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NFL Head Coach

As a Minnesota Vikings fan, it’s been an off-season of turmoil. Still within the first year under new owner Zygi Wilf, I’ve seen my purple finish with a winning record, fire Coach Mike Tice anyway, ship injured franchise QB Daunte Culpepper off to Miami for only a second-round pick one season after shipping franchise WR Randy Moss off to the Raiders for similarly-measly returns, watched as new coach Brad Children was hired and proceeded to clean house, witnessed one GM hired and then fired within a couple months, saw a great stadium deal proposed and turned down simply because the state had already awarded two other teams stadiums, and witnessed a draft in which no adequate replacement for Daunte Culpepper was drafted.

After an off-season like that – and it’s not even over – it’s enough to make any pigskin fan wish he or she could have made some of those called, instead of the “powers that be.” Well, my friend, EA Sports has heard your exasperation and responded with NFL Head Coach, an NFL football game that focuses exclusively on allowing the player to take on the role of an NFL head coach. But wait, you say, shouldn’t something like that just be an extra mode in Madden and not a separate game?

Not if you’re EA Sports and you’ve just paid a bundle for an NFL-exclusive license and need some way to bilk— err, sorry about that. What I meant to say was, not when you’re building a game with as much depth and detail as EA Sports latest work of blinding sports savvy and genius, NFL Head Coach! (Now will someone tell EA’s corporate lawyers to slowly put down the bazookas aimed at my head? God, they didn’t even GIVE us a review copy, I had to but this myself… Yeesh!)

Paranoia aside, NFL Head Coach really does offer a completely different experience than Madden. For example, I was playing the game for over 11 hours before I even reached the first pre-season game. Am I a moron who takes 20 minutes to decide everything? Nope. The game is just simply that detailed and deep. You see, unlike Madden NFL, NFL Head Coach doesn’t give you direct control over the players. You can’t “magic play” your way to the Super Bowl by utilizing only a couple solid plays and your own personal mastery of Dual Shock 2 controls. No, to be successful in NFL Head Coach, you actually have to understand football. That’s because NFL Head Coach is strategy-football, not controller-action football.

When you first fire up NFL Head Coach, your first task is to create your coach. While stopping short of the finely-tuned controls and variety available in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and WWE Smackdown vs. Raw, NFL Head Coach does offer a fairly powerful character creation system. Once you’re done tweaking his look, it’s on to your interview. You get to choose one team to interview with; it consists of about six questions or so. Yet you’ll typically get job offers from about five teams, even though you interviewed with only one. The quality of your initial contract will vary by team; generally, if the team you want to take over is fairly successful already, the money they offer will be lower and the length of the contract shorter. The more desperate a team is to find a good coach, the more they’ll add money and years to the contract to sweeten the pot. While most teams who are willing to hire you are not in ideal shape, the stuck-in-the-dolldrums teams generally have less top-flight talent, worse assistant coaches and coordinators, and have more rebuilding to do.

Once hired, one of the first things you’ll do is sit down with the team owner and talk; he’ll lay out his expectations and then free you up to go about rebuilding his shambles of a team. If you’re a beginner, go for a shorter contract with a better team; even though the expectations are higher, you’ll need the time to familiarize yourself with the game’s complex systems, so it’s better if you only have to fire 2-3 assistants and coordinators and replace them, rather than, say… seven. The same goes for talent; until you’re familiar with the game, it’s better to take on a team that’s only a couple key players away from post-season success, rather than a team that needs two or three seasons of rebuilding in order to move into contention.

All the post-season phases are basically done right, and you’ll soon realize what a 365-day-a-year task it is to coach an NFL team. You have a draft class to scout, free agents to assess, your own free agents to assess and attempt to retain or let go, a draft to prepare for and conduct, trades proposal to make and review, disgruntled veterans to manage, play books to review, depth charts to study, needs to fill, players to cut, players to add, practices to conduct, egos to massage from the lowest assistant right up to the owner, a training camp to manage, and goals to reach in each and every phase of the post-season. And all that’s before you play even your first meaningless pre-season game, let alone a game that counts.

It’s easy to log 24 hours or more into NFL Head Coach and not even reach the regular season. While this may all seem a bit arduous to the casual gamer, for the dedicated NFL control freak, it’s a wet dream come to life. Of course, there are some shortcuts; you can sim past some stuff if you’ve reached your goals for a particular phase, though doing so generally can put you at a disadvantage at times; for example, after reaching my unrestricted free agent goals, I simmed past a lot of the post-season to reach the draft quicker; big mistake! I had missed the weekly opportunity to scout NFL Draft prospects and therefore ended up with a lot more gambles in the later rounds than one might desire. So even with the ability to sim past some tasks, NFL Head Coach really isn’t a game for those who are impatient.

It’s also not a game for next-gen game players, apparently, as the game has been released to only Xbox, PS2 and PC. There are no portable versions for DS or PSP, and certainly no 360, PS3 or Wii versions; at least not announced and probably not at all this season. That’s unfortunate, as the game tends to run a bit sluggish on PS2, and only a bit less so on Xbox; not only would the game look better on 360, it would run a lot faster with quicker loading times. At least EA Sports was smart enough to link the game into its Madden franchise by offering the ability to export any team you micromanage into powerhouse status and then import it into Madden. Now if only those NCAA Football draft classes were able to be ported into NFL Head Coach as well as Madden, we’d really have something here!

The graphics are about on par with Madden in terms of the in-game stuff; or at least on par with PS2/Xbox-level graphics. The collision detection is improved, benefiting from the lack of any direct player control. One of the disappointing things is that the NFL Head Coach box trumpets EA Sports’ new ESPN license, and yet there’s virtually nothing in the game that really showcases any ESPN content; there’s not even an in-game announcer.

Unlike Madden, NFL Head Coach does not offer a wide variety of skill levels; you must face down solid AI right from the get-go; no “rookie” mode to get you thinking you know more about football than you actually do. As a bonus, the game comes pre-packed with EA Sports’ fantasy football commissioner software, though I’m in several fantasy leagues and am aware of virtually no one who uses it. Still, for fantasy beginners, it’s a nice bonus, I suppose.

In the end, NFL Head Coach isn’t a game for younger, more action-oriented button-mashing games. This is a thinking-person’s NFL game, more of a challenge along the lines of a chess match than a paintball match. Therefore, I suspect it’s audience will be limited in the early going, especially among those who pick it up expecting a Madden-style game and not liking the lack of direct player control. Oh well; to each his own. For those who love the mental strategy aspect of football, NFL Head Coach is actually a pretty decent title; and yes, those of us who qualify for such distinction can easily find faults with the game that could be corrected in a future edition.

For example, the game still limits your roster, at all times, to about 45 players, rather than the NFL’s actual roster size of 53. And there’s no allowance made for larger preseason rosters of up to 70. If this were added in, gamers could relive the sweet agony of deciding who to keep and who to cut as the preseason games roll on. Should your Rams keep Isaac Bruce, even though he’s aging, and cut the fresh young rookie? Or should Bruce be traded for the solid defensive end you need so badly, allowing younger receivers to step up to the challenge of filling in behind Torry Holt in the Rams receiving corps?

Other items on my MIA features list: no training camp training for kickers and punters, no way to shuffle first string out in favor of second and third stringers in preseason games to help determine position battles, (But since your roster is so artificially low, there really are no position battles, so I guess it doesn’t matter.) no real integration of ESPN content, no “off the field” antics that affect a player’s eligibility to play, no way to import draft files from the NCAA game, no good in-game substitution controls, and, well, I could go on, but the micromanagers in the audience get the point; more than ever, a game like NFL Head Coach inspires folks like me to say, “If your motto, ‘If it’s in the game, it’s in the game,’ is true, EA, then why oh why is there so much MISSING from your games?”

Oops, there are those EA Sports snipers again, putting those red dots on my forehead. So for now, I guess I better just wrap this up with a final assessment; despite all the MIA features, NFL Head Coach really is a new style of football game that console gamers might not be used to, though PC gamers have seen games of this sort before, only without the fancy graphics. Though it’s a long, ponderous trek through an entire season – I’m wagering at least 100 hours per season, here, folks, and you could easily get lost in something like the play design feature and make a single season last even longer – it is ultimately a satisfying game that arguably deserves to stand alone and apart from the Madden title.

While far too deep, long and complicated for the average or younger fan, true sports buffs could get so lost in a game like this, that they could conceivably actually miss the real NFL season. That’s right, gals: you’re about to become sports widows 24/7/365. It’s like being married to a real-life head coach, only without the multimillion-dollar salary! Send those cards, letters and death threats to EA Sports, not me, okay? Thanks!

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Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Jun 30th, 2006 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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