I’m a Philadelphia Eagles fan. Have been for over 30 years. So when I stumbled across Second Season Pro Football I knew I had to replay a fun Eagles season. 2017 was the obvious choice, since they finally won a Super Bowl, but I thought 2004 might be more fun, the year they got to the “big game” and lost to the cheaters from New England. My original plan was to just play through the Eagles games, but after a couple games and getting used to how it plays, I decided why not play every NFL game? No idea how long it will take me to get through this, but I’m going to do my best to see it through.
A few house rules or changes I’m using are:
- No Injuries. Whatever players the sheet has as starters I’m using for the entire season. This is mostly for my own sanity to not have to keep track of it.
- I’m only calling offensive plays for the Eagles, the defense and the rest of the league I’m using the optional Solo Play Calling Chart.
- In other seasons they have a team tendency rating for teams to call or defend run/pass plays. 2004 doesn’t have it, so I did math and came up with something to assign to all the teams.
- I’m also using the RB and receiver usage provided on the sheets, however for receivers they based the usage on receptions, which doesn’t make sense to me. Instead I went through every team and based the usage on targets and adjusted accordingly. Probably won’t make a big difference at the end of the day, but I’m anal that way.
- Also using the optional Penalty and Fumble charts.
- Scoring each game and tracking stats using the awesome program Pro Football Helper. It’s a life saver for tracking everything.
Think that’s everything. Stay tuned here for my slow progression. I’ll update leaderboards, stats and standings after each game week and provide a little write up and box score describing each game.