Front Office Football Nine Documentation

The 9.2 update was released on October 20, 2025.

• Player files were added for the 2025 season. When starting a new universe, you will be able to select the 2025 set of files with players, quarterbacks, coaches and the 2025 schedule. The 2023 and 2024 seasons remain available for selection.

• While there is very limited statistical data available for modern kickoffs and landing zones and returns, kickoffs now follow the new rules.

• Attempts were made to correctly determine overtime outcomes and strategies using the rule that teams are guaranteed one possession in the playoffs. This rule has been extended to all regular-season games. This applies regardless of the simulation year.

• In the last five minutes of a regular-season overtime period, the ball going out-of-bounds should stop the clock, as it does in the fourth quarter.

• When a turnover was returned for a touchdown, it was not always ending an overtime game.

• On pass plays, the offense can sometimes be blamed for the defense having 12 men on the field.

• We've received a handful of reports over the last two years that saved games disappear from the saved games list. In investigating this, customers report a metadata.dat file that is overwritten with all-zeros instead of edited to show the correct information after a game is saved. We have been unable to duplicate this. We suspect this is related to hardware issues. Code was added to give the game a better chance of detecting when a disk is full or can't accept an edit and will try and maintain the last saved game when this happens.

• Code was added to detect when games are being simulated, but a past game has been skipped. You should be prompted when this happens, and given the option to continue anyway. Error logging has been added that might help us determine why this is happening. We are still quite interested in diagnosing this issue. Last year, extensive code was added to try and prevent it. But we've received a couple of reports since the update, and the diagnostic code added to detect this didn't detect anything. We've spent a lot of time trying to recreate this, with no luck. If you can recreate this error (once it happens, there's no evidence of why it happened), let us know. We're quite anxious to fix it.

• Fixed a crash when performing certain actions after examining the TeamYearOffense or TeamYearDefense tabs for a team.

• Fixed a crash when running a custom league of more than 32 teams, when some players were evaluating their decisions during free agency.

• Allow selection of current season within almanac when looking at the schedule of either the current team or the entire league.

• Close a loophole allowing the AI to end a veteran holdout with a new contract signing if the user does not allow the AI to make major roster changes.

• Try and make it more difficult to extract good future draft picks from opposing teams.

• On the career statistics screen, the mouse-over help text for blocked punts and touchbacks was reversed.

• Track individual fair catches for punt returners properly.

• More variation has been added to the selection mechanism for the pre-season television show.

• In the play-calling interface, there are inconsistencies in the algorithm used to determine which quarterback can substitute in. In addition, when the third quarterback is selected, the depth chart incorrectly shows the visiting team's starting quarterback as in the game (which he isn't). Since the “Purdy rule” implemented in 2023 isn't being used by many teams and other rules related to a 47th active player and limitations to third quarterback use are difficult to explain and the game requires three active quarterbacks anyway, any limitation related to what the AI does (once a third quarterback is in, he remains in) was removed.

• Added text describing your first-year offensive and defensive coordinators' preferred playing styles to the full 53-round draft screen when beginning a new universe.

• Added some hotkey support for frequently-used navigation within the game. See the interface documentation for details.

• Saved games can continue.

• For those who are working on customization, please remember to back up all your work.

• This version updates the file league_years.csv by adding a line at the end of the file containing information for the 2025 season. This will overwrite the existing file.

• This version updates the file team_info.csv by adding lines at the end of the file containing default team information matching the 2025 player file. This file is where team nicknames are changed and is the most common customization people make. The update will overwrite the existing file.

• This version updates the file cities.csv by correcting the name of Brook Park, Ohio. This was done because the new stadium in Cleveland will be located in Brook Park. The update will overwrite the existing file.

• This version updates the following text files containing information about the data files: coaches.txt, default_teams.txt, league_years.txt, players.txt, quarterbacks.txt and team_info.txt. This will not affect game play or configuration.

• This version will add the following files: 2025_coaches.csv, 2025_players.csv, 2025_quarterbacks.csv and 2025_schedule.csv. This will allow you to use the 2025 data files when starting a new universe.

• Steam updates should not touch other .csv files, but we can't guarantee that.

Your installation of Front Office Football Nine will automatically update on its own. If you go into the Steam app's Library and right-click on the game and examine Properties, you can change the priority for Updates. There's a line at the bottom of this screen that tells you when your game was last updated.

You can also view the Credits screen in the League Menu within the game. This screen shows the game's version. This update is version 9.2.