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.

Football Mogul 19 will launch on Tuesday, September 4th, 2018.

New Player Database
After some complaints about player ratings and roster accuracy last year, we've rebuilt our database from scratch for Football Mogul 19:

• More than 18,000 NFL players.
• Double-checked rosters for every team since the AFL-NFL merger.
• New ratings for every player from 1970-2018.

We also borrowed some code from Baseball Mogul to eliminate database errors caused by two different players with the same name.

Interface Improvements
The "Sortable Stats", "Find Players", "Free Agents" and "College Draft" screens are now customizable -- with each screen individually tracking the stats you selected to view and sort by in your previous visit.

Improved Player Positions
Football Mogul 19 includes 28 additional position designations ranging from "Slot Receiver" and "Outside Linebacker" to ""Return Specialist" and "Special Teams Specialist". These designations were used by the game engine in Football Mogul 18, but couldn't be viewed in the Scouting Report. For Football Mogul 19, these "expanded positions" can now be viewed in the team screens, Scouting Reports and Player Editor.

    More info coming soon...

Football Mogul 19 will launch on Tuesday, September 4th — two days before the start of the NFL season. I'll be posting more info about Football Mogul over the next two weeks. But if you've ever wondered why videogames launch on Tuesdays, you can thank Sonic the Hedgehog.

Back before I was writing computer games for a living, there were two anthropomorphic animals named Sonic and Tails. And when two anthopomorphic animals love each other very much, they make a videogame. Sonic the Hedgehog launched in 1991 on the new Sega Genesis (and it was awesome!). But in 1992, Sega was still getting its butt kicked by Nintendo. So the geniuses at Sega invented "Sonic 2sday" in order to build buzz around Sonic The Hedgehog: 2.

However, there were also some improvements in functionality. For example, "Expiring Contracts" is now a clickable button that populates the Sortable Stats Dialog with a complete list of players in the last year of their contract -- with a new "Eligibility" column showing each player's contract status at the end of the current season:

A new study calculates that Bitcoin is on pace to use about as much electricity as the Netherlands before the end of this year.

However, the media is generally ignoring the huge cost of Bitcoin beyond electricity. It took me about two months to figure out that my computer was being crippled by Bitcoin malware on our own bulletin board system.

After I had done every virus test and hardware diagnostic I could think of, I was beginning to think I needed to buy a new PC. But then I noticed that my system only slowed to a crawl when I had a browser window open to our forums. Once I isolated the problem, some googling revealed that vBulletin is one of many systems vulnerable to Bitcoin miners. I found the offending code within a couple of hours and removed it. As of a few weeks ago, there was no permanent solution other than continued vigilance.

I told our users about this hack and apologized that our system may have been causing their systems to slow down, but it seems that no one had noticed. Over eight thousand forum members and yet no one contacted me to suggest that our site was responsible for paralyzing their computers. This isn't a surprice when you consider that most users have 10+ browser tabs open at a time.

So, in addition to ruining the planet, you can probably add in several billion hours of lost productivity, all being taken illegally by criminals (as opposed to billions of hours lost perfectly legally to something like Baseball Mogul).