On Strat-O-Matic Football Rosters and Schedules:
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
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