Fred’s Fabulous Field Goals Chart (For Strat-O-Matic Football)

 

Tom Dempsey

To determine pct chance of a good FG at every yard line and for use with recent Strat-O-Matic Football FG modifiers rule.

Freds_Fabulous_Field_Goals_Chart.xlsx

SOM PRO FOOTBALL LINKS

The way you use this is to open the “Template” sheet. You’ll see the set up for 1975 Tom Dempsey. You put the equivalent for the longest yard line in modern terms in field E4, in his case 37 yard line. Now for reference I like to put the ranges into B14:B18 and the chances/36* 100 in C14:C18.   From column E, you can see Dempsey becomes a 56.8 pct kicker at the modern (1974 on) 31 yard line in, a 48 yard kick. For him we use column F, the modern column.  He’s an 80 pct kicker from the 13 in, 30 yard kick. That doesn’t sound brilliant until you look at other 1975 kickers. He misses a lot of extra points but he’s still a weapon in that starved points environment. 

On the “1957 Bobby Layne” tab we see Layne becomes a 50 percent kicker in his season from his 30, a 37 yard kick now checked from Column G. The pole was on the goal line for 1957 so kickers pick up ten yards in range.  Layne makes at least 2/3rds of his kicks from inside 30 yards (22 yard line in 1957). That’s better than you’d think back then. (Note you still use 37 yd line for Layne’s carded longest yard line on the sheet.)

There are two modern kickers, both Jason Hanson seasons, and they really show the differences even modern kickers can make. You’ll note Hanson’s longest are now 39 yard lines, reflecting his longest kicks were 56 yards. 1995 was a middling poor year for Hanson and he only crosses 50 pct at the 27 yard line, or a 44 yard kick.  He’s over 90 pct at that distance as an All-Pro fourteen years later. 

The Tom Dempsey comparison tab shows 1975 versus 1976.  Dempsey was rated 2-10, 2-7,12, 2-8,11,12, 2-7,12, 2-3 in 1976 and even with smoothing you get a feel for his inconsistency at range.  (They did this for a number of years on the old cards).

1976 Dempsey will make roughly 2/3 of his kicks inside the 15 and 3/4 out to the 22. He drops to 52 pct at the 30 and he lacks the strength to kick much farther than 50 yards; in 1975 he had leg enough to hit at 52 yards. Amazingly enough he’s still a top ten kicker in 1976, but he’s not quite the weapon he was in 1975. 

Enjoy!

Fred Bobberts, Chandler, AZ

Initial publication date: April 23, 2023

Chances: 

 2   1/36*100

2-3   3/36*100

2-3,12 4/36*100

2-4  6/36*100

2-4,12 7/36*100

2-4,11,12 9/36*100

2-5  10/36*100

2-5,12 11/36 *100

2-5,11,12  13/36*100

2-6 15/36*100

2-6,12 16/36*100

2-6,11,12 18/36*100

2-7 21/36*100

2-7,12 22/36*100

2-7,11,12 24/36*100

2-8 26/36*100

2-8,12 27/36*100

2-8,11,12 29/36*100

2-9 30/36*100

2-9,12 31/36*100

2-10 33/36*100

2-10,12 34/36 *100

2-11 35/36*100

On Strat-O-Matic Football Rosters and Schedules

On Strat-O-Matic Football Rosters and Schedules:

SOM PRO FOOTBALL LINKS

Since it came up again on the Forum:

Question came up why Dick James (who led the team in ints with 3) is not listed as a cornerback for the 1959 Washington Redskins. Most DBs of that era were strapping guys who played in run support; James was 5 feet 9 and 179 pounds, most sources including PJ Troup have seven DBs listed as starters for the four defensive backfield positions and James is not one of them. 

I think I got it right in that Ben Scotti Gary Glick, Doyle Nix, and Dick Haley all had 8 or more starts, and Richie McCabe and Chuck Cichowski both started some.  Bill Stits played for two teams in 1959.  but In general I try to place at least two sub DBs on the card so the team is playable, but I don’t try to have every player who made a play carded.  That’s a baseball thing, in football we are trying to get playable rosters over some arbitrary goal of completeness.  

Simply put, there is no requirement that I’ve heard that stipulates every player who made a play needs to be carded at every position.  This action has not been performed for most if not all seasons we have made; it would be a heckuva data check to have to try this for all the seasons we have carded.  The effort would not be, in the parlance, a piece of cake. 

In the case of the 1959 Redskins they were manifestly horrible against the pass, turning the Fifties quarterbacks they faced into 1976 Bert Jones on the aggregate, so it should be obvious that any additional backs that were uncarded should be zeros. 

A few observations….

SOM rosters, like the game itself, are an abstraction. While every effort is made to have them be 100 percent accurate what I see on the internet is not always the best interpretation. To me nothing beats film, or contemporary accounts from newspapers of the time; there’s less of a filter there. 

Even in the case of data I have, I still have been known to flip defenders or receivers  on occasion when I know they did this to promote positional balance across a season. You don’t need to do this for 1980 with all those teams, but sometimes you need to make a split end a flanker to balance the position across only twelve teams.  I’ve made TEs TE/SEs where it made sense to card as such, and I’ve made HBs SE/FLKR as well to fill out positions. I try to be consistent, and it helps to have worked surrounding seasons.

In short SOM Football rosters are not intended nor were they ever intended to be archival repositories of NFL History, they were intended to support our gameplay. And as such some hard decisions need to be made to make that work.  

Same with schedules.  One of the quirks of the league utility is the play next week feature. On occasion (although it is thankfully rare) some games need to be moved a day one way or the other in the schedule to make this feature work.  I would say this happens once or twice in a season when it happens at all, and maybe in every other season or so in the Seventies. People post on these all the time, and the answer usually is we tried the historical schedule and the autoplay threw an error. So we had to adjust this timeline somewhat. The SOM schedule is not meant to be the NFL historical record, it is meant to ensure teams play the right opponents and the right games, hopefully in the right order. (That I don’t think I ever changed.)

Same with QB schedules. Now I get into a lot of trouble when I mention I don’t go with the starter as the starter in our file 100 pct of the time. In the case where attempts are split I might look at the season and the fraction of attempts the QBs had. We can’t rotate QBs by drive so my goal would be to realistically split the work by the right opponents for each QB on the roster.  I make QBs versus their opponents and vice versa, so the QB schedule is absolutely critical especially in a smaller season. 

A good example might be the late Fifties Giants where they used Don Heinrich as a “starter” in 10 games but he would usually play part of the first quarter to give Charley Conerly a better look at the defense from the sidelines. Heinrich usually only had a small fraction of attempts, so I might give him starts in the games where he has the most attempts. This scheduling of a “starter” is not reflective of NFL history, but it’s reflective that Conerly actually played the most in most of these games. In order for the results of seasons to work you have to give Conerly the starts he needs to get attempts against the defenses he faced. Thankfully gamers can change the Qusrterback schedule, but it still causes some angst. 

-Fred