General
The NFA is a 25-team league, broken down into 5 divisions of 5 teams each. There are no conferences. Other than that, you can pretty much assume the NFA rules are the same as the NFL's before the new CBA ushered in a bunch of changes this past offseason. It's a 16-game season with a 12-team playoff format.
The only thing that's categorically different is how the playoffs are seeded.
The five division winners are seeded 1-5, then the second-place division finishers get the 6-10 seeds. So divisional rivalries mean a lot in the NFA. You can almost think of each division as it's own mini league within the big league. The two teams left with the best records score the 11 and 12 seeds to bring us to a hearty twelve playoff teams.
The top four seeds get a first round bye, and away we go with the regular NFL playoff format (before it was expanded to 14 teams). The first round/playoff opener is the wildcard round, quarterfinals is the divisional round, semifinals is conference championships, and the NAC (North American Championship) is the Super Bowl.
Awards
Pretty self-explanatory, the All-Division team is composed of the best players at each position in each division, while the two All-Pro teams are the best in the league.
Stats
The base stats like yards, touchdowns, tackles, etc. are taken straight from the franchise, but you might notice some there are some stats in the player profiles that Madden doesn't track. I pretty much made those up. Stuff like missed tackles for linebackers, targets/catch percentage for receivers, and QB rating against for cornerbacks I would come up with based on the season the player had as well as their individual ratings. Sue me.
Grades
I left a grade underneath my analysis for each faction of each team. It's important to note that the grades are not derived solely from the players' overalls. That would be too easy for you guys. I concocted the grades based upon what the average football pundit would think of the group given the stats and general consensus on the players.
Game Tape
I played a few games per team in the 2021 season. That's where I got the game tape + pictures from. See the full disclosure tab for details. It'll hopefully answer a lot of the questions about how I'm running this whole league through Madden.
Also - this is game tape, not highlights. It's supposed to be a snapshot of what would stand out to you from <insert player here> while you were watching their team in a random game in the 2021 season, rather than a compilation of their absolute best and worst moments. (This is because the tape comes from actual gameplay and I'm only playing a few games per team, of course. But I will say it does paint a better picture of what these guys would really be like to follow as a hypothetical NFA fan).
Don't hesitate to use the search function in the upper right hand corner if someone on the opposing team stands out on the game tape. Say you see some corner get burned by Justin Iodessa for a long touchdown. Want to hear what I had to say about that bum in the preseason? Check what team he plays for in the title of the video, the type the team name and the player's number into the search bar and the first result should be his player profile.
Timeline
The 2021 preseason analysis for every team is posted.
The 2021 season itself has actually already been simulated. The results are all in front of me, and I'm ready to start writing about it. It's going to be a lot of work.
I don't think I'll be updating the site with post-2021 profiles until I have them done for every team. But the highlights from the 2021 regular season are available. So for now, think of us as perpetually stuck in limbo between the beginning and end of the '21 season.
At the time I'm writing this, I'm the only one who knows how the Orioles fared in their no-holds-barred title push, if Boston's mediocre secondary was their Kryptonite again, or whether Jared Coffey finally got the monkey off his back and won a title for San Antonio. I saw a lot of these stories evolve first hand in the dozens of games I played myself over the last couple years.
I can't wait to share it all with you soon. Hopefully one day in fairytale-land I won't have a job or any schoolwork to do, so I can devote myself to being the Hunter S. Thompson of sports fiction and fully flesh out multiple seasons of this league. (Maybe I'll eventually have an in-depth recount of all 25 teams' evolution over five or six years. It'd be like having 25 full-length novels. How cool would that be?) Until then, though, I'll probably be churning these out at a rate of about a team or two per month. So unfortunately it'll be a while before the website gets updated with the full results and analysis of the 2021 season.