NFL Head Coach ‘09
Release Date: 09/02/2008*
Developer: Tiburon
Playing Head Coach is a mammoth experience, more akin to playing an RPG than playing a sports game. Therefore, it’s not for everyone. There are countless things you need to keep track of, and while the Coach’s Clipboard allows you to see any of those things at a moment’s notice, this is not a game you’ll be able to enjoy playing while turning your brain off. Head Coach 09 requires immersion in the game in order to enjoy it, which means that football fans will either love the experience or hate it.
For the purposes of this hands-on, we chose a team and played through an entire offseason, all the way through Week 1 of the regular season. While we were tempted to play as our World Champion New York Giants, it made more sense to choose a team who had an eventful offseason and see how we would do things differently -- with that in mind, we chose the arch-rival Philadelphia Eagles. Starting the game in off-season mode, or February, allows you to go through the 2008 NFL offseason and re-do free agency and the draft process; for those who liked their team’s offseason moves and just want to move onto training camp and playing games, you can start at the preseason as well.
Entering the game’s career mode for the first time can be overwhelming -- literally, there are dozens and dozens of screens of information you can access, with each player featuring team-specific ratings not featured in Madden. Instead of the standard player ratings that are universal to all teams, each player has ratings relative to his team and system, which include everything from playbook knowledge to versatility. With the Eagles, for example, the West Coast offensive scheme and receiving backfield approach employed by Andy Reid made Kevin Faulk a valuable proposition. Although he might be a 70 overall for the Raiders or the Vikings, his skillset made him an 87 overall for our system, making the price of a fourth- and fifth-round pick for him an easy decision.
Unlike Madden, the trade process in Head Coach is entirely different. You’ll receive offers for your players listed on your trade block, and be able to make offers for players on other team’s trade blocks, but players who aren’t listed as available simply aren’t. You can’t blow the other team away with an offer if they don’t want to trade their players. The negotiation process isn’t the simple methodology employed in Madden, but instead a detailed back and forth where each team proposes one of many offers, gets a response, and can counter or choose to walk away.
The same method is true in free agency, one of the first big events you’ll face in the offseason. Unlike the real-life Eagles, we chose to pass on Asante Samuel and instead went after outside linebacker Lance Briggs, one of the players available who fit the simple, logical goals we’d been assigned by our owner to achieve in the offseason: Acquire an outside linebacker with a rating greater than 85.
The clipboard prompts you to either bid on Briggs or pass, which it does for every free agent available in the offseason (more valuable free agents come first and expect more, while lesser free agents show up at the end of the process and ask for less money). If you choose to join the bidding, you enter what’s essentially a mini-game similar to an eBay auction, where you have one minute to outbid the rest of the teams interested in the player in question. Interested teams will come and go as the process continues, with the cap hit and your cap room changing with each bid. If you win the bidding, you then negotiate a contract based upon those terms with the player, factoring in signing bonuses and various incentives. If you fail to complete the process, the player goes back into the free agent pool.
The drafting process, meanwhile, allows you to not only scout top players in the traditional Madden style, but also allows you to focus upon players throughout the draft. In fact, sample goals for the draft including finding a player with a certain potential rating in the later rounds, so your approval rating will be penalized if you don’t look at guys in the later rounds.
Scouting involves four steps, with each level unlocking a particular aspect of the relevant player’s ratings. The Senior All-Star process reveals the player’s initial rating, with Combine interviews revealing more specific values. The Pro Day process, allowing you to scout one college out of several listed per day for 20 days, unlocks all ratings except for potential, while the individual scouting sessions right before the draft unlock a player’s potential rating. Better general managers get to do more scouting than weaker ones, which is bad news for Lions fans. Throughout the process, mock drafts and the video popups of the NFL Network’s Adam Schefter give you details on who’s hot and who’s not around the league.
On Draft Day itself, you have the opportunity to trade up for any pick, trade down when it’s your turn, or on picks where you’re not involved, use the "Pick the Pick" option to try and guess what the pick is going to be, for a small boost in Approval. Your coaches and general manager will recommend players to you, and will lose some faith in you if you don’t select the player they want.
Of course, there has to be a payoff for putting all this work in, and that comes in during gameday. After setting your roster, defining your depth chart, picking the inactive players, and defining your playbook, you get to actually see how they’d play out on Sunday. The game uses the same engine as Madden, so expect similar gameplay to EA’s standard-bearer. You can choose to simulate each game, use EA’s SuperSim methodology, or "play" (watch) the game unfold from six different camera angles.
When choosing to play the game, you’ll get messages from your offensive and defensive coordinator, and react to significant plays by choosing to be emotional or calm. The game features six different camera angles, but no announcing, since head coaches don’t get commentary during the game, either. In the most important moments of the game, the screen focuses on you and time stops as the "Defining Moment" dialog comes up, giving you a choice between two decisions (such as "Go for it" or "Kick a field goal"), detailing what the effects on your approval will be depending upon your decision, all before allowing you to pick a play.
You can see detailed specifics on how successful each play is and how well your players have learned those plays, something you define in practice on a day-by-day basis (where you can have practice work on a specific player, a specific play, a series of plays, a unit, or just the scheme as a whole). One of the game’s coolest features, though, is the in-game play editor, which allows you to edit plays and add them to your playbook on the fly. The play editor is far deeper than what we’ve seen in Madden, and considering that the game allows you to combine the play editor with making adjustments on the fly, the ability to exploit a weak link on the opposition with a "Fly" route or blitzing a new quarterback with a fresh twist provides a game that already has significant amounts of replayability with even more real-time intelligence.
For those people who complain that Madden is the same experience year-after-year, Head Coach 09 is certainly something they’ll want to check out. While the game still requires more extensive testing and gameplay to see how effective its mechanics and AI are, the experience of playing Head Coach 09 is drastically different than either Madden, the original Head Coach, or any other game from the series. Casual football fans will struggle to get into Head Coach 09, ironic considering EA’s focus on playability for the casual gamer this year, but it won’t be because Head Coach 09 has a complicated GUI or difficult to comprehend control scheme. Instead, Head Coach 09 is a game that demands your attention and focus, and requires a level of football fandom that, simply, not every football fan has. For fantasy football mavens and serious football fans, though, Head Coach 09 appears to be a game that will be very, very appetizing.
*This is the most current estimate to the game’s release date; however, as always, release dates are subject to change without warning.
