Football Mogul's New Player Database

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.