PFL Ceases Operation

I am saddened to announce the Pioneer Football League (PFL) has ceased operation.

The PFL was created to play during the long off-seasons of my EA Sports College Football game. Shoving all of the college football data into databases took time during which I needed a break and still wanted to play the actual game. The league also served as a way of teaching my then girlfriend (now wife) how to play the game; eventually the league lasted long enough to teach my step-daughter how to play the game. Season 8 was to be her first season in the league after several seasons in the PFL2/PDFL (Developmental league).

The earliest recorded mention of the PFL was September 23rd 2012, a 13-0 victory for my then girlfriend (now wife's) Orlando Mustangs over the Fargo Knights.

I never would have guessed EA sports would stop making the game a few years later. After a new version of the college football game was no longer put out each year, the writing was on the wall. The previously infinite slots to create teams on EA sports teambuilder website were capped and some teams were wiped out without notice or warning. Some people lost dozens of slots for teams, others reported their catalogs were hardly touched. All of this was discovered while season 7 was still taking place, or perhaps during season 6, I can't remember. In any case that meant the end of expansion for the league.

The hope was to limp the league along either until EA returned to making the college game (and therefore their teambuilder site would return) or another solution could be found. Although new teams couldn't be added, old ones could still be updated, so the league churned on.

I wrote a previous blog about the hope that Axis football could take up that mantle, alas that currently isn't the case. Although Axis Football boast its own even more detailed team, the creation of teams takes a great deal of time and Photoshop skills I have barely enough of. What I have even less of is time, so for now the league will be disbanded; each team will be released from their contract with the league in order to pursue opportunities in other leagues. We would still like to approve of such transitions first and some coordination may need to take place as the teams are no longer visible online.  

For some teams this isn't the first time this happened. The real life UFL teams were recreated and brought into the fold of the PFL just as we had promised when the UFL circled the drain and even ceased operation. Some time had to pass as false vows of returning the UFL to operation turned out to be false.

Another crucial factor in the decision to close the league is that both my wife and my step-daughter were still just getting the hang of the EA College Football platform, trying to make up the 30 year gap between myself playing video football games and them. To start over with newer games would feel unfair. Also, their run heavy offenses from EA College game wouldn't translate into success on the Axis Football platform. This is not the fault of Axis Football, more an exploit in the last incarnation of the College football game. You can line up in any Ace (meaning one running back) formation and churn out yards against teams much greater than your own. Dive plays are easy to learn and my wife's Orlando Mustangs and my step-daughter's Rockport Explorers made a living on this. Towards the end, my wife had a favorite and deadly (especially against any computer team) play action pass she was utilizing.

Lastly, because I can no longer access the PFL teams in teambuilder, the teams are effectively locked into place. No roster changes, no uniform fixes, and no retooling the Tallahassee Sunbirds to match my step-daughter’s chosen method of play.

I still view the league as a success and plan to keep the twitter handle up @go_pfl to follow any moves by former teams and cheer them on. For now though, some final stats for the league:

551 regular season games

23 playoff games

7 championships and 2 Hawaii bowls

29756 total points

A little more than 7 years of operation.

1 marriage

2 new children.

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.

PFL AXIS Football And The Future

Oh my, oh my, how things have changed since Febuary 2015. I really only glanced here to see just how big the gap was, what I had left behind, really I had no idea what was coming that spring, sure I had some inklings but nothing could have prepared me.

I won't bore you with that stuff though, this blog is about football. Yes football sometimes gets stupidly interrupted by life's events but you keep moving on. As my 22 month old says "jus kee' swi-min" (she loves her some Nemo). In my case you keep swimming until you find a raft, a deserted island, or some other relative safety and then resume thinking about football even if your life turns in a way that you can't think about the sport you love as much as you used to. "Dammit there aren't any footballs on this Island!" or "You guys wanna play football on this life raft? Losers get cannibalized."

The Spring League I spoke of never came to be, mostly due to the unforeseen forks in the road mentioned above, but in an odd twist this last pre-iceberg hitting blog does have something in common with what I came here to talk to you about today.

The Teambuilder website by EA sports. At some point EA pulled the plug on their servers or at the very least disabled the ability to create new teams. This change was made without any warning and was never officially acknowledged or explained by EA. Everyone on various forums just started noticing that whenever they tried to create a new team it would overwrite the very last team they created.

In addition to this some people lost "slots". Perhaps I should explain further what I mean by "slots". If I log into my Teambuilder account today it will say I have 24 teams. If I attempt to make a new team it will overwrite that 24th team. Therefore I have 24 slots I can use, I originally had 32. Somehow 8 went missing. It could be worse, reading the web the number of slots lost varied greatly from person to person. I read one particular fellow had roughly 100 teams, 75 slots went missing. Others were barely scathed missing only a slot or two.

I will make a guess, a theory. All the teams were spread amongst various servers dedicated to the teambuilder website. One day EA decides since we can't make college football games anymore we'll put some of them to some other use. So if you were one of the unlucky ones who had the majority of teams on one of those server(s) that got redistributed, that meant a serious loss in team slots (like the guy I mentioned above who said he lost 75ish slots).

One would think this could create a market for accounts that are no longer used, but I get the feeling it would be one of those instances where connecting the buyer and seller even over the internet would be too hard to accomplish. I admit I’m tempted to look, but for all I know EA could shut everything down tomorrow (more on that later).

So what then? As with so many things, folks on the internet figured out a work around. You can keep creating teams by saving attributes like logos and other information offline, then creating the new team you want, downloading your new team to your xbox and then re-creating the team that was previously in that spot. Sounds more complicated than it is.

So here is an example, say my last team (the team that is going to be over written) is the Kansas City Whatevers. I save their logo, playbook, roster type, stadium all of that somewhere else, create my new team, say...the St. Louis Examples, save them and then go to my xbox and download the St. Louis Examples. Then I go back and re-load all the stuff for the Kansas City Whatever and it's like they were never gone and I have a shiny new team: the awesomely named St. Louis Examples ready to go too.

Of course it's a pain any time you want to make a minor change to a team that is the last team or some team after that. If you want a new QB you'd have to redo the entire team instead of just the QB himself.

All of this is for my “PFL” world. A league formed with only four teams and created using existing and personally created logos. The league grew slowly at first, but then I vowed that when the UFL folded I would create all those derelict UFL teams and absorb those missing teams into the PFL. This created an imbalance as I wanted teams and conferences with equal numbers, so even more teams were created. The result was the league almost tripled in one season. The end result was a league with 24 teams playing 16 games for a massive number of total games. No games are simulated. All games not involving at least one human controlled team are played computer vs computer. Because of the raucous events of 2015 that season took more than a year.

As the season progressed my step-daughter expressed interest in playing. I was glad she was interested, but didn’t let her join the league right away for a number of reasons:

1. The season was still in progress.
2. She had to learn to play, which meant she might lose or get frustrated and quit.
3. And because she was 9 and therefore a risk would always exist she’d just get bored with it.

To encourage her interests I created the PDFL, a sort of farm league for the PFL. This league only had 3 teams. They played a 6 game season and started a second. By her second season my step-daughter’s skills had improved and she even began winning games. I decided a fourth team was in order. With teams in even smaller markets than the PFL that is mainly made of up of major cities who don’t have NFL teams such as San Antonio, Portland, Las Vegas( at the time) and Los Angeles (at the time), the PDFL used even smaller towns.

The search for the fourth team was underway. I wanted the league to have more than just the usual teams close to Nebraska. We already had a team in Colorado, Florida and Missouri, so I thought Kansas would be a good location and to that point my stepdaughter had only left the state to briefly cross over into Missouri and Iowa.

So my step-daughter and I headed to Kansas so she could say she had been to that state too and we could find a fourth team. It was quite a journey and when it was over she had picked a town she had been to in person.

After we got back and I sat down to make that team, THAT is when I found out about the new limitations of the Teambuilder webpage. To this day although we have narrowed down the potential cities on the PFL official twitter account (@GO_PFL), we haven’t announced the winner. Once we do though I’ll no doubt have to do the team swapping like I mentioned earlier with our Kansas City Whatevers and St. Louis Examples.

All of the PDFL implications aside the realization that I no longer had an unlimited sandbox to create teams really crushed me. The PFL was originally started so I had football to play while I gathered all my stats I obsessed over between college football seasons on the same video game. This league grew to be somehow a creative outlet that involved FOOTBALL. Can you imagine a more perfect combination for me?

Even if I was to go weeks without playing a game I would see a logo and think, ‘That would look perfect with....’ or ‘how about a great lakes division with Milwaukee and St. Louis’ or ‘Maybe someday my stepdaughter will teach my daughter the ropes as she makes HER way through the PDFL. I can picture her now, learning with purple nail polished fingernails against the digital backdrop of a little Kansas town her big sister and I had picked so many years ago. From that to, ‘Oh hey that logo is cool! Oh wait....’ (sadness ensues)

So literally seeing cool team logos made me sad, and still does. That sucks.

Yes I can still swap teams in and out like the Kansas City/St. Louis. This is a huge pain though. I have an algorithm that changes which teams get better or worse after a given season, that would be a nightmare if I added more teams.

Annoyance aside, one has to wonder how long before EA pulls the plug completely? Yes I would still have the teams saved on my xbox but they would be static, stuck in whatever state they were last saved in,...forever…...pretty bleak future. I thought about this for awhile, and just figured I would play it out, when the time finally comes, it just comes.

Then I remembered my search for a game for a spring league back in that February before the world changed so much. A game I had dismissed pretty much completely. Axis Football. In the course of about 3 or 4 years the game has gone from a flash game in a browser to a full fledged on-the-brink-of-released-on-consoles status.

In fact it was announced until a few days ago that this year's version WOULDN’T be released to consoles, just the PC instead. I am completely fine with that. In addition and to their credit, they have embraced the same model as the PFL. Yes the game features 32 teams but they aren’t just different enough from their NFL counterparts to avoid being sued by EA’s lawyers. They have embraced creating new teams and made tools to help users create teams. It’s yet to be seen if I can create more than 32 teams. I’ve actually asked the main developer but as with most things I write, my email to him was pages long and he didn’t address that particular query immediately.

You see with EA having the exclusive rights to both the NFL and NCAA (even though they can’t use NCAA license), everyone else just stopped making games. So their technology is stuck in 2007 or whatever year EA got the exclusive license.

I seem to be in the minority here, but their is a prevalent attitude in America that if it isn’t NFL or NCAA Division I, and even then it has to be a power five conference (ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac 12, SEC), then it doesn’t matter. I can’t stand that attitude but it stops MOST people from touching anything without an officially NFL sanctioned logo on it.

As EA has fine tuned Madden into a photo realistic license to print money, everyone else is left in the dust making games featuring teams that aren’t QUITE their NFL counterparts, like the Atlanta Blackbirds instead of Falcons, but with the same color scheme. Just different enough to not get sued. And they always fail because they don’t have the unlimited resources EA has. But could Axis,.....might Axis….just the idea they are still out there, gives me hope.

I’m not saying Axis will one day compete with EA, but yesterday I started beta for this year’s version of AXIS football. As was stated over and over the game isn’t a finished product, but maybe, just maybe it will be by the time my stepdaughter is ready to teach my daughter the ropes in the dying light of the living room on a digital field in some small Kansas town.

A League For Spring

As I write this the chilly winds of a Nebraska February howl angrily outside, spraying my bedroom window with light swaths of subzero bitter and sharp snow.

Aside from enjoying the warmth and coziness of my dwelling, anyone who knows me knows what else I’m doing.

Thinking about football.

Duh.

Yes the bitter chill of February will fade giving way to March and finally April.

April can’t come soon enough around here and not just because of the weather. April means the spring “game”. A game that needs put in quotes because this game is technically a scrimmage. A scrimmage that draws an enormous amount of fans from not just all over the state but in some cases the world.

As crazy as it sounds that 85,000 Nebraska fans from all over the world would converge on Lincoln, NE for a glorified scrimmage, the game will actually be a notch crazier this year.

This will be the public's first chance to see a brand new coach lead the Huskers out of the tunnel for the first time.

The last several spring games with a new coach have all been sellouts.

Regardless of who the coach is I have the same thought every year. This thought always occurs to me as I take in my surroundings while watching the spring game.

Looking up at the sky which appears to be blue for the first time in years, replacing the cold overcast and permanently gray skies of winter. The sun shining bright, and if I’m forgetful, burning a yearly reminder about sunscreen around my wrap around shades. A cool spring breeze is all that remains of winter.

Amidst all of this the same thought occurs to me. “Why don’t they play football here in the spring?”

Sure it’s been tried before but I’ve never seen it in person. And yes there's Arena Football. Don’t get me wrong I LOVE Arena football. As I type this I’m counting down the days until March 27th, the first Arena game. By it’s very name though Arena football doesn't exactly take advantage of the beautiful outdoors of spring.

In the spirit of the criminally footballess spring I am moving forward with a fictional spring league of my own.

Before this footballess spring injustice sprang to mind I was sitting in the living room. The Xbox 360 was spoken for as usual. I began perusing the net for a PC based football game I could play sans Xbox.

This search took me deep into the night.

Finally, I stumbled upon Front Office Football 7 described as a “spreadsheet” game. I think that does the game a great injustice. Sure there are no graphics and it’s basically a football “Tycoon” game. But a spreadsheet is something you use to help balance your checkbook, or other simple such things, not micromanage your own Pro Football Team. Even the “Tycoon” moniker doesn’t do this game much justice. The game is so complex and deep. As a programmer I can appreciate the complexity of the algorithms behind the scenes even if there are no gameplay graphics to drool over.

Despite the impressive depth of this game, by the time I had put the demo through its paces, this spring football idea had crept into my mind and I had to admit Front Office Football 7 wouldn’t do the trick.

I may pay for Front Office Football 7 eventually, but any league I make out of it won’t be a “spring” league.

Instead, I have decided to fall back on EA NCAA Football and it’s in-depth Teambuilder website.

The Teambuilder website allows you to upload a logo and edit just about every aspect of your fictional team, including picking a stadium for your team to play in.

Before I jump into the teams I’m making in Teambuilder, I should take a step back. Around the time the UFL was stumbling out of the gates, several other leagues were in the works, some more intriguing and memorable than others. None of these leagues played a single down (except the UFL) but one such league’s concept caught my attention. So much so that I remember this never-to-be league’s concepts to this day.

The concept was to play in moderate sized college towns with big name programs. Nebraska and Tennessee are the only that I can remember. I’m sure if I had the desire I could do some digging and could find the name of this almost league, but for now I like the idea of letting the mystery live on (at least for a while).

In addition to using the stadiums of some big name college teams (which you can decide to use in Teambuilder )  these teams would adorn the colors of their home stadium (Red and White for Nebraska, Orange and White for Tennessee) and the roster would feature former players from that stadium’s university. I recall that they even specified that only former players who earned a degree could play in this league. That is so much the right thing to do no wonder this league never played a down.

The final nugget of interestingness is that the teams would have no mascot, nicknames or logos. Teams would just be “Nebraska” or “Tennessee”. I know this sounds lazy or perhaps unexciting, but I find the desire to do something so different, so simplistic it’s borderline genius. I like the idea of focusing on the location, the venue, players and especially the game of football itself.

The other reason this appeals to me is that I’ve spent my entire life creating fictional teams and leagues. At some point fatigue sets in. You can only come up with so many team names to go with Lincoln, Omaha, Sioux Falls/City etc. before the mental team name generator gears in your skull grind to a halt.

This seems to happen whenever I find another football game or football sim. I get so stuck on thinking up names and things for this newest league it sometimes feels like that annoying song that is stuck in your head. When all is said and done I vow never to fall into this “New League” trap again. Sooner or later I’m knee deep in the “New League” creation cycle and I’m laying in bed thinking ‘Lincoln….Ravens?.....Lions?.....”

So the idea of a team just called “Nebraska” with simple uniforms that tie into the local team seems brilliant to me.

Work has already begun on this spring league but as you may recall the point of all of this was to make a league I could play on my computer. Lucky for me I have a tecmo league I could play, but I'm hankering to start a Front Office Football 7 league. I’ll have to come up with 32 team names and locations...it’s going to be a long night….