10-16-2022, 07:23 PM
(This post was last modified: 10-16-2022, 08:24 PM by shadyshoelace. Edited 1 time in total.)
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4. “Sim gonna sim”
As everyone who is and ever has been a part of this league is aware, our experience as players and general managers is largely a function of the random whims of the Draft Day Sports Pro Football sim, which has some quirks (to put it mildly). While users spend a great deal of time earning TPE and finding the optimal way to apply it to maximize their chances of success and GMs do the same for lineups and strategies, at the end of the day the on-field results often don't match up with what people expect or believe should occur. It's not always clear whether this is a feature or a bug; on some level, football is an extremely random game where a wrong bounce can completely alter the course of a game, season, or franchise, and reflecting that unpredictability in the sim has its merits. On the other hand, it can be demoralizing to see your hard real-life work result in little success in the sim itself.
I think that people often get a bit too wrapped up in the box score and play by play of games, despite it not being clear (to me, a computer dummy at least) that the outcome of each play is determined independently in succession rather than the game deciding how a game will proceed and then filling in plays accordingly. When I was a GM, testing a matchup hundreds of times could give you a reasonably fair (on hesitate to say good) idea of how your team stacked up to the opposition in terms of win percentage, but the actual points scored in test games rarely seemed to have much rhyme or reason. However, it's really easy to fixate on that strange punt decision, nonsensical third down spike call, or pass short of the sticks during an attempted comeback.
I say all this in service of discussing one of the crazier "sim gonna sim" moments of my league life, the Baltimore Hawks win over the Orange County Otters in the season 33 Ultimus Bowl game. The Otters, coming into the game as the road team and underdog after a 9-7 season compared to 11-5 for Baltimore, jumped out to a shocking (to me) 24-0 lead. It looked like they had backed Baltimore into a corner that would force them to press and play more mistake-prone football in hopes of catching up. However, the sim had other ideas. Baltimore put together two consecutive touchdown drives to cut the deficit to ten at the half, but the Orange County faithful still felt like the game was well in hand. After extending the lead several times and ultimately carrying a 14 point lead with under ten minutes left to play, it looked like the Hawks luck had run out and they'd likely go home empty handed. Then, the sim decided to sim to the nth degree and turn Tron Carter, the Otters quarterback, into a JUGS machine on speed, launching balls left and right with no semblance of accuracy. Nursing a seven point lead with four minutes to play, Carter went 1 for 7 for four yards and an interception, with the pick and a subsequent three and out leading to a Hawks tying touchdown and go-ahead field goal.
It was a brutal way to go out, and I've been told there were actually behind the scenes conversations about whether or not games that play out in such a heartbreaking fashion should be re-simmed in a way that holds the same final result, but spares the losing team from having the pain of being on the wrong end of seemingly random and problematic sim decisions. In my experience, this of ultimately a bad idea and the league benefits from the lore and narratives created by the sim, as infuriating as it may be in the moment.