Fixing the Top 25
Every game, even the best ones, have issues. NCAA 07 is no different. One of my beefs with the game is that seemingly every year you’ll get at least three undefeated teams with a lot of 1-loss teams making up the top 20. If you lose 2 games in NCAA 07, you can pretty much kiss your top 10 chances good-bye. I once had 6 teams finish 12-0. I really was perplexed as to how that was happening until I started to look at the schedules once you get past the initial season.
Oklahoma Vs. Cornell
Ohio State Vs. Elon
USC one year had Dartmouth, Fla Atlantic, and Wyoming as their OOC games.
This seems to be the culprit. There are quite a few top 20 teams with C+/B- rated schedules which obviously makes it very easy to waltz through the season with 0 or 1 loss.
The high number of cupcake games also has an impact on stats, which may be why we see so many 7+ YPC backs as well as QBs with 47 TDs.
There is a workaround for this, though. I guess it all depends on how much you care about it. It bugs me personally just enough to do this at the start of each season, though.
I add a human coach for the top 11 programs in the nation (you can have 12 human controlled teams in the game). At the start of the year, manually make sure that each of these teams play at least an A- rated schedule. While you can only control these 12 schedules, (including your own) by forcing more top 25 or 30 programs to play each other you are altering the landscape of a lot more than just those 12 teams. Make sure you don’t let a top 25 team slip under the radar with a C rated schedule, though. This takes all of about 10 extra minutes at the start of each season, so it’s not a big time killer and it can go a long way to making the top 25 at season’s end look more like real college football.
After I started doing this, I simmed a season and had two undefeated teams, four 1-loss teams, three 2-loss teams, and then the rest of the top 25 was peppered with 3 and 4-loss teams with a small school like Rice finishing 10-2 and ranked around #25.
Works for me.
July 23rd, 2006 at 2:12 pm
Bill, that deifnitely sounds like a workable idea. However, what do you do after the season starts and you dont want to control those other 11 teams anymore, how do you switch them back to computer control? And can you switch is back to human control at the start of the next season?
July 23rd, 2006 at 9:27 pm
Once the season starts and the schedules are set you can just resign from those positions to turn the teams back over to the CPU. You may need to fully delete those coaches though and make 11 new ones the following year, though. Once a coach reswigns I dont think he can go back to that team.
July 24th, 2006 at 12:54 pm
Man, is it just me or is that a lot of work to do so things turn out the way they should? I mentioned my simming “irregularities” on the podcast that I do, it would have been wrong not to, but gave it an overall thumbs kinda sideways. Overall I’m still playing it so that’s a good sign.