Too Many Plays In Action PC Football?
Let's take a deep dive
Too Many Plays in Action PC Football?
Does Action PC Football result in too many plays per team?
I was talking with my dad the other day about my now-abandoned 1980 Browns replay. You might remember it — we stopped because the game was forcing us to overuse backup receivers for some strange reason.
Anyway, he thought that Action PC Football might have some issues with creating too many plays in older seasons. I thought I’d test it out.
I looked at the Browns first. Per Pro Football Reference, the 1980 Cleveland Browns ran 1013 plays, or about 63.3 per game.
“Play” here is defined as passing attempts plus rushing attempts plus sacks. We’re not talking about kickoffs, punts, field goals, or anything like that.
In the 10 games I played in the replay, the Browns ran 688 offensive plays, for an average of 68.8 per game.
I thought this might be significant. I decided to take a look at every single team in the league.
Now, it turns out that you can’t run a simple report to do this. I wound up doing the math by hand. Here are all the plays called for each team in my partial 1980 NFL replay:
As you can see, the average was 65.5 plays per game. This ranged from 72.6 for the Green Bay Packers all the way down to 59.5 for the Kansas City Chiefs.
What was the average in real life?
65.0
In other words — the average in the replay was spot on.
I’m still not sure what causes the fatigue system to go haywire like that, but it certainly isn’t because there were too many plays being called.