Too Many Quarterback Runs?

More Action PC Football headaches

Too Many Quarterback Runs?

I ran into a pretty frustrating issue with Action PC Football the other day.

I’m still playing with the 1984 college football homebrew season. South Carolina, a team that played surprisingly well in real life, was visiting Mississippi State, a team that was pretty bad.

Of course, I took the reigns of Mississippi State.

Now, the truth is that Mississippi State’s defense is pretty well rated:

I decided that we’d play man coverage in this game as soon as I saw this, and had fun alternating blitzing between Green, Pearson, Cannon, and Nichols.

And it failed miserably.

The reason why it failed, however, is because the computer manager inexplicably started calling multiple bootleg runs for Mike Hold.

In real life, Hold averaged a little under 3 yards per run, and ran maybe 9 times per game:

In this game, however, Hold ran all over us:

18 attempts and an average of 5.9 seems a little bit high to me. Of course, Hold was able to run so frequently because we were looking for South Carolina to pass on third and long. They fooled me over and over again in that situation.

In real life, Hold passed about 10 times a game, which isn’t really that out of the ordinary for 1984:

In this game Hold only attempted 2 passes, which seems abnormally low. He completed both for 63 total yards:

And these completions came against pass defense.

Now, I don’t want to complain a lot about losing (we lost 20-0), and I don’t necessarily think that simulation statistics absolutely need to reflect what happened in real life. Part of the fun of football sims is shaking up strategies and seeing how teams perform in completely different situations.

However, these running attempts by Hold were not scrambles. They were designed runs. And it makes me believe that the computer manager was calling plays unrealistically.

What do you think?