Scheduling

Because the 2021 season was the first time I was moving forwards instead of looking backwards, I had to figure some things out in order to get the results that I'm going to be recapping in the upcoming '21 review.

Fair warning: this is where things get pretty nerdy. Unless you're someone who's looking to do a stylistically similar simulation league of their own, I'd advise you not to read through this.

And even if you are, bear in mind that I only have to jump through all these hoops to get a legitimate league because of my own decisions. As I explained in the full disclosure tab, the NFA is two different sims rolled into one. I liked the thought of using cool new logos and uniforms to make my own league instead of using real NFL teams (FYI: this is because Madden doesn't allow you to relocate multiple teams to the same city, so you have a cap at like 15 of the fancy new relocation teams per franchise). I also didn't have time to write another 30,000+ words to get seven more teams. So I broke the NFA into two save files and had to MacGyver some stuff to work around it. If you're cool with 32 teams and you don't need to have your league comprised only of relocated franchises, you can just run one sim and Madden will take care of everything. So you also don't really have to read this.

At the very beginning, when I first started writing about this stuff, I didn't even think about the potential of actually being able to play the games. I just wanted to screenshot the simulated rosters of a bunch of cool-looking relocated teams, stick them in a Word document and see if I could make something out of it. So the league I came up with to organize all these stories wasn't really designed to move forward in time.

When it dawned on me that I could actually go and see these guys out on the field, of course I had to make it happen. So the NFA had to be a functional league for 2021 and beyond. I needed to figure out how to merge these two separate files. And I did, but it's a bit complicated. To preserve the sanctity of a completely untainted simulation, you should look away. But in the name of transparency, I'll have it here anyways.

(Still here? Alright, let's go.)

Having two sims wasn't a problem when I was just going through the team's rosters to write the 2020 preview. I was looking at each individual team/player in a vacuum for the most part. I had the standings, stats and games from each team in their own sim (I saved after each year from 2030-2040 so I could look back at the past in detail), and that's all I needed to get the raw facts that I could branch out into a story.

I did have to work around the playoffs. That was a lot of effort - I went back five years and each year leading up to 2041 I would write every team's record, seed them 1-25, and make a playoff bracket out of the top 12. If the two teams that faced each other were in the same save file and played each other earlier, I'd take that result and use it to determine the winner. If they were in different files, or they hadn't played each other, I had a funky way to determine which was the better team: I'd go back to an earlier save point and simulate the whole season over again, and whichever one went further within their sim I'd say won the game. It's complicated, I know, but it's how I got the playoff results to work with from the last five years.

So that's the only meddling I did with the results of the 2020 season and earlier, which is what you're reading about right now on the site. (Besides the occasional embellishment, of course)

But now that I want to write an in-depth season review, all 25 teams have to actually coexist. It's not enough to just say that a team went 10-6. I want to know exactly who they beat and how badly, even in the regular season. Hell, I want to play some of these games myself. I can't just write about their successes and failures within their own sim anymore. When teams are scheduled against opponents that aren't in the NFA, it doesn't work.

So I made a schedule of my own.

The first part of that task was devising the schedule itself. I stuck to the script of the NFL - each team needs 8 home games and 8 away games, they need to play their four division rivals twice, and then they play each team in another division once. That gave me 13 games, and the other 3 were pretty much random. It was actually a pretty fun sort of puzzle to solve.

Then, I had to actually have Madden simulate that schedule. I made sure that teams mostly only played opponents in their own sim and that were on their schedule in the 2041 Madden season. Things ended up aligning pretty well - the majority of most team's schedules played themselves out without a fuss. Like, for example, 12 out of 16 the games from the London Monarchs (Miami Barons) 2041 schedule were against NFA teams that were on the Barons 2021 schedule. (Those were also the games I could choose from to actually play. So they were where I got highlight tape from).

They weren't in the same order (for example, the Barons played the Lumberjacks week 4, but in Madden they played in week 10), but I could jump forwards and backwards to piece together my results. Stuff like player stats and injuries I left untouched, and just looked through them at the end of the year.

On the rare occasion a game wasn't in the same sim or the same season, I had a process to determine a winner. The Barons are in Madden 18 and the Knights are in Madden 20. If they face each other in, say, week 6. I went to '20 and calculated the difference between points scored and points allowed by the "London Black Knights" (Knights) in their week 6 game, then went to '18 and compared that number with the "London Monarchs" (Barons) score differential in their week 6 game. Whoever's was higher got the win.

So that's how I filled out the schedule and got the standings for the 2021 season that I'm currently in the process of recapping. I know. I had a lot of time to kill in quarantine. Three hour Zoom lectures are very boring.

Everything about the NFA is ran entirely through the jaws of Madden. Doing all this extracurricular stuff just gave me more data to work with. Now I can really tell the story of each team's 2021 season.

Also, if anyone from Madden is reading this, it'd be really cool if you could make this an easier process. NBA 2K allows users to create their own teams and reduce the number of divisions in a sim league. Those features would eliminate the need for me to do all this stuff just to get a succinct & personalized sim league I can dive into.