Sometimes, no matter how much you put a player on the practice field, his attribute ratings just won't rise much, and he'll inexplicably start stinking it up on the field. No player in the game stays at his max potential at all times, and only by giving players a healthy dose of practice-field time can you get them to where they should be. The more you practice up individual players, the higher their attributes will go. You get 10 reps per practice section, and you can send any combination of first-, second-, or third-string offensive and defensive squads onto the field. Between every game, you'll schedule a myriad of practices, from simple one-on-one, noncontact drills, to full-on 11-on-11 contact runs. As a coach, you don't just show up on game day and call the plays. Inflexibility aside, the sheer amount of stuff you can do in Head Coach is enough to make your head spin-at least at first. So if you want to assign three players to the first team before the next day's practice, you aren't going to have enough time to move them all.
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You only get time for two specific tasks during these free periods, and each single move on your depth chart counts as one of the tasks. And even depth-chart management is too tightly regimented here. The same goes for designing plays, calling up potential coach hires, and just about everything else that isn't checking your e-mail, reading brief news bits from around the league on NFL.com, or managing your depth chart. You can only sign players during a designated "sign players" appointment. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do here. The only "free" time you get in the game is during some brief office-hour periods each day. There isn't a ton of difference in the physical and facial attributes available, but you can certainly dress him up in some snazzy, team-colored sweat suits or a Tom Landry hat. You'll also get to play dress-up with your coach, albeit in a somewhat limited fashion. You simply pick your favorite team, and you'll soon find yourself entertaining offers from that team, as well as several others. The premise here is that you're either the offensive or defensive coordinator of the Super Bowl-winning Pittsburgh Steelers, and now you're a hot commodity on the head-coach market. You begin the game's career mode by building your very own coach. But if you're the type that can't get enough of the management mindset and loves to be the brains behind the brawn, no matter how much micromanagement might be involved, then NFL Head Coach is the kind of game that should be right up your alley. If you're the kind of casual-minded player that prefers to skip through most of the menu-based tasks of a Madden franchise mode and doesn't have a ton of patience for busywork, then you're going to find yourself frequently frustrated and annoyed with Head Coach's slavish dedication toward micromanagement. One thing to make clear from the get-go is that this is not a game for casual Madden fans. This is a franchise mode on serious performance enhancers-the kinds that lead to a major step-up in athletic ability but also harbor a few ill side effects.
While it would have been easy for EA to simply take its existing franchise-mode model from Madden, beef up a few aspects, and shove it onto retail shelves, NFL Head Coach isn't that. Still, there's a good, solid foundation for a better future rooted in Head Coach's design, and as a first stab at the genre, it gets more right than it does wrong.įinally, the armchair coach in all of us is given its chance to shine in NFL Head Coach.
Too little freedom and too much busywork often combine to make the flow of the game overly sluggish, and the on-field action isn't nearly as exciting or enjoyable as you'd hope. While all of this sounds wonderful on paper, Head Coach isn't quite a smashing success. From the off-season to the Super Bowl, you'll be dictating everything from practice schedules to contract negotiations, and you can even call the plays in an on-field simulation using the Madden engine. Of course, hardcore fans aren't necessarily satiated by such casual fare, and now EA is out to prove it can play the management game, too, in NFL Head Coach, a deep, involving management sim that puts you in charge of practically every aspect of a team's operation. Some of the more dedicated sports fans have taken to any of the assorted menu-based managers available for the PC, and in Europe, multiple publishers have turned their popular soccer franchises into successful management simulations on both the PC and consoles, but over here, most fans have been satisfied with a new franchise mode in Madden every year, and little else. Sports-management simulations aren't exactly a hot item among North American audiences these days.