Scouting defenses

[Aston]

How do you guys like to do it?

We are mostly a "do what we do" kind of offense. Sometimes, I'll spot a roster weakness and really try to hit it hard. I seem to remember this ends up more often than not in disaster for me, though.

I get the feeling most teams just run a system by and large on offense, which is why gameplanning defenses vs opposing offenses tends to be more interesting.

But, I also like going through logs if I have time to glean any useful information I can get out of them. I get the feeling this doesn't tend to be useful so much as it is interesting. (For example, I noticed one of my opponents didn't DC ever. I thought, "Oh, that's nice. How can I use it? Oh, I guess I can't, really. Well, good luck Foley.")

If you do scout another team's logs before you play them, what kind of stuff do you find most interesting? What kind of info do you wish you could get from them more quickly? Or do you just not bother with this kind of stuff?

I'm thinking when gameplanning an offense, "Let your roster do what it does best" is mostly the best strategy, but I'm curious nonetheless, how people like look at opposing D's.

[mike17]

I very rarely change my offense unless I notice the team I'm playing does something extremely well, like stop the run, or defend the short pass, or something like that.

Mostly, it's "Do what we do"

[Guest]

About all I change on defense in a given week is double-teaming, unless I see something particularly egregious in the situational stuff in the logs.

[Guest]

I very rarely change my offense unless I notice the team I'm playing does something extremely well, like stop the run, or defend the short pass, or something like that.

Mostly, it's "Do what we do"

This is pretty much how I handle offense. Unless someone has a particular weakness or I want to trick a "smart" player, I run the same thing every week.

Defense I run like the offense, except I change it up a little every week almost without exception.

[prinzar]

I tend to watch out for really good run/pass defenses and try toning down one in my gameplan.
If I'm playing the number 1 rushing defense then i'll try a lot of deep throws unless their secondary is much better than my receivers.
If their defense Is good at both then I just run with what I do best. Pretty basic advice on my stuff but its worked well recently for me

[marvelous]

I try to blitz at the worst lineman. I change things up because I'm never satisfied with more than 0 points a game. A good defense starts with a solid first and 10.

[Aston]

Yeah, on defense it's a week-to-week thing. Sorta fun sometimes, NOT FUN this week.

For gameplanning your own offense though, anyone else like combing through the logs?

[Guest]

I've been running the same defense in all my leagues for about the last 3 years (real time). The only thing I change week to week is I rex blitz %'s and certain coverages.

It seems to work, although this Aces team lacks the secondary depth needed to be successful all the time. My New England defense in the RNFL has been top 5 for like 10 years in a row, though. That's my blueprint team.

Offensively, I have several different setups I generally run, but every season something is slightly different, so I tweak as necessary to try and maximize production. Usually by the end of the year, my teams are where I want them on both sides of the ball.. But yeah, its a do what we do best theme on every team I run aside from defensively.

[Aston]

Julio, you run a very interesting, flies-against-conventional-wisdom defense.

I've seen at least one other GM in another league run what looks like the exact same thing, on 1st & 10 at least. So there must be some method to this madness! So far I don't have a guess, aside from needing to acquire an extremely superlative secondary.

[Aston]

OK, how useful would you guys consider GPA for defensive playcalls to be? (GPA shows offensive, but not defensive calls on a down-and-distance basis).

What if it were limited to a per-single-game basis?

http://www.goldenerafootball.com/for...ead.php?t=3690

The latter is exactly what this does. Specific to the GEFL it can analyze whole seasons, but it's not set up that way for other leagues -- so you have to paste in a log and it will analyze one game at a time. Namely, this:



Thoughts? It looks really neat and would be a huge time saver over going through logs manually. I'm working on something similar but I don't have the programming chops of this guy. I asked biggen, and he said he's happy for anyone to use it however they like, so I'm sharing it here.

[Ozias]

I don't use the GPA as it is, but that looks like a very useful tool.

Maybe I should start using the GPA. Maybe I would of won the close games that I lost by 3 points or less.