How many times have you watched your team run an offensive play and yelled "don't call that now!" at the screen? If this doesn't happen to you, you've probably either got a few 100% slider settings or you're using rules.

Rules can act either in addition to your more basic planning or can govern your entire gameplan. There are a few fundamentals to understand however:
1 - Rules are super easy to use.
2 - Yes they are. Ridiculously easy.
3 - You can start small

Using rules to govern your offense will improve your results. No, it won't make a bad roster into a bowl-winner because there are good rosters using rules effectively who'll still stomp you. They also won't stop you committing penalties or having a bad run of luck, but they can reduce the number of sacks, tackles for loss and interceptions while increasing first downs and touchdowns instead of field goals.

Never written a rule before? No problem, let's get started. This is going to be a step by step rule that you'll be able to observe in action if you follow it exactly. Let's go.

Click on Add Rule

1. At the top is an empty name box. As you write more rules you'll want to develop some kind of naming convention here, but since this is your first time out let's just call it "Test Rule". For Type we'll leave it as Offense.

2. Conditions. This section of the rules popup asks you "under which circumstances do you want this rule to run".

2a - Down. Which down (or downs) do you want this rule to run on? For our test rule, we'll choose 2nd Down. Select it from the dropdown menu. If you want this rule to run on multiple downs click the Add Down button until you have all the necessary downs included.

2b - Distance. This is the measure of how many yards are needed to get either a first down or touchdown, whichever is less. It's also probably the least helpful part if you use the basic options. You have the option of Short, Medium, Long or Yardage. Short/Medium/Long are dynamic measurements - they mean different things depending on which down it is. For that reason I choose to only ever use Yardage. Select it now. This then gives you 2 sliders to play with To Go From [slider] through [slider]. As this is a test rule just to see it working let's select To Go From to zero Through 30. This is effectively saying "I don't care how many yards are needed to get a first down, we're doing this."

2c - Location on field. Pretty straightforward stuff. Again, my preference is to avoid using the predefined values (Own Goal - 25, Own 25 - 50 etc) and set my own. Select Custom and we get a couple of dropdown menus with a slider to accompany each. For this test rule we want to use it in a low-risk area of the field so select From Own 40 To Opponent 30. This is a 30 yard chunk of the field where this rule will apply.

2d - Quarter. Easy. We're going to choose Second Quarter, as it's just a test. As with all other rules if you want to set additional conditions here just add another quarter, or you can have the rule apply for the whole game.

2e - Time. How much time left in the quarter? We won't override your end of half play here, so we'll opt for 15:00 to 7:00. That gives us an 8 minute window where this rule will trigger.

2f - Score. It's still in the game, so we'll call this no matter what. Select Down 29+ to Up 29+.

Quick summary: we're halfway there. Once you've down this a few times you'll have breezed through the above in under 2 minutes. What we've told the game so far is as follows:
"If we have the ball and we're on 2nd down with any number of yards to go but the ball is somewhere between our 40 and their 30 in the second quarter with more than 7 minutes to go, no matter the score we're going to do the following..."

Sure, the summary is a little cumbersome, but you can see already that it allows you to be really precise... and there are some occasions where you might want to be precise. The last minute of the game when you're down by 6? On 4th down and less than a yard to go? Why would you let the AI decide what to do?

So we know when we want to do the thing, let's now decide what the thing is we want to do.

3. Decisions. This is where we're going to refine the possible plays your offense will now run.

3a - Play Type. Good ole friendly sliders. These are balanced against each other, so if you set them all to maximum you'll end up with a 20% chance of each play type being used. That's not worth rulesetting for (unless you want to purposefully mislead scouts and play very randomly). In this example case we're going to choose one play type only. Your choice. I'd recommend a run because even if you only get 2 yards it still makes the third down a little easier, whereas an incomplete pass gives you a bigger mountain to climb. Sure, you might fumble, you might be tackled for loss but if you've put the work in on your playbook those should be out-of-the-ordinary occurrences. You could also decide to go Long Pass for this test. Really low likelihood of success, higher than normal odds of a sack or interception, but it'll be interesting to watch, right?

3b - Personnel. This part is critical. If you opt to use 5WR in personnel but you don't have any 005 plays in your playbook, this won't do anything. Again, you can mix the different personnel groups in here and it's less daft to do so than before but as this test is to see the game call exactly what you want we'll pick just one or two, most likely being 212 and 113 or 203 - you know your playbook (or you ****** should) so know what to choose. If you genuinely don't know what to choose, Discord - where you'll find out that actually, you do know what to choose.

Quick summary: For my test rule I've chosen to Long Pass 100% of the time using a 1RB, 1TE, 3WR formation (aka 113).

4. Hit Save

5. Time for a quick check you've not done something dumb.

5a. Click on the rule. Read down through each item. Make sure it's what you want.

5b. In the rule listing, the 4th button says "View Plays" click on it. It will pop up all the plays this rules says you want to run on that rule with the likelihood they're called indicated by the red bar. Bigger red bar, more likely it's called. If you've no plays listed here, check your playbook then the play type and personnel sections of the rule. If you've no long passes in your playbook you can't call one from a rule.

6. Put the rules in the right order. This only applies if you've more than one rule, but is very important. The highest rule takes priority. If you've two rules that govern what you do on first down and the conditions for both are met the game will apply whichever rule is higher in your list. If you're at the point where you're running multiple rules you've probably figured this out already.


Now sit back and watch. If you get the ball in the second quarter with more than 7 minutes remaining you will call one of the exact plays you asked the game to run. No more goofy playcalling! Awesome!

If there isn't a rule that applies to a particular situation the game will revert to your gameplanning sliders. So, if you don't fancy covering every single situation you don't have to. The way I set my own rules up is that I'll set a default rule for the entire game first - give the mix of run/pass and formations that I want. I then stick that rule right at the bottom of the list. That way I avoid the ambiguity of the sliders. I then add further rules to cover more specific plans. Here are a few of the rules I have:

- What to do if we have the ball inside our own 10 yard line
- What to do if it's 4th down and we're in the opposing half but outside field goal range
- A special rule to call a high-probability of breakaway play while avoiding its overuse
- What to do on first down in the 4th quarter if we're ahead by more than 2 scores
- What to do in the red zone to give us a better chance of a touchdown than a field goal

I've a few more, but as you can see these are pretty specific. They've come into being over multiple seasons after I got fed up of seeing really stupid play calls.


The main takeaway here is that rules are not complicated at all. There are plenty of moving parts, but they're all easy to understand. If you've watched your team play for half a season or more you already understand every part of this puzzle. YES YOU DO. The only thing remaining is to try it out, watch the effect and revise it. You will get it wrong once in a while, in the same way as many of us have accidentally made an offensive lineman the punter in a game, or forgotten to switch the starting QB back in after preseason. Mistakes happen. If you want to stop the AI making you look like a chump, bite the bullet and slap in a rule or two. Don't go mad. You won't know if each rule works properly unless you look for them.

No, there are no guarantees to any of this. And no, it won't make your **** roster into superstars, nor will it stop you getting a crucial penalty. But if you take two evenly matched teams and play them head to head a dozen times, the one running effective rules will win far more often.

Bonus pro-tip: how to score touchdowns instead of kicking field goals.

You're going to have to do some work.

Go back through the last season and look at every touchdown you scored.

Now look at every field goal you kicked that was outside the last minute of the game.

Make notes. What happened on third down? How many yards did you need to go on 4th down? Were you unlucky and got a penalty? Did you come up just short? Were you inside the red zone (the opponent's 20 yard line)?

Draw some conclusions. Here's an example, "If I try to run the ball on 3rd and 4 inside the opposing red zone, I come up short 90% of the time."

You may be stunned to learn that, holy ****, you're doing the same thing over and over again and it isn't working. No, you won't learn anything from one game. You need a full season of data so you can see what you're doing in multiple scenarios against a range of opponents.

Once you find the knucklehead thing that isn't working you can write a rule to change it. More succinctly - if that thing you're doing isn't working, do something else.

I made one change to my gameplan, created one rule and it changed my likelihood of scoring a touchdown when I'm in the red zone 3 times what it was previously. It's not foolproof, and sure, I miss out on some chip shot fieldgoals, but with 4 straight seasons of winning records I'm good with that. No, I won't tell you what it was. For two reasons: first, your team is not my team. Second, do your own **** work.

There's another rule I use that increased the number of times I actually get into the red zone. On average once more per game. Nope, won't tell you that either. Figure it out. You're smart enough.