterback does, and a specialist's onset arrives so late that it barely bites at all. A mid-20s back can already be almost entirely on the downslope while a passer the same age is still climbing. Plan re-signings around the curve, not just the current number.

Durability follows the same clock. From about age 30 a player's injury-proneness ratchets permanently upward every few seasons — it never comes back down, and it isn't reflected in his OVR at all. That's the quiet reason a 33-year-old star is a worse bet than his rating says.

Growth types and the hidden curve#

There's no single "early bloomer" or "late developer" label stamped on a player. Instead, each player's individual track is his growth type: some front-load their gains and are close to their ceiling by their early 20s; others keep inching upward deep into their 20s before plateauing. Two players with the same current OVR can be headed to very different places.

Because the curve is fixed per player, two things follow. First, a breakout isn't random luck painted on afterward — it's the ascent portion of a track finally showing up in the box score. Second, while a player is still climbing he is capped at his true potential: a good year can carry him a point or two past it, but not further. Once he's past his prime that cap stops applying, so a late-career player can sit above an old ceiling — he just won't be climbing to get there.

Growth also respects who a player is. When a season's gains land on his ratings, the skills that define his current archetype grow together, so a speed rusher gets better at being a speed rusher instead of quietly morphing into a run-stopper. Archetype changes through development alone are vanishingly rare — the player you drafted for a role stays that player as he improves.

Potential you can't fully see#

Every player has a true potential — essentially the highest OVR his track will ever reach if development goes to plan. That true number is hidden. What the game shows you is a scouted estimate, and the quality of that estimate depends on your scouting: a sharp front office reads a prospect close to the truth, a weak one can be badly fooled in either direction.

How that fog is produced, how good scouts tighten it, and how the draft interview and combine sharpen a read are all covered on the Scouting page. Here it's enough to know: the ceiling number on a player card is an estimate, and estimates miss.

Dev traits: boom, bust, and the fast track IN GAME#

On top of the raw curve, each player carries a development trait — one of five tiers, from lowest to highest: Hidden, Normal, Star, Superstar, X-Factor. The trait isn't part of the curve; it's a thumb on the scale applied every season on top of it. A high tier adds a small persistent push upward, so a Superstar reliably reaches his ceiling while a Hidden settles below his. It also widens the swing: an X-Factor's season-to-season results scatter far more than a Hidden player's. The trait is never shown to you as a label — you read it off the growth arrows and the scouts' potential estimate.

Most of the league is Normal. Hidden and Star are each reasonably common; Superstar is uncommon and X-Factor genuinely rare.

Those pushes look tiny, and over one season they are. Over the life of a rookie contract and beyond they're worth several OVR points against a Normal peer on the same curve — potential permitting, most of the gap between a good starter and a star.

Age widens the swing on its own, independently of tier. Young players carry extra boom/bust volatility, settling down as they age. That's why a high-upside 21-year-old can either rocket past expectations or stall for a year, and why a 29-year-old rarely surprises you in either direction.

Position widens it too. Quarterbacks and defensive ends swing hardest of anyone: their draft-day projection predicts their career worse than any other position's does, so the high-pick passer both busts and booms more often than his grade suggests. That's deliberate, and it is the single biggest reason to think twice before trading up for one. Every other position runs on the normal spread.

What moves the needle#

The dominant force in development is age — where a player sits on his own curve. That's always live, and it's most of the story. Coaching adds a real, modest push on top; two further influences are designed in but currently switched off:

• Age and the personal curve — live, and the primary driver of every rise and fall.
• Coaching IN GAME — a well-coached franchise genuinely develops its players a little faster, and a badly coached one a little slower. The effect is deliberately modest and capped each season — a nudge on the curve, not a rewrite — but it compounds across years, which is part of why sustained staffs matter. It's measured against the rest of the league, so an average staff is exactly neutral, and it's routed by skill: your passing-development grade coaches quarterbacks, receivers and tight ends, your run-game grade coaches backs and the offensive line, your pass-defense grade coaches the entire defense, and your kicking grade coaches the specialists. Free agents and draft prospects have no coach, so they develop neutrally until somebody signs them.
• Playing time and usage NOT YET LIVE — the design has benchwarmers developing slower than players getting real snaps, but that throttle is parked and isn't affecting development today.
• Organization quality NOT YET LIVE — the idea that a well-run franchise develops its young players faster is built and measured, but ships off. So a prospect develops the same on a model franchise and a dysfunctional one.

Mood sits alongside all this and does not touch the growth curve. What it does touch is availability and money: unhappy stars really do escalate to trade requests, renegotiation demands and holdouts, and that machinery is live in a new game. The one part still switched off by default is mood nudging on-field effectiveness — that's an opt-in setting. See Morale, Health & Your Roster for how mood plays out and Contracts for what a demand costs you.

Decline and retirement#

The back half of the arc is the mirror of the front: negative deltas eat into ratings, the physical tools go first, and effective OVR drifts down. Eventually a player reaches the end. Retirements are resolved at the close of a season and it's a roll, not a cutoff — the odds climb with age past his position's typical retirement age, with how far his curve has fallen, with how low his rating has sunk, and with the count of serious injuries on his record. An old, worn player one bad season from the scrap heap may simply walk away in the offseason. Two edges to that: enough severe injuries can retire a player who is nowhere near old, and every position does have a hard age at which he is definitely done — late thirties for most of the field, past forty for a quarterback, later still for specialists.

That makes the timing of your roster moves a real decision: extend a declining veteran a year too long and you're paying peak money for downslope production — or worse, for a player who retires out from under the contract. The How a Season Works page walks through where retirement and offseason aging land in the yearly sequence, and Player Stats & Ratings explains how the underlying skills roll up into the OVR you see move.

What "out of position" means#

You can take one of your own players and line him up somewhere that isn't his listed position — a guard at tackle, a running back at receiver, a safety at linebacker. You never control players on the field; this just fields him at a different spot in your depth chart.

The important thing to understand up front: it's meant to be a patch, not a free upgrade. A player is worse at a borrowed position than a natural is, and both his shown rating and his actual on-field results reflect that. There's no way to "convert" a player permanently or dodge the cost.

This is a user-only tool. The AI-run teams never flex their players; they always field naturals or sign for the hole. So everything on this page only ever affects your roster.

Near moves vs far moves#

Positions sit on a kinship map. Some are close cousins — a corner and a safety do overlapping jobs, so a corner slid to safety barely notices. Others are distant: a defensive tackle asked to play defensive end is doing a genuinely different job, and it shows. The game only lets you move a player along a legal edge on that map, so you can't drop a kicker in at receiver — there's no path between them.

Every legal move carries two things baked in:

• A base penalty — the typical rating hit for an average player making that move. Small for cousin positions, large for distant ones.
• A minimum drop — a floor. However versatile the player, he ends up at least this far below his natural rating (one exception, below). This is the crutch that stops a great player from being just as good everywhere.

So a shuffle along the offensive line costs a few points; turning a tackle into a defensive end costs a lot.

What it costs#

When you field a player off-position, the game re-scores his existing physical and skill attributes as if he played the new spot — using only the attributes that matter there — and then subtracts the familiarity penalty. That penalized number is what you see on his card and what the sim uses on the field. They never disagree, so his box score always matches his card.

The penalty itself is softened by how versatile he is, and slashed if he happens to have a knack for that exact spot. Barring that knack, the result can never beat his natural rating minus the move's minimum drop.

In practice: a very good running back moved to receiver plays like a middling receiver, not a second star. That's the whole point.

Versatility and the hidden knack#

Two things soften the blow, and they're worth knowing before you plan a move.

Versatility is a visible rating on every player, and most players have almost none of it — a genuine utility man is rare, and nobody is generated as a true do-anything piece. A highly versatile player pays meaningfully less of the base penalty, but versatility can never erase the move entirely: the minimum drop still applies. It also grows only by actually playing out of position, a little each game, and never fades — and that grind is the only way a player climbs past what generation allows. Rotate a lineman around the front for a season or two and he slowly becomes a real utility piece.

The hidden knack is rarer and stronger. A small share of players are secretly excellent at one specific nearby position — the athlete who was miscast coming out of college. It isn't spread evenly: defensive backs are the likeliest to carry one, since corners and safeties really do swap, and linemen on both sides the least likely. A player with a knack for the exact spot you're moving him to pays only a fraction of the penalty and skips the minimum-drop floor. He usually lands a few points below his natural rating — and once in a great while at or above it. You won't see this listed on a normal card; you discover it by trying the move and watching the number come out far better than expected.

Which moves are legal, and how far they reach#

Some moves are deliberately not legal: a running back and a tight end can't cover for each other directly — that flexing runs through receiver instead — and tight end to the offensive line is one-way. The front-seven moves follow the position map: a defensive end is a step from the edge-rusher pool, an edge rusher a step from the off-ball linebackers, and a linebacker a step from the safeties. There's no legal straight line from a hand-in-the-dirt end to an off-ball backer.

Turning a skill player into a quarterback is a special, one-way case. A back, receiver or tight end can line up at quarterback, but he throws from a set of hidden, deliberately low passing attributes generated when he was created — real numbers run through the real quarterback model, not a fudge. He always lands far below his own natural rating. Emergency-only, or the occasional gadget wrinkle.

When it's actually worth it#

Given the cost, out-of-position play earns its keep in a few specific situations:

• Injury and depth patches. Your third safety goes down and your fourth is unplayable — sliding a corner over on a cheap move may field a better player than the natural backup for a week or two. Injuries and next-man-up are in Morale, Health & Your Roster.
• Genuine hybrid athletes. A highly versatile player, especially a hidden-knack one, can hold a spot at close to natural level — and his versatility climbs the more you use him there.
• Roster and package crunch. Your defense needs twelve or thirteen bodies to fill eleven slots across its sub-packages, so a corner who can cover safety snaps saves you a roster spot you'd otherwise spend on a pure backup. See Schemes & Scheme Fit for which packages your defense lives in.

What it is not good for is squeezing extra starters out of your stars. Moving a great player off his position almost always makes him worse, by design. For why some athletes re-score better at a new spot than others, see Archetypes.

What it does to the player#

Playing a man out of position isn't free off the field either. His contract ask blends toward wherever he actually lined up. The game tracks the mix of positions he's played since he last signed, and his next ask is a proportional blend of those positions' pay scales. A running back who spent most of his games at receiver will ask for something close to receiver money.

That counter resets every time he signs, so you can't swap him back to his cheap position right before talks to dodge the raise — the season's worth of receiver reps still counts. This is the real long-term cost of using a player out of position: field him there enough and you'll pay him partly like the position he's been playing. What that does to your cap sheet is Contracts.

He'll tell you so, too. Every player carries a short DEMANDS line on his contract tab explaining why he wants what he wants, and the position blend is one of the reasons it can give ("I've been lining up at receiver all year"). It names the driver but never the dollar figure — that appears only once you open negotiations, where a fuller version of the quote shows up. It sits alongside the other things that shape an ask: production against his rating, what his personality cares about, loyalty and tenure, his age and his window to win. Those same motives drive mood and holdouts — see Morale, Health & Your Roster.

Reading a stat table#

Every stat table in the game carries an ⓘ beside its header, and it opens the key for exactly the columns in front of you — the quarterback key on a quarterback, the punting key on a punter, the leaderboard key for whichever board you are looking at. This page is the same key, written out once so you can read it away from the game.

The one habit worth forming: a header code means different things at different positions. YDS is passing yards on a quarterback's card, rushing yards on a running back's, receiving yards on a receiver's, and gross punt yards on a punter's. TD, AVG, LNG and INT are the same story. Read every column in the company of the position that produced it — which is why the tables below are grouped by position family rather than alphabetically.

Ratings are a different measurement entirely: a rating is what a player can do, a stat is what he did. For the rating side of the house, see Player Stats & Ratings.

Snaps, games, and what the percentages divide by#

Three usage columns travel with almost every table in the game.

SNAP% is the one that is easy to misread, so read it slowly. It is a share of his unit's snaps — every offensive snap the team took if he plays offense, every defensive snap if he plays defense. It is never a share of the team's total plays, and it is never a share of some league average.

Two consequences worth knowing. A player traded mid-season is measured against each club only for the weeks he was actually there — his old team's remaining games are not held against him, and neither are his new team's earlier ones — so a move neither inflates nor deflates the number. And when the game cannot reconstruct a true team snap total for some season — an old save, a season recorded before the totals were kept — the share reads as a dash rather than a guess, and a career share is only shown when every season feeding it has a real denominator.

Only offensive and defensive snaps are counted. Kicking and punting happen on special teams and nowhere else, so a kicker or punter carries no snap columns at all — his usage is told by his own volume columns instead (FGA, PUNT), next to a GP count of the games he appeared in. Returners are different: the man fielding a kick is normally a running back or receiver, so his snap columns are real and describe his day job on offence, not his return work.

A week he missed is not a blank row. His season table lists it with the reason in place of the stats — BYE, OUT for an injury, IR, or SUSP — so a thin stat line and an absent player never look the same. Where those reasons come from is on Morale, Health & Your Roster.

Which games are counted depends on the surface. A league leaderboard ranks the regular season only — playoff games are left out of it entirely. A player's own card is the opposite: his season table lists every game he played including the playoff weeks, and its TOTAL row adds them all up. His career table keeps the postseason on its own separate POST line, so a career regular-season total stays a regular-season total. When a leaderboard number and a player card disagree by a few games in January, this is why — see How a Season Works for the phase calendar itself.

Quarterbacks#

Running backs#

CAR% and TCH% are the workload columns. A committee back and a bell cow can post similar yardage; the share columns are what tell them apart.

Receivers and tight ends#

Offensive line#

Linemen are graded on the two jobs they actually do, and each job carries its own snap count so the rates mean something.

Defense#

Every defensive player carries the same tackle-and-turnover line, so you can compare a safety and an interior lineman on the same row shape.

The coverage ledger#

Anyone the defense can put in coverage — corners, safeties, linebackers and edge rushers — carries a second block on top of the line above, charting what happened on throws into his coverage. Interior linemen and base ends do not: nobody asks a nose tackle to cover anybody, so those columns simply aren't on his card.

Kickers#

FG% is field goals only. Extra points live in XPM and XPA and never flatter the percentage, which is the difference between a kicker who is good and a kicker who has been asked for a lot of chip shots.

Punters#

NET is the column that decides a punter. A big AVG with a mediocre NET means he is out-kicking his coverage or booming the ball through the end zone; I20 against TB shows you which.

Returns#

The league's return board folds kick returns and punt returns into a single line, then splits the averages back out.

Columns only the league boards use#

The leaderboards mix positions on one table, so a few headers are disambiguated there that a single player's card never has to be.

Every board is filtered from the side you're on: ALL · QB · RB · WR · TE · OL on offense, ALL · DL · LB · DB on defense, ALL · K · P · RET on special teams. The ALL board is deliberately narrow — a handful of columns that mean something for every position — because widening it to every position's stats would render mostly dashes. Pick a position filter and you get that group's real column set instead.

Two of those boards rank on a rate rather than a total, because the counting stat would reward the wrong man:

• The OL board sorts by fewest pressures allowed per pass-block snap. A raw sack-allowed count just punishes whoever plays the most, so only full-time linemen are ranked at all — a man needs at least 80% of the busiest lineman's pass-block snaps. Everyone else is listed underneath them.
• The DB board sorts by yards allowed per target, with the rest of the coverage ledger behind it. The LB board carries the same coverage columns but ranks on the tackle line, because that is the larger part of the job.

Anatomy of a deal#

Every contract is built from four things: a length in years, a base salary for each year, a signing bonus, and a set of guarantees. What counts against your cap in a season — the number on the CAP HIT tab — is that year's base salary plus that year's slice of the signing bonus.

No year of an active-roster deal may pay less than the league minimum salary of $885,000, so even the last man on the roster has a price floor. (Practice-squad deals are a weekly stipend and sit legitimately below it — see Morale, Health & Your Roster.)

How much of a deal is bonus depends on who the player is, not on a fixed rule.

The star row is the one that surprises people: an elite player demands the biggest signing bonus in the league, not a clever cap-friendly deal. That matters twice over, because prorated bonus is exactly what accelerates when a contract leaves your building — so the star you just signed is also the player who will be expensive to move later.

A greedy personality pushes every one of those asks further. The later years of a long deal also count for less against your cap than the sticker number suggests — see Free Agency.

Weighting: front, balanced, or back#

When you build an offer you pick how the same total money is spread across the years. This doesn't change what the player earns — it changes when the cap pain lands and what it costs to cut him early.

Rival GMs use the same slider with intent: a cap-strapped or rebuilding team back-loads and shaves a year off, while a win-now contender front-loads and pays the pain now. Stars are the exception either way — a team that just won a bidding war for one will meet his guaranteed-years ask rather than nickel him, because a star punishes a short-guarantee offer by walking.

Guarantees and what they cost you#

Not every dollar is promised. Guarantees cover whole early years of base salary rather than a slice of every year — roughly the front half of the deal, while a genuine blue-chipper asks for most of it guaranteed. The signing bonus is always fully guaranteed on top of that.

His ask is an anchor, not a fixed price. You dial the guaranteed number yourself, and coming up short is sticky: shaving a guaranteed year hurts your chances far more than adding one helps you. A true star goes further than sticky — if the share of the deal you are actually promising is too thin, he doesn't weigh it at all, he refuses it.

Guaranteed base is money you owe whether he's on your roster or not, and once a guaranteed year has been played the promise lapses — which is what makes "cut the veteran after his guarantees run out" a deliberate plan rather than a free move.

Blue-chip players also negotiate for no-trade clauses on re-signs and extensions. A star in his prime who is loyal, or a multi-year fixture of your building, may want one; granting it helps close the deal while restricting where you can later trade him. They never appear on a fresh free-agent signing. Consequences on the Trades page.

Cutting players and dead money#

When you release a player, you don't escape everything you owe. Two things accelerate onto your cap as dead money: every remaining slice of his signing bonus, and every remaining guaranteed year of base salary. Non-guaranteed base in future years simply disappears — you owe none of it.

A June-1 designation NOT YET LIVE would soften the worst cuts by splitting the bill across two seasons — this year eating the current bonus slice plus the guarantees, and the rest of the acceleration deferred to next season's books. It never reduces what you owe; it buys you a year. The split is built, but no save currently gets any designations, so every release you make lands in full this season. Plan cuts as if the whole bill is due, because it is.

Trading him away is the third kind of dead money, and it is the cheapest. A trade-out accelerates the remaining bonus onto your cap exactly like a cut does, but the base salary and the guarantees travel with the player to his new team instead of staying with you. That is the real reason a bad contract is easier to trade than to release — if you can find a taker. Details on the Trades page.

A restructure is the flip side: convert some current-year base salary into signing bonus and re-spread it over the remaining years. Lower cap hit now, more dead money later. Cap-strapped rival teams do it too, before they resort to cutting anyone. More on Morale, Health & Your Roster.

What a player thinks he's worth#

Every player is priced against his position group — quarterbacks, edge rushers, receivers, interior linemen and so on — and, inside it, against the rank he'd hold if he signed today. Elite money is scarce: a group's best, its tenth-best and its fortieth-best are priced very differently. That rank price is the starting point; from there the number moves for reasons you can read straight off his card.

That last one is the lever that keeps your own stars from all walking. A player can also over-ask well past his rank price and simply go unsigned for it.

Age cuts a deal on both axes. Annual money peaks in the late twenties, holds through about 30, then falls away hard — a star still playing well in his mid-thirties earns a clear fraction of what that same player commanded at 27, not something close to it. Term collapses alongside it: premium players command real length into their early thirties and progressively shorter deals after, mid-market and depth players shorten faster, and a fast-aging room (running backs above all) reads older than the calendar says.

The other end of the curve moves for a different reason. A young star already at the top of his game refuses the long deal you'd love to give him and asks for a short bridge, so he can reach the market again while he's still a peak asset. Once he is out of his mid-twenties he stops refusing years at all — keeping a veteran short becomes your job, not something he does for you.

The number he asks for is the number he signs for. The DEMAND column is a real price, not an opening bid: it is the cheapest deal of the shape you currently have on screen that he would say yes to. Change the shape and the price moves with it — stretch the term, load the signing bonus, or guarantee another year and watch his ask come down; strip the guarantees out and it climbs. Meet it and the deal is done, no dice roll.

That also means there is no free second try. Once he turns an offer down, he won't look at the same one again — not after you leave the screen, and not next week. You have to actually improve it: more money, more years, more bonus, more guaranteed years, or any mix of those that genuinely helps him. A genuine lowball isn't considered at all, and he won't sit through an unlimited number of tries either — loyal players give you more rope, greedy ones less.

Extensions, the tag, and the option#

You can't renegotiate whenever you like. A player will only talk extension in the final year of his current deal. When you do extend, the new money is a plain append: his current final year plays out exactly as signed, and all the extra salary and bonus start with the tacked-on years. No mid-deal cap surprises.

Two formula deals let you keep a player without negotiating at all:

• Franchise tag — a 1-year, fully guaranteed contract at the average of the top 5 salaries in his position group. One per team per season.
• Fifth-year option — for a first-round pick, an extra guaranteed year at the average of the top 10 in his group, exercised before his rookie deal ends.

Both are sanity-checked against the individual, so a journeyman backup quarterback can't be tagged at superstar money just because his position is expensive. A star whose own price already clears his group's average is unaffected. And because both are fully guaranteed, tagging a player and then cutting him is almost never worth it.

Drafted players sign standard rookie contracts, and you can't extend one until after his third season — no locking a stud in at year-one prices. An expiring deal is always re-signable. Rookies are also mood-proof at the table: a sour mood inflates a veteran's ask, but not theirs. See the Draft page for where they come from, and Player Growth & Aging for how their ratings move afterward.

Renegotiations and holdouts IN GAME#

Mid-contract drama is switched on. A player who has badly outperformed a deal with a year or two left — or one buried in the pecking order, or ringless on a doormat — can escalate from private grumbling to a public demand. Most of it resolves quietly: he asks you to rework the deal and you accept, promise to revisit it, or ignore him and eat the mood hit.

A trade request is the next step up, and on the Easy and Medium presets it is where every saga stops — the ladder simply has no rung above it. Only Hard lets a player actually sit out (a custom setup lets you set that ceiling yourself), and even there it is the rare tail rather than the norm: he stays away, gets fined a slice of his salary every week he does — credited back to your cap — and usually reports in around the trade deadline anyway.

How mood is built week to week — usage, wins, pay, coaching — lives on Morale, Health & Your Roster.

The salary cap#

Every team plays under the same hard number: a flat $300M salary cap, the same every season. It does not grow. Instead, multi-year deals you sign quietly get cheaper on the books as they age — the effect matches a rising cap in the real NFL, where a star's slice of the pie shrinks over the life of his contract, except the number you budget against never moves.

What counts against the cap is every player's current-year cap hit — base salary plus the prorated slice of any signing bonus — plus any dead money you're still carrying. The full anatomy of a deal lives on the Contracts page; this page is about the market that sets those numbers.

You must be cap-compliant, but not at every moment of the offseason — you can dip over while wheeling and dealing. The hard gate is before Week 1, and it keeps firing every week after: you have to be inside the roster limit and under the cap to play the game. It is not a fine and not a silent purge — the calendar simply refuses to advance until you fix it, and the screen that stops you will draft the cuts for you and price each one before you commit. See How a Season Works for where this sits on the calendar.

Rival clubs are pushed up toward a spending floor, so nobody sits on idle room forever — and the better the team, the higher its floor. Title favorites are expected to spend nearly to the cap, the middle of the league a little less, and rebuilding clubs are allowed to be genuinely cheap. That carve-out is the point: bad teams get to be cheap, get younger, and come back.

The three offseason waves#

Free agency runs before the draft, in three waves. But nobody hits the market until the re-sign window opens first: every team looks at its own expiring players and decides to extend them, tag one, or let them walk. Only the players a team won't pay — or won't pay enough — reach the pool. The franchise tag is the override that yanks an elite player back off the market for a forced one-year stay, and rival GMs use it too — one per club per year. Cap casualties are the third door into the pool: a club that has to get under the cap cuts good players, and they arrive in the same market.

Then the pool opens in tiers. Each wave advances the calendar a few days; you and every AI GM act once per wave, offers resolve, and the market re-prices before the next one.

The waves cool for two independent reasons. The wave itself applies a premium early and a discount late — and separately, a player who goes unsigned closes part of the gap between his ask and his true market rank every time a wave passes him by. Unsigned players stay active in later waves, so patient GMs regularly land a Wave-1-quality name at a Wave-3 price. Teams pace themselves too: a club spends the bulk of its room in Wave 1, keeps some powder dry for Wave 2, and holds a little back for the bargain bin, and each club is limited in how many offers it can table per wave — though one sitting on an embarrassment of unspent money is allowed extra swings.

That "length ceiling" is a ceiling, not a template. The actual offer is the shorter of the wave ceiling and what the player himself wants, so a 33-year-old signs short even in the frenzy. Below-average starters are capped at a short "prove-it" deal in any wave.

After the waves comes the draft, then a light post-draft cleanup for undrafted rookies and leftover holes — not a fourth headline wave.

Winning a bidding war#

Offers on a single free agent resolve as a sealed auction: everyone bids, the player evaluates, and the best offer after his personality wins.

• Contested players get expensive. Every additional rival bidding on the same player pushes the price up.
• Every team prices slightly differently. There's a spread across clubs, so sometimes you're the high bid by luck.
• A contender's offer is worth more than its dollars to an ambitious player.
• He can say no to everyone. A winning bid still has to come close to what he's asking, or he goes unsigned and waits for the next wave.

Rival GMs are fenced in on price: an AI team can only go so far above what the player himself asked, and no AI deal — however desperate the club — can exceed the top-of-market price for that position group. You are exempt from both. A human GM can overpay to whatever the cap allows, which is a real edge in a bidding war and a real way to wreck your own future.

How free agents choose#

Past the cap casualties above, a player reaches the open market by one of two doors.

The team's call — a club lets its own player walk when the money doesn't make sense: it can't fit the extension under its projected cap, it already has a cheaper young heir at the spot, he's overpriced for a low-value role, or a rebuilding club is deliberately shedding its older players. Contenders, by contrast, pay a premium to keep their own.

The player's call — even when his team does offer, he can decline and test the market:

• Money. The offer sits below what he thinks he's worth, and a greedy personality chases the top bidder.
• Rings. A ringless star past his mid-twenties, stuck on a non-contender, wants out — and will take a discount to join a winner. The urge cools hard once he actually wins.
• Role. An ambitious high-end player who isn't getting the ball wants to be the alpha somewhere he will.
• Mood. Roster churn, bad coaching or a lost season sours him — raising his ask and weakening his pull to stay.
• Betting on himself. A young player still climbing turns down security on purpose, plays out a short prove-it deal, and comes back for the real contract.

Money isn't the whole offer — when the offer is yours. He weighs the deal you built, not just its total: guaranteed money, how much of it is signing bonus, and the length. Beating a rival by a million on a hundred-million-dollar contract is a rounding error to him, and a better-built deal at the same price will win it. He also looks at your depth chart: a genuinely good player who can see he'd be sitting behind someone better wants convincing, and the way you convince him is guarantees. Rival clubs bid against each other on price alone, so a well-built deal is an edge only you can use.

On the easiest contract difficulty that edge is gone — the auction becomes pure money, and in exchange free agents say yes a little more readily and a winning bid that falls just short of a player's floor still gets signed. The depth-chart read survives at every difficulty: a good player never wants to be a backup, whatever the settings say.

Loyalty is the counterweight. A loyal player gives his current team a real discount plus a strong pull to stay — which is why re-signing your own guys early is almost always cheaper than replacing them.

In-season free agency#

Once the season kicks off, the market shrinks to one-year deals only — depth and injury replacements, never headline signings. What opens a signing is a genuine hole: a position that no longer has enough available starters because a man is hurt, suspended or cut. (The exception is the first few weeks, when a club still short of a full roster is allowed to fill it out without any hole at all.)

The street is deliberately thinner than your own building. The in-season pool is quality-trimmed, while practice squads carry the league's best willing fringe — so when an injury opens a hole, the intended first answer is a call-up from your own squad, and free agency is the fallback, not the plan.

Deals are prorated to the weeks left — sign a player in Week 10 and you pay only the back half of the season, with little or no future dead cap. A player who sat unsigned all offseason keeps getting cheaper through the regular season, drifting toward a floor, so a stranded name eventually becomes affordable.

A firmer floor sits under all of it: when a club fills out its roster, a genuinely good player may not be signed at scrub money, and a team that can't clear the real price simply doesn't get him. That is the governing law of the whole economy — a high-OVR player is only ever cheap through a rookie deal or a post-trade contract where someone else already ate the guarantees. And nobody, at any point, signs for less than the league minimum.

What the market pays#

Prices are fit to real-NFL money, and set by position group rather than raw position — guards and centers price separately, for instance. Two consequences catch people out. A stand-up EDGE rusher is paid on the pass-rush market while a base DE is paid as an interior body, so two men who look like ends cost very different money. And an interior lineman who is genuinely a penetrating rusher blends part-way toward the edge market — the only place a player straddles two groups. Each group has its own curve and its own hard ceiling on what any single contract in it can be worth.

Those ceilings are the whole positional-value argument, and they run in this order:

The gap between the tiers is far bigger than the gap between two players inside one tier — the best quarterback in the league is worth multiples of the best running back. How rating maps onto money is on the Player Stats & Ratings page.

Holdouts and contract drama IN GAME#

The pressure layer is on: a player whose situation has curdled can escalate from private grumbling to a public demand that you rework his contract, and from there to a trade request — which is where the ladder ends on the Easy and Medium presets. Only Hard lets a player actually sit out, and a custom setup lets you set that ceiling yourself. The market matters here because an unhappy player's ask is one of the forces that prices him. The escalation ladder and what each answer does live on Morale, Health & Your Roster; the negotiating mechanics are on Contracts.

How the AI decides#

Every one of the 31 rival GMs runs the same math you do. Each player and each draft pick carries a trade value — a single number the whole league agrees on as the neutral market rate. When you send an offer, the receiving GM sums the value coming in, sums the value going out, and asks a simple question: does this make my team better?

That baseline value is talent, age and contract only — a shared anchor, identical for every team, so the market stays honest.

On top of it, each GM applies their own read. A team desperate at cornerback will pay over market for one; a team already three deep there sees the same player as surplus and discounts him. That personal read is what turns a fair-value trade into a deal a specific team actually wants — and it's why the offer screen shows you two numbers: the league market bar, and their take on it.

Four things set the neutral number:

• Talent, steeply. Value is near-flat at the bottom of the league and ramps hard at the top: the last man on a roster is worth essentially nothing as a trade asset, and the curve only starts biting around the level of a solid full-time starter. But it is a curve, not a cliff — three genuinely good starters really can outweigh one great player. Quantity has a value here; it just isn't a shortcut to a superstar.
• Age. A 30-year-old star is worth less than his raw rating; a 23-year-old riser more. The bite is heaviest where speed is the job — running backs fall fastest, then receivers and corners; quarterbacks age most gently of all.
• Position. Premium spots are weighted hardest, and the weighting is derived from what each group is actually paid rather than hand-picked — so it broadly tracks the money tiers on the Free Agency & the Salary Cap page. Quarterback is in a class of its own, then edge rusher and receiver, then the interior defensive line. Tackle and cornerback sit right at league-average value, the rest of the front seven and secondary just under it, and running back, tight end and the specialists well below.
• Contract. A bargain deal adds value; an albatross subtracts it.

What moves a player's value#

The talent-and-age curve does most of the work, but the situation around a player swings what any one team will give:

The two forces you'll feel most are need and surplus: the same star nets a first-round pick from a team with a hole at his spot and a shrug from a team already three deep there. Around the deadline a second layer shows up in the AI's own dealing — contenders start valuing veterans over future picks, rebuilders do the exact opposite and dump aging salary for draft capital. What "fits their scheme" means in practice is on the Schemes & Scheme Fit page.

The cap side of a trade#

A trade is a cap transaction, and both halves are real:

• The seller eats dead money. Trading a player away doesn't erase his contract — the unpaid signing bonus accelerates onto the seller's cap immediately. It is the cheaper half of a cut: the base salary and the guarantees travel with the player, and only the bonus you already paid sticks to you (dead money).
• That acceleration is also a price, not just a cap hit. A team being asked to swallow dead money to move a contract wants more back for the trouble — so the ugliest salary dumps cost you cap and return.
• The buyer inherits the base salary, but not the old bonus proration — that stays behind with the team that paid it.
• No AI club will end a trade over the cap. A deal that would leave the other side in the red is refused outright: take salary off their books first. Your own club is not blocked the same way — you get a warning and a confirmation, and then the bill is yours to solve before the compliance gate in Week 1 (Free Agency & the Salary Cap). The Trade Center shows where both teams land, this season and next.

One more wrinkle: trade for a player in the last year or two of his deal, and if you gave up a high pick to get him, the game reads that as intent to keep him and signs him to a fair-market extension on arrival — provided you have the room. Rent a veteran with a late pick instead and no extension fires; he plays out his deal and can walk. Players 30 and older are capped to short extensions regardless.

Trading draft picks#

Picks are assets just like players, and they carry their own value from the same steep-at-the-top curve: a Top 5 pick is worth a fortune, a late-round pick is worth a body. You browse them one club at a time — pick a trade partner, then switch between its PLAYERS and PICKS tabs.

Three things shape a pick's price:

• When it lands. A next-year pick is discounted against the same pick this year — future capital is worth less than capital you can spend now.
• What the rookie will cost. A pick isn't a free player — it comes with the slotted rookie contract the drafted player will sign, and a top pick's deal is a real cap commitment (see rookie contracts). The price nets that in, which nudges premium picks down a little and late picks up a little, because their players are nearly free.
• How good it will be. Until a season finishes and the draft order locks, a pick's slot is only projected. Before kickoff the projection is pure team strength; as games are played it blends in record and remaining strength of schedule — but roster quality keeps the larger share of the weight all the way through, so a fluke 3-0 start can't dress up a bad roster's first-rounder as a late pick. The Trade Center shows the estimate as a tier: Top 5, Top 10, Mid 1st, Late 1st, and Early/Mid/Late plus the round number after that.

Because the projected slot travels with the pick, the AI values it exactly the way you see it — there is no hidden discount waiting to surprise you. How you actually use picks once you own them lives on the Draft page.

The trade block and shopping players#

The Trade Block is the league's want-ad board. The AI lists its own expendable players there — mostly mid-tier surplus bodies and the occasional big-contract veteran a cap-strapped team can no longer keep — and browsing it tells you who is genuinely available before you waste an offer on an untouchable star. Nothing stops you offering on someone who isn't listed, but a team that loves its guy will say no, or demand a package that reflects how badly it does not want to move him.

Listing your own player there is not a passive act. A quality name on the block draws real interest: rival GMs who could start him come looking, usually within a week or two, and their packages are built against a motivated-seller price. If you want offers, list him — then judge what arrives.

A player who negotiated a no-trade clause into his deal can only be dealt to a contender-tier team — the title favorites and the next tier of genuine contenders. Try to ship him to a rebuilder and he vetoes, with a reason. The clause restricts trades only; you can still re-sign, extend or cut him. Contender tiers are recalculated every week, so a team climbing into contention opens up mid-season.

The window and the deadline#

Trades are not always available. The trade window is open throughout the offseason and training camp, stays open through Week 9 of the regular season, then closes for the rest of the season and the playoffs. When it is closed the trade buttons grey out and a TRADE WINDOW CLOSED chip appears on your next-game card.

Open is not the same as busy:

At the deadline contenders become buyers, rebuilders become sellers, and rental veterans flow toward the teams chasing a ring. Rival GMs pitch you offers on their own schedule each week — including on players you never listed — so check your Offers Received inbox regularly rather than only when you're shopping.

Draft day is its own market. Trading up or back while the clock runs is on the Draft page; unlike an in-season trade, those deals are checked hard before they execute — roster limit, the personnel your scheme requires, and cap space are enforced, not warned about.

Why the AI won't be fleeced#

GMs will not take obviously lopsided deals. The engine enforces a fairness band on every executed trade: two AI clubs only shake hands when both sides land close to level in true value. You will see a steady stream of deals get done around the league without lifting a finger, and none of them will be a heist.

When you propose a trade, the standard is even stricter — the AI accepts only if, by its own read, what it receives is worth at least what it gives up. Its need-and-surplus tilt still applies (it may take a raw-value-uneven deal because it genuinely needs the position), but there is no built-in generosity to exploit. A few more guardrails you'll run into:

• No gutting one position. A team will not send away two starting-caliber bodies at the same spot in one package, and a club that isn't rebuilding also has to still field a real starter afterward. Rebuilders are allowed to fire-sale into a hole; nobody ships a whole position group.
• Picks close the gap both ways. When a deal is close but tilted, either side adds picks until it balances — the cheapest ones that actually close the gap, never padding that changes nothing. A club will not hand back its own first-rounder as a balancer, and it won't ask for yours either: a surprise first-round ask reads as fleecing, not fairness. At most one first-rounder and two picks total may ride on either side of a deal. If it can't be balanced inside the band, it simply dies.
• The counter. When you land close but short, the AI often counters rather than refusing — it adds or asks for the assets it thinks square the deal, and the additions are marked so you can see what changed. Accepting takes the counter as written.
• Realism limits — on the AI. A rival keeps at most three players on its side of a package and won't flip a player or pick it acquired this same season, so nothing ping-pongs around the league. Those are limits on its behavior; the Trade Center does not impose them on you.

How the draft is built#

The draft is the cheapest way to add real talent to your roster, and once your league has been running a few seasons it is the only source of genuinely young players. The first few classes ship with the game's seed data; after those run out — and to top up any year that comes up thin — every rookie pool is generated from scratch, season after season, forever. The game keeps the next few classes minted ahead of you at all times, which is what the scouting board reads.

The structure mirrors the real thing: seven rounds, 224 picks, running worst-team-first within each round, so the clubs that struggled last season choose ahead of the clubs that thrived. You hold one pick per round to start, but that inventory is fluid — you can trade picks away for players, pick up extra picks the same way, and swap picks on draft day itself (more below).

The prospect pool is deeper than the pick count: a hundred or so prospects go undrafted every year and wash into the undrafted free-agent pile, where the occasional gem still hides. That gap is deliberate — it keeps the late rounds and the undrafted pile worth scouting instead of a formality.

What a class looks like#

Every prospect is manufactured to feel like a real draft entrant. Each one gets a position, a hidden true ceiling, a current (raw, rookie-level) ability well below that ceiling, an age between 21 and 23, an archetype, a college, a full set of skill grades, a simulated college stat line with an injury history, and combine measurables. None of it is placeholder — the college season is real generated history you can read, and the combine numbers correlate with the player's physical ratings, so a blazing forty actually means something.

The position mix is fitted against two decades of real NFL drafts. The draft is defense-heavy, the trenches eat about a third of all picks combined, and quarterback is the scarcest non-specialist spot on the board — which is exactly why a franchise passer is so hard to come by.

Those are baselines, and each year wobbles around them. The shares hold across a whole class rather than within a single round — early rounds skew toward premium positions, later rounds fill out depth, the same way real drafts do.

The talent spread inside a class is a bell curve with a fat, unreliable top. Most ceilings land in solid-starter territory; a true blue chip is a once-a-class event. And blue chips arrive raw but high-ceiling — a player who will one day be elite almost never starts elite. A prospect who looks finished on draft day gets his rating pulled back and the trimmed points handed to him as room to grow instead. No drafted prospect is a pure camp body, either: a rookie can be raw, but he can play.

How raw he is, and how much runway he has, comes from his development type:

A boom-or-bust prospect often starts low enough to go undrafted entirely and then grows into the classic undrafted-gem starter. The middle rounds hide treasure on purpose too: a real share of eventual stars enters the pool priced like a day-two or day-three pick, waiting for the scouting department that spots them. What happens to any of them after you pick is covered under Player Growth & Aging.

Loaded years and down years#

Class strength is not fixed. Every season's pool is rolled with two independent levers: how good the class is on average, and how many true blue-chips sit at the very top. A year can be a "loaded class" or a "down year," and those two things move separately — you can get a deep, solid class with no superstar, or a thin class carried by one or two headliners.

On top of the global shift, each position group has its own year-to-year swing. One draft is deep at receiver and thin at tackle; the next is a run on edge rushers with no franchise quarterback in sight. This is what makes trading up or reaching feel situational: in a loaded quarterback year you can wait, in a barren one you pay a premium.

Mock drafts during the season#

You don't have to wait for April to see where the board is heading. Three times a year the League Office publishes a mock draft of next season's class — after week 7, after week 14, and once the season ends. Each is a frozen three-round, 96-pick projection: the slot order from the standings as they stand, the picks routed through whatever trades have already moved them, and every club taking the player its needs and the public read point it at.

Each edition arrives as a message on your phone and opens straight onto the board; they also live under LEAGUE ▸ DRAFT as MOCK #1, #2 and #3, and any row drills into that prospect's page. The earliest mock is the loosest guess and each one tightens, so the value is in the drift: a name climbing across all three is a name you'll be bidding against, and the third one is close to the real thing without ever being a script.

Draft day#

When the draft runs, you watch the board tick down as every other team makes its selections. The AI clubs pick for real — weighing their own roster needs against their own scouting reads — so weak-scouting teams genuinely misjudge players, reach, and let steals slide. When your slot comes up, the clock stops and hands you the board: an AVAILABLE list of everyone still on it, a PICKED log of who has gone where, an UPCOMING view of the pick order and team needs, and a live TRADE tab.

The PICKED log is worth reading as you go. Every completed pick carries the drafting team's own scout stars (how much they liked him) next to a separate media grade on the pick itself. The grade starts from a solid B — most picks are fine picks — then moves for value versus slot (a steal late grades high, a reach early grades low) and for need (filling a glaring hole earns credit), with a little pundit noise on top. So a club can love a player and still get panned for where it took him, and two outlets' worth of jitter means the same pick isn't always graded identically.

On the clock you can trade instead of pick. Rivals float trade-back offers — you send your slot, they send a package of later or future picks and pick immediately. You'll see plenty of interest in the early rounds and it tapers off as the draft wears on, until nobody bothers in the seventh.

Packages are small and priced at near-equal capital, tilted slightly toward the team moving down. In the first three rounds at least one offer on the table will also include a real veteran at one of your listed needs, so moving down can be a way to fill a hole today rather than only stockpiling picks. You can shop the pick to pull a fresh set of offers, and you can counter any offer: demand extra picks, drop ones you don't want, or throw in a pick of your own, then watch the rival re-run its verdict live. The value math behind all of it is the same currency used everywhere else — see Trades for how pick value is calculated.

You are never forced to draft blind on need alone: the board also highlights a single recommended prospect while you're on the clock, blending your team's need with your scouts' read on the player. It's advice, not an order — and because it reads through your scouts, a weak scouting department gives you weaker advice.

Rookie contracts#

Drafted players sign slotted rookie deals automatically — you don't negotiate them the way you do free agents. The scale follows the real NFL's: where a player is picked sets what he costs, and steeply. A top-five pick is a real cap commitment, not just a lottery ticket, while a late first-rounder costs a fraction of that and a day-three pick is close to free. Money is spread evenly over four years, and guarantees fall away by round — a first-rounder's deal is fully guaranteed, day-two picks about half, day-three barely at all.

For his first four seasons a rookie is also exempt from asking you to reopen his deal, no matter how far he outplays it, and first-round picks carry a fifth-year option you can exercise before that clock runs out. Cheap, cost-controlled, and the whole reason the draft is such good roster value. The full mechanics — length, guarantees, the option price, and what happens when the deal runs out — live on the Contracts page.

The hit-or-miss reality#

Here is the honest part: potential is a guess, not a guarantee. The ceiling the game tracks internally is never shown to you before the pick — not as a number, not anywhere. What you see instead are your scouts' fogged reads, expressed as stars, and those reads can be wrong in both directions. A genuinely great prospect can slip because nobody spotted him; an over-hyped one can go early to the whole league and then never grow into the player everyone expected. Busts and steals are baked into the class itself, not bad luck laid on top.

That uncertainty is the point of the pre-draft grind, and it belongs to a different room of the guide: how scouting quality sharpens (or blurs) your reads, how the two star ratings differ, and how interviews expose a prospect's character all live on the Scouting page. Where a rookie slots once he's yours is Morale, Health & Your Roster.

Draft well and you're not buying a finished player. You're buying a bet.

The scouts' desk#

Every prospect who will ever enter your draft has a true ceiling and a true current ability baked in the moment his class is generated. You never see those numbers. What you see is your scouting department's best guess — and how good that guess is depends entirely on who you hire.

Your scouts live in the Front Office, under MY TEAM ▸ OFFICE ▸ STAFF, which carries four views: STAFF, DRAFT POOL, DRAFT COHORTS and INJURY REPORT. Two star ratings on your lead scouts drive everything on the two draft views:

• Evaluator — overall accuracy. How closely your projections track the truth, across every prospect.
• Star Spotter — ceiling accuracy. How reliably your department separates a real blue-chipper from a

merely good player, and catches a hidden gem before the rest of the league does.

A department strong on Evaluator but weak on Star Spotter will place most players about right, yet keep mistaking future stars for role players (and role players for future stars). That distinction is the whole reason both ratings exist.

Reading a class through the fog#

The DRAFT COHORTS view is your bird's-eye view. Its heat map lays the next three draft classes down the side and projected-potential tiers across the top. Each cell carries the exact count and share of the class, so the shape of a class stays easy to scan without hiding the numbers.

Filter by position and the map reshapes. This is how you spot that "two years out is a loaded receiver year" or "there's no franchise quarterback until the class after next" — before anyone else is talking about it.

Here is the part to internalize: every number on that screen is your scouts' projection, not the truth. Two GMs with different scouting staffs looking at the same league see different heat maps. The cells are rebuilt from your department's read each time you check, never from the hidden reality underneath.

The fog narrows over time#

A class three years out is blurry. A class one year out is nearly in focus. The further from draft day a prospect is, the wider the error on his projection — but the bar is never hidden from you, just noisier. Watch the same class across seasons and you'll see it firm up year over year as the noise drains out.

A strong Evaluator flattens that curve: good scouts see further with confidence, so their far-out picture is already usable while a weaker department is still guessing. Here's how each lever tightens the picture:

Hiring or firing a scout re-rolls your whole department's read — the bars visibly move the next time you open the screen. Scouts are hired in the same offseason market as your coaches; see Coaches, Scouts & the Organization.

Two stars, one board#

On a prospect's page the read splits in two, and the split matters:

• Projected stars — his ceiling, the fogged number above. This is where a bad department burns you.
• Current stars — his draft-day ability. Present ability is observable, so this read is only lightly

fogged and rarely far wrong.

What your scouts cannot move is the board itself. A prospect's ranking among his classmates, and the projected-pick tier that ranking maps to (Top 5, Mid 1st, Day 2, UDFA and so on), come from the league's public consensus — the same order every GM sees. Scout quality expresses itself purely through how trustworthy your stars are, never through a re-sorted board. And the raw ceiling number is never surfaced before you make the pick. See Player Stats & Ratings for what those underlying numbers mean once he's yours.

College tape, the combine, and interviews#

Each prospect comes with generated history you can dig into from his page, so scouting is never just one number:

• College production — a simulated season stat line for his position, plus an injury history (how often,

how many games missed). Because output carries its own noise, a great prospect can post a quiet year and a sleeper can put up big numbers — the tape is a clue, not a verdict.

• Combine — height, weight, and the drills (40-yard dash, 3-cone, shuttle, bench press, vertical, broad

jump), each ranked against his position, plus a single relative score from 0 to 10. The workout correlates with a player's physical traits but is a separate signal from your scouts' grades, so fast numbers can flatter a raw player and vice versa. Weighing tape against combine against scout grade is the craft.

• Skills grades — his attributes shown as letter grades (A+ down to F) on colored chips. A few chips

read blank when your staff hasn't uncovered that trait yet (things like injury-proneness stay hidden until revealed).

• Interview — his character (greed, loyalty, ambition) and intelligence (personality, football IQ,

work ethic) as HIGH / MED / LOW chips, plus his real college GPA.

That last tab has a setting attached to it, and it changes the whole feel of the draft. By default, character and intelligence are simply readable on every prospect, for free. Turn on the interview setting (below) and they hide behind ?? chips instead, unlocked only by spending from a fixed budget of 10 interviews per draft season. Reveals are permanent and persist even if a prospect re-enters a later class, so the scarcity becomes the mechanic: 10 reveals against a class of hundreds forces you to spend them only on players you're seriously considering. Either way, what you read is exactly how that player will behave as a pro — his character on draft day and his conduct on your roster are the same underlying person, and that conduct is real: see Morale, Health & Your Roster.

Busts and steals#

Under your scouts' private read sits a second, league-wide layer: consensus. Occasionally a prospect is collectively over-hyped — the whole league grades him high, drafts him early, and he develops only to his true (lower) ceiling. That's a bust. Occasionally one is under-rated — he slides down the board, then breaks out. That's a steal.

This is the crucial bit: busts and steals come from the consensus miss, not from your scouts' fog. Every perception path in the game — your read, the public grade, the board order, the AI's board — is centered on consensus rather than truth, so busts and steals exist even if you turned every fog setting off. What a strong Star Spotter buys you is a chance to catch the miss before the pick. That catch is capped on purpose: even a near-perfect Star Spotter still whiffs a meaningful share of the time at the extremes. There is no such thing as a sure thing at the top of a draft.

The fog-of-war settings#

Settings ▸ FOG OF WAR holds five switches, and all of them stay editable for the life of a save.

Scout potential fog is the one that ships on IN GAME — it's the fog this whole page describes, and it also makes the AI clubs draft on their own imperfect reads, which is where gems slip. Turn it off and you see true potential and the AI drafts on true value; the draft gets legible and considerably easier.

The other four are built but ship off NOT YET LIVE — opt in for a harder, more uncertain game:

• Prospect interview fog — hides prospect character and intelligence behind the 10-per-season interview

budget described above, and makes AI clubs draft partly blind to character too, producing their own reaches.

• Own player OVR fog — hides the exact overall of players already on your roster until snaps reveal it.
• Hide rookie OVR until the season — a freshly-drafted rookie's overall reads ?? on his card until the

regular season starts, then reveals at the roll.

• Mood on field — lets a player's mood tilt his on-field performance (more on mood).

Two related dials sit one section up, under GAMEPLAY SETTINGS. Scout accuracy (high / medium / low) is the global fog dial named in the table above — your difficulty seeds it, sharp on Easy and blurry on Hard, and you can move it any time. Drafted player ratings decides whether the draft recap shows every pick's true overall, yours and the AI's alike; it starts hidden on Hard and visible on the easier modes.

Once you've made your picks, see The Draft for how draft day and class shape work, and Player Growth & Aging for how a raw prospect grows into — or falls short of — the ceiling you scouted.

Your roster, in three buckets#

Your franchise carries players in three places: the active roster (the 53 who can play this Sunday), the practice squad (fringe talent you can call up), and injured reserve (hurt players parked to free a slot). Only active players count against your 53-man limit, your team rating, and your game-day lineup.

The practice squad#

Your practice squad is up to 16 players who don't count against your 53 but are yours to develop and promote. It isn't optional and there's no setting for it — all 32 clubs run one, and the league is balanced around that. In-season, when an injury opens a hole, tapping your own squad should usually beat shopping the street — squads are carved from the best willing fringe in the league, and the in-season free-agent pool is deliberately worse than that. Shopping that pool is covered in Free Agency & the Salary Cap. Each squad also has room for up to two deliberate exceptions: young, high-ceiling players (24 or under) allowed to sit above the usual quality band. Those are your development stashes — and poach bait by design.

Who will join. Not everyone accepts a practice-squad deal. It's a fixed one-year, league-minimum contract, and willingness falls off sharply as a player gets better — a fringe starter is roughly a coin flip, and anyone clearly better than that refuses outright. Young players, unproven bodies, and anyone sitting unsigned a while are far more willing. Every offer shows an accept read — LIKELY JOINS, CONVINCIBLE, or HARD SELL — before you commit, and a small salary sweetener can tip a wavering player.

Calling players up. There are two ways onto your active roster:

• Elevate — a game-day call-up. You may elevate up to 2 squad players per game; they join that week's lineup and auto-revert to the squad afterward. Each player can be elevated at most 3 times per season — after that, you must promote him to the 53 or he sits.
• Promote — a permanent move to the active roster. Needs a free 53 slot and cap room.

Poaching and protection. Your squad isn't safe. Any rival with a real hole can poach one of your squad players straight onto their 53 (the guarantee rule then lands on them). Rivals are picky: they check their own squad first, and only reach outside for someone who is both genuinely playable and a clear upgrade on what they already have. To defend your best stashes, every team — you included — protects 4 of its 16 at a time; a protected player cannot be claimed. Your protected set carries forward untouched unless you change it, and a new franchise opens with each team's four most poachable bodies already shielded. So hoarding an unusually high-rated player, unprotected, should feel risky. You can poach too: rival squad players show up in your free-agent view, badged with their current team.

At season's end all practice-squad deals expire to free agency, and squads rebuild after the draft.

Injured reserve#

When a player gets hurt for 2 or more weeks, you can place him on injured reserve. That frees his 53 slot so you can sign or promote a replacement — but his salary still counts against your cap. He's locked away for at least 4 weeks (longer if the injury itself runs longer), then can be activated back onto the active roster when you have a free slot.

The catch is a season budget: you get 8 activations per season. Spend them greedily and you can strand a healthy player on IR with no way back until the offseason. At season's end everyone heals and every designation resets. The AI plays it simply: anything costing more than four weeks goes straight to IR, and shorter injuries get shelved only under real roster pressure.

Depth charts, personnel and rotation#

Your roster is your depth chart. Within each position group a player's vertical order is his role — top receiver is your WR1, next is WR2, and so on. You rank players against others at the same position. This is the single most important lever you have over who plays and who gets the ball, and the sim reads it directly.

It drives the box score. Who touches the ball is weighted by depth-chart slot, blended with scheme fit and rating — not by rating alone. It's a weighting, not a script: defenses, situation and the play-by-play still move the numbers. But naming a player your WR1 genuinely shows up in his stat line. (Slotting a player somewhere he doesn't naturally play is its own trade-off — see Out-of-Position Play.)

And when you disagree with the machine, you can pin. The lineup normally fills itself from the depth chart, but any slot can be pinned to a specific player — the game honors your pin even when it's a worse fit, hands him the slot, and sorts the other ten around him. Unpin and the automatic assignment takes back over.

The roster screen also shows what your scheme actually requires. Each position group carries a required-starters count derived from the looks your scheme really plays, and if injuries leave a group unable to fill its slots you're warned before kickoff — a nudge to promote, sign, or slide a body over before a backup's backup does it for you.

You need more than eleven defenders. The defense changes personnel snap to snap: base, nickel, dime, goal-line. Because those packages call for different bodies, a scheme's real requirement is 12–13 defenders to fill 11 slots, and your lineup screen shows the extras as sub-package slots. Which bodies a package pulls follows real football — a nickel corner in an odd front replaces a safety, not an inside backer, which is why a 3-4 keeps two inside backers on the field for the large majority of its snaps while a 4-3 almost never does. Your scheme decides which packages you live in; see Schemes & Scheme Fit.

Injuries and next-man-up. Players carry stamina that drains as they rack up snaps and recovers on the bench, so a fresh backup can out-snap a gassed starter late in a half, and blowouts let you rest starters. When a starter goes down mid-game, the next player at that slot steps in for the rest of it. If a group is completely empty, the game borrows the nearest sensible body rather than fielding ten men — a missing linebacker is covered by a safety, then an edge defender; a missing tackle by a guard — but a borrowed body plays like what he is, not what you needed.

What your players want#

Every player carries a hidden mood, surfaced as a three-state chip: Happy, Content, or Unhappy. It's built from seven things — team success, his usage, his contract, his loyalty, roster churn around him, his coaching, and his prestige — each weighted by his personality. Every player has a primary trait plus a secondary one at half strength, drawn from four: Winner (a title matters far more than a paycheck), Fame (spotlight and usage), Money, and Loyal. A Winner on a losing team and a Money player on a below-market deal are unhappy for completely different reasons.

Mood is not just flavor — it feeds his contract asks and, if it curdles, real trouble. A discontented player escalates through four states: content, privately disgruntled, a public trade request, and at the sharp end a holdout. Three situations open the door:

Once a gripe opens, its intensity climbs each week the cause goes unfixed and falls faster once you fix it. Winners and ambitious players simmer up quicker; loyal ones far slower. Public drama is deliberately scarce: your club runs at most one active saga at a time and starts at most two per season — everyone else who crosses the line stays privately disgruntled, still costing you at the negotiating table but never making news.

If it reaches a renegotiation demand you have three answers: pay him, promise to revisit it (which halves the pressure but doesn't clear it), or ignore it. An unresolved trade request also puts him on the trade block and makes him a target as the deadline nears. The dollars side of these demands is in Free Agency & the Salary Cap; the rhythm of the season they ride is in How a Season Works.

How far it can go is a difficulty question. On Easy and Medium the ladder stops at the public trade request — the modern hold-in, where he shows up, plays, and is loudly unhappy. Only Hard lets a player actually sit out, and Custom lets you set that ceiling wherever you want. A player who does sit is unavailable, is fined a slice of his salary each week (credited back to your cap), and gives in well before the season is out if nothing resolves.

The whole morale economy is also a switch. PLAYER MOODS under Settings ▸ Difficulty turns it off entirely — no mood shown anywhere, no effect on any decision — and it starts off on Easy. Holdouts and season goals hang beneath it as children: with moods off, neither one runs. Turning moods back on simply resumes; nothing was rewritten while it was off.

Season goals IN GAME#

On Hard, a handful of your players start each season with up to three goals of their own — a personal one ("rush for 1,150 yards", "lead my position group in snaps"), a team one ("reach the playoffs"), or a contract one. They're on the GROWTH tab of the player card, with live progress as the season runs, and they resolve when the year does. Hitting them lifts his mood; missing them drags it, weighted by what he cares about — a Winner feels a missed playoff berth, a Money player feels a missed contract goal.

They're a pressure system, so Easy and Medium leave them off, and you can switch them either way at any time under Settings ▸ Difficulty — they sit under PLAYER MOODS, so they need moods on to do anything. One thing to know: goals are handed out when a season begins, so turning them on mid-season won't give anyone goals until the next one starts. Turning them off hides them everywhere and stops them touching mood at all.

Two more pieces stay off unless you ask for them: mood affecting on-field play is an opt-in setting, and league-wide sagas — the same drama on all 32 rosters instead of just yours — are built but not switched on. NOT YET LIVE

Your seven-person staff#

Every team employs the same seven-role staff. Each staffer is a rated person with his own skills, style and contract — and each role touches a different part of your franchise:

Each coach's own styles are printed on his staff profile — the same rows for a candidate in the market as for the man you employ — so you can read the system a hire brings before you sign him. Coaches also carry a merged overall of their own, rolled up from their coaching skills the same way a player's OVR rolls up from his attributes, so the market can rank a head-coach candidate the way it ranks a free-agent tackle.

What coaching actually moves on the field#

Coaching is not flavor text: each skill feeds a specific on-field channel, and the full spread is big — the same roster wins meaningfully more games under an elite coach than a terrible one, worth real wins across a season. Most clubs employ coaches near the league middle, where the effect is modest by design: an average coach is neutral, and it's the genuinely great or genuinely bad staff that moves your season. Coaching never outweighs the roster.

What your team doctor is worth#

He is the one staffer who never touches a snap and still decides how much of your roster you get to play. Three ratings, all real:

The spread is wide on purpose. The best medical staff in the league sees roughly half as many injuries as the worst, and gets hurt players back meaningfully sooner. A doctor near the league average is neutral — he neither helps nor hurts — so the ones that matter are the genuinely great and the genuinely awful.

Two things follow from that. A cheap doctor is a real cost, not a saving: you pay for him in snaps your best players don't take. And Re-Injury Protection compounds quietly — a bad medical staff turns one serious knee injury into a player who keeps breaking down for the rest of his career, because a severe injury permanently raises how fragile he is and good aftercare blunts that.

Two things worth knowing as a GM. A head coach's playcalling trait is a real probability model — an Aggressive coach genuinely goes for fourth downs far more often than a Cautious one, not just in flavor. And coaching compounds: a good staff also nudges your young players' development year over year, which is how a well-coached franchise slowly out-grows an equally talented, badly coached one. The effect per season is modest and capped; the dynasty is built by keeping it running.

Hiring, firing, and the offseason carousel#

Staff contracts run down just like player deals, and the offseason has a staff phase: openings around the league fill from a market of free-agent coaches and scouts, and you shop the same pool. Candidates weigh your appeal — money on offer, the quality of your situation — so a losing club paying bottom dollar sees the good names sign elsewhere.

Three things to check before you hire:

1. Scheme first. A coordinator brings his system with him and your roster refits slowly — hiring a Vertical coordinator onto a Ground & Pound roster costs you seasons of scheme fit. The Coaches Aligned check tells you whether head coach and coordinators agree.
2. The skills that pay. Pass defense and motivation carry the most measured wins; play design speeds scheme learning after any system change.
3. Scouts are a stealth pick. Your two scouts are your draft board — see below.

Scouts: the quality of what you know#

Draft scouting runs through your two scouts — the offensive scout reads offensive prospects, the defensive scout reads defensive ones. A better scout means a tighter, less-biased projection on every prospect on his side of the ball; a weak one means wider misses in both directions. Hiring or firing a scout re-rolls your whole department's read on the class, which makes a scout upgrade one of the highest-leverage winter moves a rebuilding team can make.

The organization underneath IN GAME#

Beneath the people you hire, every AI franchise carries a hidden organizational profile — a quality of the building itself. It tilts how that front office behaves: some organizations systematically overpay, some chase big names, some run a scout-first culture that drafts better than it signs. Ownership changes and regime resets shift these eras over time, and the league's news feed surfaces the stories they create — the perennially dysfunctional club shopping every star, the quiet franchise that never misses in April.

You'll feel it as texture in every market: the same contract ask gets different answers from different buildings, and some teams stay good (or bad) for structural reasons, not luck.

Reading your staff as a system#

The staff screen is worth a season-start audit: a head coach whose style matches his coordinator's scheme adds a small fit bonus to every preferred-archetype player; a coordinator in a contract year is a scheme change waiting to happen; and a bottom-quartile scout is quietly costing you a round of draft accuracy. The staff is a small roster — run it like one.

The one page that isn't finished yet IN DEVELOPMENT#

Everything else in this guide describes a game you can play today. This page is different: it's the on-field future we're building, and it isn't in the shipping game yet. Read it as a promise, not a feature list.

Right now, when you watch a game, you experience it as a live feed of events — a stat viewer ticking through completions, sacks, and touchdowns while you control the sim speed. That experience is real and it's live; it's covered under the season and game flow. The Film Room adds a whole new layer on top of it: a top-down field where all 22 players actually move — the receiver running his route, the corner trailing him, the pocket collapsing, the back finding the hole. It exists today as a working lab you can't reach from the shipping game.

The single most important thing to understand about the Film Room is how it relates to the game you already play. It does not re-decide anything. The result comes first, from the same engine that runs every other game in the league. Then the film is drawn to match it.

The result comes first, then the film draws it#

Think of it as two jobs done in order, never mixed:

1. The engine decides. The same play resolver that simulates all 272 games a

season — the one that turns ratings into contests — produces the outcome: run or pass, who caught it, how many yards, whether it was a sack or a pick, the whole box score. This is the source of truth, and it's exactly what already happens today when you watch the stat feed.

1. The film choreographs. Given that finished outcome, the visualization layer

arranges 22 players moving on the field so that what you watch lands on the result the engine already decided. An 18-yard completion gets a believable route-and-catch that adds up to 18. A sack gets a rusher arriving free before the throw.

This ordering is deliberate and load-bearing. Because the picture is drawn after the decision, nothing you see on the field can ever change a number. Improving the animation, adding better routes, making the defense look sharper — none of it can move a stat line or tip the league's balance. The film is downstream of the truth, always.

One honest caveat comes with this design: because the engine decides the result but not the exact play concept, the film shows a believable version of the play, not the one true play that "really" happened — there was never one true play to begin with. An 18-yard gain might be drawn as a dig route one time and a crossing route another, both landing on 18. For a GM game, that's the right trade: your league stays perfectly balanced, and you still get something real to watch.

That freedom is used deliberately. For every play the lab drafts several candidate takes, scores each one for believability — penalising a defender chasing the wrong way, a ball carrier who stalls, bodies sliding through each other, players standing dead — and shows you the best of them. Anything that fails a hard check (a player asked to reach a spot faster than his legs allow, a step out of bounds, a beat out of order) is thrown away rather than shown. In the lab there's a "new take" button that re-dramatizes the same result a different way; the box score never budges.

What the film shows#

The visualization is built from the roles the engine already tracks — it knows the passer, the target, the ball carrier, who got the sack, who made the tackle, how the yards split between the throw and the run after the catch, how long the pocket held, and which eleven each side had on the field. Your scheme shows up in all of it. From those facts the film stages the full picture:

Every one of those movements is a player steered by his own ratings — speed sets his top gear, burst his acceleration, agility his cuts — so a faster, more explosive player visibly plays like one. Timing is held to real football, too: the ball comes out and the pocket breaks on the clock the real league runs on, and every test film is graded against those windows.

Two rules keep the picture honest. Anything the engine actually credited — the catch point at the credited air yards, the spot where the tackle happened — is locked and can never be nudged to make the animation easier. And nobody is asked to cover ground he physically can't: no teleporting to the ball, no catch-and-freeze.

The longer vision — calling your own plays IN DEVELOPMENT#

The Film Room is the first step toward the biggest feature on the horizon: a mode where you call the plays.

Today your strategic input is the weekly gameplan — a tilt across the whole game — and the individual play calls are made for you, hidden. The next stage lets you choose the offensive and defensive call before each snap. Crucially, you'd still never control individual players with a joystick; you're the coach making the call, not the athlete making the move. Your play call becomes one more input the engine weighs, riding the same tested machinery your gameplan already uses, so it shifts your odds without ever breaking balance.

Beyond that sits the play designer — authoring your own formations and routes, building a personal playbook, and having the sim genuinely respect what you drew. That's the largest single piece of work in the whole project, and it's sequenced last, on purpose, after everything underneath it is proven.

Where development actually stands#

Here's the honest state of things. The core idea has moved from concept to a working lab, but it is not in the shipping game and there's real work left.

What already works. The engine-decides-then-film-draws pipeline runs end to end: simulate a real game, watch any play in the play-by-play list as 22 moving players, with the movement guaranteed to land on the box score. Every scrimmage snap films — dropback passes, play-action, screens, run-pass options, the full run concept vocabulary, turnover returns — with special teams the one family still getting its full motion. Man and zone coverage are both built, including pattern-matching rules and pre-snap motion. A standing guard checks continuously that none of it can move a balance number, and a large library of frozen test plays is re-graded on every change so a fix in one place can't quietly make another play worse.

What remains. The path forward was just settled: rather than keep patching the lab's aging drawing machinery, the visualization engine is being rebuilt from the ground up — keeping the validated motion model (players accelerate, cut and chase like real athletes) while replacing the tangle underneath with a clean pipeline designed to run on your phone. Individual concepts still get tuned play by play against film review, and the finished engine still has to be wired into the game you play before this becomes a feature rather than a promise. None of that changes what this page says — it's all downstream work on the drawing, never on the decision.

The short version#

Franchise GM: Football collects nothing about you. There is no account, no login, no telemetry, no analytics, no ads, and no third-party trackers. The game runs entirely on your device and never phones home. This Field Guide website is the same: static pages that report nothing about who reads them.

That is the whole policy. The rest of this page just spells out what "nothing" means, and is honest about the single, optional moment the app can touch the network — one you start yourself.

What the game collects#

Nothing leaves your device, because the game was built on-device only from day one. It plays fully offline — put your phone in airplane mode and everything works exactly the same.

Your franchise, your saves, your settings, your GM career record — all of it is stored locally on your device and nowhere else. No copy is kept anywhere online, because there is nowhere online to keep it.

The one time the app uses the network#

There is exactly one moment the app can make a network request, and it only happens if you ask for it.

When you start a new game, you can optionally import a custom teams file from a web address you type in yourself — typically a link to a file you host on GitHub. If you use that option, the app fetches that one file over a secure (HTTPS) connection from the address you provided, checks that it is valid, and loads it. That is a one-time setup download of a configuration file you chose and pointed the app at — not ongoing online play, and not something that happens on its own.

Even then, the request only goes out to fetch a file. Nothing about you is sent, attached, or stored remotely: no identifier, no usage data, no phone-home. It is an ordinary file download to the address you named, and if you never use the import option the app itself never makes a network request at all.

There is one other outbound thing worth naming, though it isn't the app going online: the community link on the save-select screen hands a web address to your phone's own browser and steps out of the way. The game doesn't open a browser inside itself, doesn't read anything back, and sends nothing along with it — it is the same as you typing the address in yourself.

No analytics, advertising, attribution or crash-reporting library is bundled in the app at all, so there is no component that could start reporting on you.

This Field Guide website#

The guide you are reading right now is a set of static pages. It runs no analytics, sets no cookies, loads no tracking pixels, and measures nothing about its readers. Nothing about who opens it, what they read, or how long they stay is captured or reported anywhere.

There is nothing to opt out of, because there is nothing collecting anything in the first place. The only thing the page remembers is your light/dark theme choice, kept in your own browser purely so the page looks the way you left it — never sent anywhere and visible to no one but you.

Your data, and your rights over it#

Most privacy pages end with how to request, correct, export, or delete your data. Here there is nothing to request, correct, export, or delete — none of it is ever collected, so none of it exists to hand over or erase.

• Nothing to access. There is no profile or record of you anywhere to see.
• Nothing to delete online. Nothing about you is stored on any server. To clear your local game data, remove the app, which takes its saves with it.
• Nothing shared or sold. No data is collected, so none is ever shared with or sold to anyone.

If you want to walk through the game itself from here, start with How a Season Works.