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Sports   Mogul   blog

What's Up With Punt Distances?

9/22/2023

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As part of an effort to improve the realism of historical replays in Football Mogul, I recently calculated the average punt distance for the last 72 seasons:
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There is a general upward trend, which I think can be explained by improvements in technique and training (similar to the improvements we've seen by field goal kickers). But there are a couple things that I can't explain:
  1. A sharp but temporary increase from 1959-1965. The average punt during these 7 seasons was 42.6 yards, about two yards per punt higher than the previous 7 seasons. It then dropped sharply in 1966, dipping below 40 for most of the 1970s.
  2. A drop from 43.4 to 41.9 between the 1998 and 1999 seasons. It took almost a decade for the average punt length to get back to the level it was at in 1998.​
I can't think of any rules changes or shifts in strategy that would cause these changes. If you have any theories, let me know on Facebook or by commenting here.
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Football Mogul's New Simulation Engine

9/15/2023

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Football Mogul 24 has a "new simulation engine" with "normalized player ratings for true-to-life depiction of historical eras". But what do these words mean?

​Well ... it means I found some flaws in the way the game simulated historical seasons, so I rewrote a lot of the code to produce more realistic results. The best way to see the changes is to look at the numbers.
On the right are:
  1. Stats from a simulation of the 1965 season using Football Mogul 23.
  2. Actual totals from the 1965 NFL season.
  3. Stats from a simulation of the 1965 season using Football Mogul 24.
Below that are the same stats for the 1995 season. In both examples, the offensive and defensive stats are more realistic, and I was even able to improve field goal accuracy rates to better match historical results.

I achieved these improvements by creating a "baseline" performance level at each position for each season. Then I use player ratings to adjust a player's performance up or down from those levels.
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So, an average QB in 1995 will have a completion percentage a few points higher than an average QB in 1965. It also means that if you moved Troy Aikman from 1995 to 1965, his completion percentage will probably drop.

Update: The day after I wrote this, two people emailed to ask how I calculated the league averages shown in the tables above. As you may have guessed, I used Football Mogul. For the first six rows, I went to the Standings Page and clicked on the column headers to select these stats. League averages can be seen along the bottom (see screenshot).
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Standings Page
The last three (FG%, Rush TDs and Pass TDs) aren't shown on the Standings Page. But they were easy to find with a cool little feature I added this year:
First, go to Sortable Stats and select "All Active Players", "This Season" and "All Positions". And this is where the new feature comes in: click on the column header for any counting stat like Field Goal Attempts or Pass TDs. The text in the upper right will update to show the total of all entries in that column.
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Sortable Stats
This screen doesn't calculate the league-wide FG%, but it was easy for me to type the totals into a calculator to get the league's overall field goal success rate.
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Setting Injury Frequency in Baseball Mogul

7/12/2023

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Today's email question:
Is there any way to control how often players get injured in Baseball Mogul?
Answer:
Yes! The League Settings Dialog (on the League Menu) has a few ways to control the length of injuries in the game:

Injury Frequency
Sets the frequency of injuries from -100% (no injuries) to +100% (twice as many injuries).

Injury Severity
Sets the average severity of each injury from -100% (no injuries) to +100% (longer-lasting and more damaging injuries).

Medical Staff Impact
This adjusts the impact that a team's Medical Staff ranking has on the injury frequency of their players. On the default setting ("+0%") the team with the best Medical Staff in the league will experience about 25% fewer injuries than the worst team in the league suffers.
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You can eliminate injuries completely by setting Injury Frequency to "-100%"
With this set to "+100%", this gap widens to about 50%. (These figures are averages — it's still possible for a team with the highest Medical Staff spending to experience a high number of injuries.)
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Baseball Mogul 2023: New League Builder

3/31/2023

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Baseball Mogul has a very cool feature called the League Builder. It lets you quickly fill a league with historical teams. You pick just two teams, or as many as thirty. You can add World Champions like the 1927 Yankees or 2016 Cubs. Or fill it with cellar-dwellars like the 1962 Mets. It's up to you.
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The problem is that previous versions of the League Builder had problems:

1) It was impossible to have two copies of the same player in the league. For example, Reggie Jackson won the AL MVP with the 1973 Oakland A's. He also helped lead the 1978 Yankees to their 22nd World Championship. But if you added both teams in the League Builder, Reggie would only appear on one of them.

2) Even when there weren't direct conflicts, many of the player ratings were inaccurate because of the way Baseball Mogul tried to combine players from different eras in the same league.​
Baseball Mogul 2023
For Baseball Mogul 2023, I rewrote the League Builder to eliminate the above problems. And I precalculated player ratings for every historical team to prevent the distortion that occurred in previous versions. This also makes the League Builder code much faster, because you don't have to wait while Baseball Mogul calculates the ratings for every player.

To use the League Builder in Baseball Mogul:

1) Start a New Game.
2) Click the 'CUSTOM' button.
​3) Click the 'League Builder'.
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Baseball Mogul 2023: Historical Schedules

3/29/2023

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Thanks to the volunteers at Retrosheet, Baseball Mogul now includes the correct league schedules for every season from 1901 through 2023. (These are the full pre-season schedules for every team, and don't include in-season changes caused by weather etc.)
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The schedules are stored as text files so that they can be viewed or edited if necessary. The schedule for the current season is stored in a file called "162-U-555-555-I-2023.txt" in the 'Schedules' sub-folder of the 'Input' folder (e.g. "C:/Sports Mogul/Baseball Mogul 2023/Input/Schedules"). Historical schedule files are located in the "Retrosheet" subfolder.

Baseball Mogul includes the full 162-game schedule for the 2020 season, and will use this by default when you play the 2020 season. If you would prefer to replay the COVID-shortened 2020 season:

1) Start Baseball Mogul.
2) Click 'Resume Game'.
3) Select "60-Game Season (2020)".
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Double Headers
The addition of historical schedules required changes to the interface to support double-headers. For days in the future, the Calendar Page now lets you select whether you wish to play one or both games in Play-By-Play Mode. For games that have already been played, the scores for both games are shown:
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