Full Disclosure

This is not a perfect sim - as I mentioned in the home page, I wasn't exactly a deist entity when it came to meddling with the seasons and their storylines. The vast majority of the names, ratings, stats, standings, scores, and transactions within the NFA are all directly taken from the automated output of a Madden simulation. But I didn't hesitate to change some things around if I saw fit.

For example, in my particular sim, the luck of the draw gave me roughly one million generated players with the last name Gillespie. I would also see guys with names like Morgan Morgan or Chandler Chandler. If I ran into these problems, I'd head over to https://www.name-generator.org.uk/ to crank out something a bit more realistic. I also wanted to sprinkle in a bit more diversity, so I'd input names from places like Poland, Ghana, South Korea, and India to get a cool story out of the international integration of the NFA like we see in pro basketball.

If I thought an interesting player prototype wasn't really being represented in the sim, like if there weren't any good tough-guy power backs or super fast linebackers, I would simply make one or two of them myself by giving certain players a ratings boost here and there. I made Tyus Smart bigger. I made Justin Iodessa faster.

Also, technically speaking Raja Peterson on the Dreadnoughts is Odell Beckham, Alex Siosifa on the Lumberjacks is Colin Kaepernick, and Deion Lecque on the Capitals is Mike Evans. I thought it'd be pretty cool to have some guys with tattoos to make them stand out more on the game tape, and the only way to do that is by using those three player models. I lowered Beckham/Kaepernick/Evans' age a couple times to prevent them from retiring, then took a player from the sim and copied his ratings onto their player model for the highlights. In Deion Lecque's case, it turns out Mike Evans' tattoos disappear when you change his last name for some reason. So that was a waste of time.

And obviously Madden isn't going to start a halfback at quarterback like I have the Washington Capitals doing. I thought it'd be a fun experiment though, a little alternative history inspired by phenomena like the Kendall Hilton game between the Broncos and Saints this past year - what if Denver actually won? What if the front office was crazy (or desperate) enough to commit to it?

For 2021 Analysis (coming soon)

As you've already seen in the game tape, I played a game or two per week in the 2021 season myself (which I'll be writing about soon). It was super fun to meddle here and there to see what happens with the story - I've never had such a vested interest in the outcome of a Madden game like when I hopped in a Week 15 game between the Dreadnoughts and the Dragons and tried to jump start a winning streak that (spoiler alert) would have saved Philadelphia's 2021 season.

By setting a tentative limit of four or five games per team, I gave myself a few small opportunities to fight for a big win before leaving the rest to the fate of the simulation.

I was experiencing my own sports universe first hand. I played to win, but also thought of every play, every player that did something or recorded a stat as a progression of the overarching narrative (or, to put it simply, like I was a fan watching it on TV). Sure, I knew that Darrian Hamblin drops a lot of passes from his ratings and the stat sheets, but I felt how shitty he was when a game-winning touchdown slipped through his fingers. It was like catching a snapshot of something moving a million miles an hour, frozen in time for a split second for me to dive in and explore before I exited out of the game, hit sim and watched it go by again.

I would save the replays of fun/interesting plays from both teams. That's where the game tape and pictures come from (besides when a spotlight player is a rookie or a new arrival to the team, in which case I take a picture of them in college/wearing their previous uniforms). Please be nice about my recording skills in the replay, I am aware that I have a bad habit of abusing the slow motion + rewind function.

General

A very important thing to note for scheduling purposes: the NFA is actually an amalgamation of two different sims, with 13 teams coming from a file on Madden 18 and 12 from Madden 20.

There are a few reasons why I ended up doing this. One is that I became hooked on the idea of using fake teams from the relocation option instead of actual NFL franchises. Madden does not allow for many relocations in one save file, because they made it impossible to relocate two teams to one city. So to get the teams I wanted, I needed to use two different files.

Another reason is redundancy - flaws in the automated XP/player development system lead to many of the teams looking roughly the same on paper. For example, very few running backs end up cracking the 90 overall milestone in Madden 18, leaving a ton of teams with the same kind of middling, ho-hum backs. And in Madden 20, the vast majority of rookies, even those taken in the first round, were too low in overall to start on their teams.

So to make my story a lot more diverse, I chose the 25 most interesting teams out of a possible 64 (two 32-team simulations) and made the league out of them. Every team in the NFA made the cut because they stood out to me in one way or another when I was looking through their roster.

To get a sense for how long I've been working on this as an on-again off-again hobby, the reason one sim is in '18 and the other '20 is because that's how long it took me to write the profiles for the 13 teams in '18. By the time I was ready to really dive into the second half of the league, Madden 20 had been out for months. So I simmed another twenty years over there, copied the spark notes of the second file (teams, star players) and started crunching the data.

This means that the results from the 2020 season (which is actually the 2040 season in Madden) were not derived from the teams directly playing each other, but rather how successful they were within their own sim. I had to add some wins and losses here and there to even things out in the NFA standings, and the playoffs had to be remodeled (I'll get to that in a sec). But it is still certainly the case that the big-picture successes and failures of each team are directly correlated to what Madden had determined for them. It also means I had to pull a bunch of strings to play out the 2021 season.

To fully explain how I made two different sims work together, I'll need a whole other tab. So you can hear me nerd out about my processes in scheduling, explaining how the 2021 season will work and how I made the past 20 seasons leading up to 2021 mesh into a single grand story.

If you find this kind of stuff interesting and want to try it out for yourself, a quick word of advice I can give is to simulate one season at a time and create a new save file at the end of each year. Madden is terrible at storing information from past seasons. To get into the real juicy stuff like team history (win/loss records, standings, trades, game scores from years prior to the one you're looking to preview) and player progression (previous teams, how their ratings developed over time), you'll have to manually keep each season on file. Also be sure to turn up XP development sliders and injuries.