Good Afternoon,

This post is a reminder that Baseball Mogul and Football Mogul are free for all active members of the U.S. military – as designated by a valid ".mil" e-mail address. This has been true for more than a decade, but I’m not very good at publicizing it. Please help spread the word.

To download either game, service members can "purchase" one or both games from www.sportsmogul.com. During checkout:

1. Click ‘Add a coupon code’
2. Enter ‘MILITARY’
3. Click ‘Apply’.

This will reduce the price for all downloads by 100%. Download links will be sent to the ".mil" address entered during purchase.

Sincerely,

Clay Dreslough, President
Sports Mogul Inc.
cjd@sportsmogul.com

Some Football Mogul users are encountering problems trying to install the game on a computer with McAfee anti-virus software running. After fighting with them for 3+ months, it's clear that McAfee has a bug that they are unwilling to fix. If you need proof that Football Mogul is safe, you can right click on FB19.exe and choose 'Scan' (with the red McAfee icon) and McAfee will tell you the program has no viruses.

However, whenever you run FB19.exe, McAfee deletes it. :(

To replace the one file that McAfee keeps deleting, you can get it here (to avoid reinstalling the entire game):

http://files.sportsmogul.com/FB19.exe

Copy this file to c:/Sports Mogul/Football Mogul 19/ (or wherever you installed the game).

Then you'll have to exclude FB19.exe from McAfee's Real-Time Scanning:
1.    Run the McAfee program. 
2.    Click Settings (the circular gear cog) at the top right. 
3.    Click Real-Time Scanning. 
4.    Click Excluded Files. 
5.    Click Add File. 
6.    Navigate to the location of FB19.exe (e.g. C:\Sports Mogul\Football Mogul 19)
7.    Click 'FB19.exe' and click the 'Open' button.
8.    Close McAfee and run Football Mogul 19.

I hope this finally resolves your problem. If not, you probably have a few choices:

1) Go back into McAfee Real-Time Scanning and turn off the entire feature.
2) Contact McAfee product support for help.
3) Uninstall McAfee.

As I said above, and I cannot stress this strongly enough as a small business owner who has been developing virus-free software for more than 20 years, this is McAfee's problem, not ours -- and I've talked with other developers that are frustrated by the same bug. We could use your help stressing to them that this bug is causing serious headache for their users (some of whom have already told me that they simply uninstalled McAfee once they realized that it was constantly deleting a program that McAfee itself verified was virus-free).

Thanks!

Clay

Short version: Previous versions of Football Mogul would cause top players (and top draft picks) to tank in the off-season at an alarming rate. This effect has been reduced by about 85% in Football Mogul 19, making the game both more realistic and less frustrating.

Long version: Both Baseball Mogul and Football Mogul include code that models the real-world phenomenon generally refered to as regression to the mean: if a player puts up incredible numbers in one season, he is extremely likely to post a performance in the following season that is closer to the league average (aka "the mean"). One example: the #1 wide receiver (in terms of fantasy points) will lose, on average, more than 30% of their value in the following season.

Some of this comes down to luck: bad weather, lucky bounces, missed tackles. But regression to the mean also occurs at the underlying level of raw ability. The league MVP is more likely to get worse than to get better, and this applies to a lesser extent to all superstar players. 

However ... I'm writing this post to admit that I made a mistake when implementing this phenomenon in previous versions of Football Mogul, and that I was finally able to fix it for Football Mogul 19. (FYI: it was a simple math error/typo that I didn't notice until I stepped through the code and realized that it wasn't performing the calculation I'd described in the comments).

You don't have to take my word for it. This year's demo version lets you access "Commissioner Mode" so you can see how player ratings progress in the off-season. And if you see results that you still find unrealistic, please let me know. I appreciate constructive feedback and take seriously any suggestions or criticism backed up by data and a logical argument.

Thanks for reading!

​Clay

We received the following post from a frustrated Football Mogul player this week:

I understand his frustration. Compared to baseball, football players are notoriously difficult to evaluate because there aren't enough stats. EA has a full-time expert dedicated to the job, and that's just for the current season's players.

I've been working for years on a new method to rate historical players, and I finally got it working for Football Mogul 19. In a nutshell, team performance is divided among the players on offense or defense for any given game, not unlike the work done in this paper.

In previous versions of Football Mogul, Deion's Pass Coverage rating in 1996 would be brought down by the fact that he had only 2 interceptions in a full 16 starts. However, he accrued these starts with the '96 Cowboys – one of the best defensive teams in the league. Thanks to the magic of computers, I wrote code that loops back to evaluate Sanders according to a combination of his stats (such an INTs in other seasons) and the defensive success of the teams he played on, then folding the player ratings into the evaluation of each team and so on – until the ratings stabilize. In the final database, I ran this loop overnight (more than a thousand times) until every rating was stable within 0.06 points. 

Anyway, I'm attaching Deion's 1995 Scouting Report from the Football Mogul 19 beta. I think it's a LOT better than last year's version, and I'm really excited about these new historical seasons.