Are The Aliens Going Extinct?

A Pioneer Football League Blog:

Southwood's tall pocket passing QB is slammed to the turf again. The sack wasn't the first and wouldn't be the last. By the end of the game the Fargo Knights would finally knock him completely out of the game.

Even when not being sacked the Southwood Aliens QB was being penalized for intentional grounding, throwing a costly interception or best case scenario evading defenders long enough to throw the ball away.

The above paragraphs make it sound like the above QB is inept or lacking in skill but the truth is systemic of a larger problem that may bring the Aliens reign as Pioneer Football League power house to an end.

I believe during the making of what would be the last College Football Video game the developers knew said game would be the last thanks to legal battles involving the players’ likenesses. Ultimately it was decided that even though the players’ names weren't shown, their in game equivalents were similar enough to the real thing that monetary compensation was necessary, something the NCAA wouldn't budge on, therefore no more players or games.

Fun fact, Sam Keller former QB for Nebraska was one of the few whose legal pursuit led to the deadlock. I can still remember my friend saying all the way back in the mid 2000s "If that ******** Keller ruins our game I'm going to be pissed".

Well he did and my friend was, and probably still is.

Anyway, going into that last game they very intelligently got the read-option game right, something that would keep the game relevant even today, close to five years later. As was the case with previous years’ points of emphasis, the first year said feature is overpowered. The next year said feature is tweaked a bit and a new one is added.

Therefore it is in your best interest to have a read option offense and a mobile QB who can run it. If you do, you are pretty much unstoppable.

A mobile running threat QB means a defender must treat said QB as a run threat at all times, unlike our poor Aliens QB who was built to stand like a statue and throw bullets, this frees an extra defender to either rush the unathletic human arm or back off into coverage and wreak havoc on whatever pass routes the old school QB has little time to decide on.

The Pioneer Football League was founded before the last version of EA Sports College Football and endured the ebbs and flows of each year’s changes. Not until this last version were the Aliens affected negatively in any real way. The version with flawed defensive coverage, argued by some as a secretly intentional bug by EA to try and fix the previous year’s overly effective pass defense was a boon to the pass heavy Aliens.

The Pioneer Football League @Go_PFL formed seven seasons ago. Its purpose was to be a league that could be picked up and played anytime. No statistics except for the finals scores and the standings were allowed. This was really hard for me to do but I wanted something I could play while getting NCAA stats, players, standings, draft results, recruiting results, bowl games etc. entered into my database. Despite my efforts to streamline the process, months could go by between NCAA seasons, meaning no games could be played.

The Southwood Aliens actually pre-date the formation of the PFL itself. The team was once "Southwood State" created so I could play NCAA seasons with that same anti-Sam Keller friend of mine. The need arose for another team because we couldn't BOTH play as Nebraska. Our match-ups were epic with my friend prevailing about 75% of the time I'd say.

Southwood sprang up as a fictional University somewhere in central Nebraska near the Union Pacific "RaceTrack" a triple tracked main line between just east of Gibbon near Kearney and North Platte Nebraska.

Back when people still purchased DVDs from magazines, various small video production companies produced videos of this "hot spot" boasting of "105 to 115 trains in 24 hours" this tag was on a video produced in the mid to late 90s, but a booming economy coupled with the deregulation of railroads made the number soar even higher.

As if to convince the world of my train nerdiness I spent spring break in the area in the early 2000s. Whatever year the XFL existed. I remember checking into my hotel, eating pizza I had delivered directly to me for the first time in my life and watching a spring XFL game.

My point being the league was only around for a year so I could pinpoint the year pretty easily but I chose to keep it nebulus. To me the vagueness somehow adds more nostalgia.

During the days there the three sets of tracks produced an impressive parade of trains. The longest stretch between trains was maybe five minutes. Based on my time by the tracks I estimate in 24 hours that would be roughly 150 trains per day.

My dad had a box full of leftover disposable cameras from a promotion done by his previous employer. The company was no more and the digital cameras needed to be used up. I ended up capturing a stack of blurred yellow engines rushing by at full speed, too fast for the little disposable cameras. I still have the pictures somewhere, I wish I could find them.

An article by Trains magazine soon after verified my numbers but even if I was off in the total the main thing was that I saw a ton of trains and had a really good time.

With all of the trains’ memories in mind, a fictional campus was built there, the crown jewel of which was the domed stadium affectionately dubbed "The Mothership".

Clashes over xbox live with my college buddies vaunted Nebraska teams were epic, the winner of which was a shoe in for a spot in the National Championship.

Time and money became tight and our dynasty stopped, but Southwood would eventually drop the "State" to become a charter member of the Pioneer Football League ( @GO_PFL on twitter ) . Another of the charter members was the Fargo Knights the Aliens’ opponent today.

Speaking of the Knights, back inside "The Mothership" Fargo's pro-style play action offense as old and boring as a passing coal train is eating up track and putting up touchdown after touchdown.

Earlier in the year I was inspired by the Knights’ gutty performances against human opponents and decided to take their helm for the remainder of the season.

Yes, I play as more than one team. I do this to ensure parity and challenge in the league. In games such as this one I play all time offense letting the computer man the defense.

Normally this means I score on almost every possession, games come down to who has the ball last and above all turnovers are utterly disastrous.

The last point is where the Aliens’ reign of championships may well come to an end.

The style of play for teams in the PFL is based on what you would imagine their mascot to play like. For example the Las Vegas Locomotives run an old fashioned punishing running attack, slow going at first but as the team they are playing wears down the Loco's pick up steam. The Omaha Nighthawks mascot are named after the F 117 Nighthawk a Stealth fighter whose devastating attack could come from anywhere. This lends itself to the Omaha read-option scheme, filled with trickery and on any given play the attack could come from anywhere. That brings us to our Aliens whose flying saucer you would think, would zip across the sky with great speed lending them to a hurry up passing attack. The problem is that one interception could and often does lead to a loss when facing off against a human opponent.

Then came the Destroyers.

First a little backstory though. The UFL was a short lived real life football league in the late 2000s, they had a cool style and interesting game play but insisted on playing in the fall, competing with the already saturated College and Pro football schedule. By the third season I didn't even bother buying Omaha tickets because I knew the league wouldn't last the season, even before that though I vowed that when the league went under I would fold those teams into the PFL. The Owner/League Commish, whatever he was insisted that even though the third season came to an early end with rescheduled games and players not being paid the UFL would "be back", so I had to wait deep into the next fall to make sure the UFL wasn't going to zombie from the dead,....and now that I think about it there were rumors that at long last the commish had seen the light and the league would emerge strong and anew in the spring. Of course they didn’t emerge from anything that spring…….So say....summerish I started making the teams from that league.

That's where the Aliens’ days really began to be numbered. To accommodate the new teams the league more than doubled in size. One such former team was the Virginia Destroyers. For their first season they were just another computer controlled team but at some point I got to thinking about my grandfather and how awesome big ships were and decided to play as that team.

Deciding to play as that team forced me to think, how would a Destroyer fit into the PFL?

I knew my grandfather was on a Destroyer in WWII and I know they were the smallest ship (I think only two pegs) in the Battleship! game but what was their primary role?

I actually had to research this. Turns out the long arms race of building bigger and bigger battleships came to an end during WWII as those ships were just slow moving behemoths (and yes powerful) ships with an "I bet you can't sink me sign" on them. They were primarily ineffective and the huge ships sank left and right. No, what came out during WWII was the realization that the Carrier was now the kingpin of any fleet, and it's protector? The Destroyer, whose primary role was to protect the Carrier from air attacks by planes. (I know there is some WWII nerd who will tell me I'm wrong but just roll with me a second).

Crafting the football version of a Destroyer to honor my grandfather inspired me to create a team with a defense first mentality, I really didn't think it would work. I went with a 3-3-5 defensive base set, meaning 3 defensive alignment, 3 linebackers and 5 defensive backs. This means the majority of the time five defensive backs are on the field. I cranked up the abilities of those air defense players and voila! As it turned out the most effective defense in PFL history and one that turns an Alien air attack into a series of ufo craters making Roswell look pretty tame.

Another surprise was the fluidity with which the 3-3-5 also wreaks havoc on any option attack. The 5 defensive backs can hang back and overload any option point.

Earlier this season the Destroyers became the first team ever to to shut out the Aliens. A ridiculous amount of interceptions were thrown. In a weird way.....the old World War II Destroyers are now the future of the league, and the futuristic Aliens are now the league’s past,.....being hunted down, blasted out of the sky one at a time.

Will the Aliens go extinct? No, there are too many computer controlled cannon fodder teams to knock them completely from relevancy but as long as the read-option is error free, an interception can cost you a game, the game itself is stuck in its 2013 version and the Destroyers are lurking about, their return to championship glory let alone league dominance, looks doubtful.