Category: In the Trenches Football

My second try at In the Trenches Football got off to an interesting start during the week one replay of the 2024 NFL season. There were a lot of compelling games. The stats were okay. Scoring: Teams averaged 24.4 points per game, just a bit too high. The actual week 1 scoring average (which was…

Halfway through week 6 and I realized that the last round of updates went a little bit too far. Possessions are down, but probably not quite enough. But scoring went up — way too far up. The seven games averaged 54 points a contest, when it was 42 for the actual season and 37 for…

It was another good week of play, although the most highly anticipated game of the week (Dallas-San Francisco) was a dud. Eight of the 14 results matched real life, but the other six were won by the better team on paper. I had thought that the game boards were in pretty good shape, but scoring…

In the first three weeks of play, I didn’t roll a single overtime game. That changed in week four, as there were four of them, all of which saw exciting endings to regulation. The results were decent — the actual winning team was victorious in 10 of the 16 games. Some of the other six…

Sixteen more games went into the books and I’m feeling good about the gameplay, although the numbers say there’s probably still too much punting and not quite enough of everything else. Week three averaged 38.8 points per game (it was 44.2 in the real week three, and 43.6 for the season). We had 1.3 interceptions…

After overhauling some of the ratings and doing some work on the drive charts, the next eight games of week 2 were played. Results were favorable, and I think the changes to the ratings paid dividends, but some things are not yet where they need to be. For whatever it’s worth, six of the eight…

After some tweaks to the play charts, I made it halfway through week 2 before deciding more changes needed to be made. Scoring’s down. Turnovers are still too low. Favorites aren’t winning enough of the time. More work is being done to the play charts, and I’ve done some revamping of the offensive and defensive…

After the first 16 test games, it looks like In the Trenches has promise. There were some exciting games played, and I think the general concept may work. Should I be concerned that only nine of the 16 actual winners were victorious here? Maybe. The sample size may be too small at this point. I’ll…