davis - maybe I'll fool around a little with some gameplanning - I have had very good results with my method in the new engine, better than with the old one actually, but then again, my method is not exactly chopped liver.  As I said, there are types of teams that changing distro makes more sense for, and types that it makes less sense for, I never really thought about it, but I tend to recruit teams that make distro changing less important.

But given your input, I will take a look at gameplanning with a few of my teams, I think I still remember how - LOL

I think my initial comments, may they live in infamy, were taken a bit too far.

Maybe more along the lines of... by the 6 or 7th game in the season you know what your guys are capable of doing, you should be doing things that you know work well for you.  That doesn't mean set it and forget it.

My comment would go better cased in the frame of mind "changing something that works very well during the season end tournaments" as I have consistantly blown myself out of tournaments by making changes that I thought were better for a team that didn't work.

Posted by bscoresby on 11/30/2010 2:50:00 PM (view original):
I think my initial comments, may they live in infamy, were taken a bit too far.

Maybe more along the lines of... by the 6 or 7th game in the season you know what your guys are capable of doing, you should be doing things that you know work well for you.  That doesn't mean set it and forget it.

My comment would go better cased in the frame of mind "changing something that works very well during the season end tournaments" as I have consistantly blown myself out of tournaments by making changes that I thought were better for a team that didn't work.

I totally disagree about your 6th or 7th game theory. It's exceedingly common for players (and even teams) to significantly over or under perform over a stretch like that. I'd say that it's actually quite difficult to draw truly meaningful conclusions from such a small sample. If given the choice between tweaking my gameplan based on the results of a 6-game stretch or tweaking it based on ratings and ignoring results, I'd opt for the ratings without blinking.

Maybe it's just me- the last 4 seasons in DI I've know from the 6th ot 7th game to the beginning of the NT almost exactly how the team would fare.  I have a pretty good idea of where people are going to end up ratingswise after 1 season.


And since it's not "set and forget" you definately can change them, if your heart desires.

I agree with your premise, but how the team fares overall and individual performance over a short period are very different things. You might be dead on as far as how the team will do overall, but still have very disparate performances from players over the first half dozen games.

Considering I did allow for changing certain things down the road... I think we are saying the same thing.


I rarely see a player over or under perform from the first quarter of the season  to the rest.  And I typically try to schedule my hardest ones first?

the importance of game planning is something i expect we will never all agree upon. guys like OR mostly set it and forget it. other, myself included, think game planning is of extreme importance. but as OR mentioned, in the end, we realized we did things not that much differently.

i will start by saying something i have always failed to communicate effectively in the past, so hopefully i can finally get it right. by far, to me, the #1 importance of game planning is the act of actually assessing the situation, and evaluating the performance of your team. i think the vast majority of coaches can not set a team up perfectly on day 1 and "set and forget it". OR seems to have mastered this. in fact, when i was most intensely game planning, if you watched my game plans in the national tournament, they were usually almost exactly identical. the value of game planning off a team set up right is a totally different argument than game planning in general. i think game planning until you find that right basic setup is one of the most important things you can do.

i think the truth of the matter is, for most teams, the optimal base team setup is very close to optimal for almost any opponent. so if you set your team up perfectly every season on day 1, is game planning very important? i don't think so. but i honestly don't think it is possible to really understand the game without going through a period where you are doing the micromanagement i.e. i dont think you can set a team up right on day 1 until you've got a lot of experience thinking about your team setup and evaluating team performance. i can tell you for sure, even after a dozen titles, the way my teams looked the day before the NT, and they way they looked on day 1 were dramatically different.

outside of the learning aspect, both for the current team and for future similar teams, i still think game planning is worth it. a good 15% of high end teams are specialized enough to really benefit from game planning, to me. some coaches style might result in most of their teams falling outside the 15%, and some might see many in the 15%. i have had maybe 4 teams who won who i was changing the lineup and distro significantly throughout the whole tournament, and am very convinced it was to the benefit of the team. but that was not the norm. but even for the 85% of normal teams, a good 10% of opponents match up against you in a way that you should be making changes, IMO.

that said, i feel like most of the time most coaches make radical changes before they play my team, its hurting them. however, how do you get to the point of making the right adjustments, if you don't get it wrong a bunch of times first? eventually i think it becomes clear that the changes need to be subtle and calculated, if you are changing your distros by more than 1 or 2 points regularly you are almost certainly hurting yourself. 

so i really can see the view point of most of the coaches who posted here. game planning can kill you. or it can make your team that much better. especially a really good team - in a 50/50 matchup, great game planning might push you to 65/35. but i feel in a 90/10 matchup, you can push it to 95%. if you do the math on your chances of winning the NT, the better the team, the more it matters. some will say a great team won because of talent and could do so no matter how they were coached. but if you think that, just look at the great teams in d1 every season, there are always at least 5-10, who are fantastically talented, who really don't get anywhere. to me, its critical to play with your team during the season so you have them set up right by the end. but sadly, at that point, its often best to leave well enough. but not always. and that makes it worth it :)

its also useful to be able to start young players strategically to maximize how good your team is at year's end, instead of having the best regular season you can. i have found its pretty important to play around a bit to strike the right balance between hurting yourself too much and not getting enough time to the young guys who will play important roles in your NT run this year or the next. i used to figure if i didn't drop at least 1 or 2 games each regular season due to gimmicks like that, i wasn't making the most of the opportunity.