In no way am I directing 'bad teams' to anyone in particular, I myself have been on the reverse of this during an *** kicking.

I've noticed that rarely do we see 'blow-out' games, I mean basketball scores to zip, which is a good thing for the best part, no one wants to be beaten in such a way and I think for the best part it would be detrimental to the game.
But... I've just played a game and in the first half, they didn't get ONE first down and were held to just 25 yards. The game turned when it looked like my team were going to annihilate the other team.
The second half was like facing an almost different team, that could now move the move both on the ground and through the air, granted not that well but compared to the first 2 qtrs...wth?

This is the game in question - http://cust10.myfootballnow.com/watch/425#81162

This isn't the first game I have had this thought after witnessing what seem like melt-downs from winning teams.

So....does the sim put a penalty on teams that are overly dominant early on in a game to keep it close ?

I am not convinced it does ... I lost 52-7 in the divisional round. lol

But on the other side of the coin we had a team in our league that I believe ended up with 2 or 3 wins (and I don't think the owner had logged in since January) and beat one of the power teams. So it can happen.

I'd be curious to know also!

There is a very minor decrease in intensity when a team is up by more than 3 touchdowns, but as soon as the losing team closes the gap to 3 touchdowns that immediately turns back off. This is only there to prevent college-type blowouts, which rarely happen in the NFL and still happen here but with limited frequency. There are a few other factors that might be coming into play:

* The crowd noise could come into play - if the home team is getting blown out and then starts to come back, the crowd may get back into the game. Conversely, if the home team is blowing out the visiting team some of that could be from the crowd noise, which will die down as the game becomes less exciting.

* Sometimes there does seem to be a momentum with the dice rolls - this is not simulated, in fact I was going to add this to the simulation but was surprised to find that it seemed to happen naturally somehow. If you have a first half where all the dice rolls go in favor of one team, that may not stay in their favor in the second half.

* When a team goes into hurry up mode, they start to throw more. This is a more effective offense than running (higher risk, higher reward). Note that the more you throw, the higher the risk, which is in the engine to prevent you from willingly having an unbalanced arial attack, but if the team who is behind hasn't been throwing a lot their QB will be relatively fresh and may have some level of improved success.

To parsh's comment, there is no "trap game" simulation, again something I considered but seems to happen naturally. Ultimately, the difference between most starters in any league is not terribly significant, so unless you have a team of all scrubs you should have a fighting chance on "any given Sunday," as it were.

Thanks for the explanation, it goes some ways as to my understanding.

But I still don't know why (as in the case of my last game (above) ) all of a sudden we started throwing deep passes that were easily picked off when we were so far ahead..?

I traded for my QB right before the first game and as such game-planned our first game to be a huge rushing game, because I feared that he would not have known the PB well enough. Would I be right in assuming that this may still be the case?

Your play calling will not change from what is in your game plan; if you have a run-heavy game plan but throw lots of long passes, some causes could be:

* Bad dice rolls - even if the probability of a long pass is 1%, it is not impossible for a 1% probability to succeed multiple times in a row.

* Game plan adjustment - if you have long pass plays on "medium" or "long" settings, it is possible that because you are running a lot that your "short" play distance is shrinking, especially if your game plan adjustment speed is high at all. If you have that set to more than 5, I would suggest reducing it to 5 (or even less).

Right, I see. I don't think there could ever be a 'perfect' game plan then.
Cheers JD

well if you made your adjustment speed 0 it would not change no matter how successful / unsuccessful your team is.

(different team, same outcome)
This 'roll of the dice' chance seems to be getting repetitive.
Once again, we dominate and hold a team to ZERO 1st downs, and once again we turn the ball over via INT which fundamentally lets them back into the game....The similarities between these 2 games is extraordinary ...
http://cust10.myfootballnow.com/watch/425#81162

i looked into the games code.

at line 23457 there is a line which says something like....

IF 'Gustoon' IS 'owner' THEN MAKE 'Gustoon' LOSE in the most painful way possible lmao.

How did you get a hold of the source code? I need to double-check my firewall.