Offensive Profile Design:

Setting Up a Basic Profile

by Jeff Bryk

In the first quarter a team trails early by 7. Its drive stalls, leaving it with fourth and one on its own 45. The team runs a surprise fake punt that doesn’t work. The punter is sacked back at his own 35 yard line and the team’s opponent takes the ball in for the score and a commanding two-touchdown lead a few plays later.

Trailing by two late in the fourth quarter after a touchdown, a team lines up to kick the PAT. The team converts to cut the deficit to one and tries an onside kickoff. The team fails to recover the kick and its opponent runs out the clock for the win.

In both these examples a single call had disastrous results for the team that made it. More often than not, these kinds of calls come as a surprise to the coaches running the teams. We’ve seen variations on this theme in NPL many times, and I’d wager these scenarios happen in nearly every online commissioner-sim FBPro league at least once or twice a season.

There are things that cannot be controlled in FBPro, like that onside kick I mentioned before–if the game had decided to boot it deep, the coach would only have been able to look on in horror. But most crucial calls can be controlled. This tutorial will set out some basics for setting up profiles that make sensible decisions in key situations. Some of this information will be very elementary, as NPL sometimes has coaches who are altogether new to the game. It may not be all-inclusive, but it should be a good start.

Entering the PPP Editor

Fire up FBPro. Under Game Type choose League. Click on the Team Info button and choose Coaching. Click on the Edit Plans and Profiles button. This will take you into the play editor, where you can create and edit plays, playbooks and playcalling. We’re interested in playcalling, which is done through the coaching profiles.

Click on the Coaching Profile button it will prompt you to select either offense or defense. For the sake of this tutorial, we will choose offense. Load up OFF1. This will take you to the coaching profile screen, which will be labeled as such in the upper right hand corner of the window. Click on the Display button and choose Play Types.

Editing Profiles

For beginners, here is a quick overview of how the playcalling works (there is more detail in the Coaching Profile Editor section of the manual–hit F1 if you do not have the paper manual).

Calling play types