Offensive Game Planning
The four Offensive Game Plan screens set your offensive game plan. The game plan is a series of scripted plays used for various situations on offense. While this is somewhat simplified from what professional teams use, the idea is to provide a mechanism that gives Front Office Football players a game-planning experience that's close to realistic without requiring dozens of hours of preparation for each game.
The game plan can be edited during each week of the season. Alternately, the game's AI will do its best to craft a good game plan for your next opponent if you don't want to do this yourself.
If you set the option for the coach to handle your game plans on the Game Options Screen, your game plans are set for you prior to each game regardless of what you do with these screens. This option is on after you install Front Office Football.
The play list on the left side of the screen is your offensive playbook. It contains all the plays (up to 200) in your team's playbook. This can be sorted by name, personnel group, play type, primary receiver's route/run direction and the count of how many times this play appears in your current game plan.
You may add 55 different unique plays from your playbook to the game plan. You can use up to 150 plays (including duplicates) in your game plan across all the sections. It's unlikely you'll need that many.
The game plan is divided into sections. Each section is a script of plays. Beginning at the top of each section, each time a situation occurs on offense, your team will run the next play in that section.
Sections mostly divide plays by down and distance. For first-and-ten plays, they are divided into an “at possession” section, which is the first play of a new possession, an “earned” section, which is a first down play after your team has achieved a first down, and a “red zone” section, which is for first downs inside your opponent's 20-yard line. This section takes precedence over the other two.
There are also sections for first and second down plays inside the opponent's six-yard-line, first and second down plays inside your own five-yard-line, and plays for the two-minute drill. These sections also take precedence over any other section. The two-minute drill section has the highest priority. These plays are for your hurry-up offense, as determined by the game situation.
There are four screens for offensive game planning: 1st Downs, 2nd Down, 3rd Down (the same sections are used for 4th Down) and Two Minute, which also includes the red zone and inside your own 5-yard-line section.
If, in a game, the situation dictates a play that simply isn't in that section (for example, it's third-and-long but you have a lead and you're clearly trying to drain the clock), the game uses “Hot Plays” it will call automatically. There's a simply run up the middle hot play, a kneel-down play, a generic short pass play, a spike-the-ball play and a “Hail Mary.”
To add a play to your game plan, highlight it in the offensive playbook list, then drag it into a section on the game plan list. You can drag plays within a section to change the section order.
The following actions are available from the drop-down action lists:
- Generate New Plan: your offensive coordinator creates a new game plan. This sets a new plan for all four offensive game plan screens.
- Generate New Guided Plan: brings up a guide allowing you to make choices about how plays are specifically assigned to sections, then generates a new game plan. You will have the option of setting a new plan for the current screen or all four offensive game plan screens.
- Delete Play (one option for each section): delete the highlighted play from the indicated section.
- Delete All Section Plays: delete all the plays from all the sections on this screen.
- Save Game Plan: save your entire offensive game plan to the strategy folder for this saved game.
- Load Game Plan: load an entire offensive game plan, replacing the current plan.
The 1st Down and 2nd Down screens include an analysis of running and passing percentages for the current script.