In your opinion, does better game planning trump good recruiting or does good recruiting trump good game planning? Do these coaches who win multiple national championships have a better game plan or do they recruit outside their minds and beat people with talent?

Talent trumps gameplanning, but without good gameplanning, you won't win a championship except in fluke years (like my only championship!). If you have great talent and poor gameplanning, you can be a perennial top 15 team. If you have bad recruiting and good gameplanning, I suspect you'll be at the fringe of the top 25.

Recruiting talent is the most important part of the game, but once you have the talent, you must gameplan well in order to put them in a position to succeed. I don't believe anyone winning championships consistently is a wizard at only one of these aspects.

I'm of the opinion that it is 70% talent, 20% game planning, and 10% luck. Talent almost always wins out. Game planning is important to the extent you are playing near equal talent. Then you have those games where you have better talent and may even have a better game plan, but fortune goes the other way. My best team got knocked out of the playoffs in the 2nd round to a vastly inferior team. On the flip-side, I had no business winning my first NC, but I got lucky in two playoff games against much better teams.

It depends on the level somewhat. At Division I-A, where the talent among human-coached teams is often nearly equal, gameplanning becomes a more important separator. At Division III, you will see a wider distribution of talent due to many coaches just learning how to recruit and the overwhelming number of unpredictable SIM teams.

Long held debate and if I had to put a guess, around 90% will say that talent outweighs gameplanning. I'm not one of those 90%. I would say that neither talent nor gameplanning is the leader in the clubhouse. I've argued and put up various examples supporting my position on the matter, so I won't dive back into those here. I will say though that at the D2 and D3 level, the talent is disparate enough that talent likely has a greater edge. At the D1A and D1AA level, I believe gameplanning has the edge.

My two cents - Talent gets you to the dance, but you won't get the goodnight kiss without gameplanning.

If you only aspire to be a top 10 team, then talent is enough. However, I think championships are won with gameplanning. When you get deep in playoffs, there is less of a difference in talent. That's where gameplanning can be a difference maker.

As someone mentioned above, what level you're at makes a big difference. I think WIS balanced the game based on Div 1A. The lower levels struggle football sim wise because of it, and because of that, at those levels talent trumps game planning by a wide margin. The gap closes the higher level you go.

So when is the talent gap too big to overcome? If I have a team with a 54 roster value rating(Guess), could I beat a team with a 60 roster rating(Guess) if I scout and gameplan properly?

Posted by bigkeithdog on 1/6/2017 12:18:00 AM (view original):
So when is the talent gap too big to overcome? If I have a team with a 54 roster value rating(Guess), could I beat a team with a 60 roster rating(Guess) if I scout and gameplan properly?

Yes. Myself and Orangepace agree on the game planning aspect. I don't think people realize how big of a difference it makes. A six point roster advantage based on guess is not that hard to overcome with the right set up.

Posted by bigkeithdog on 1/6/2017 12:18:00 AM (view original):
So when is the talent gap too big to overcome? If I have a team with a 54 roster value rating(Guess), could I beat a team with a 60 roster rating(Guess) if I scout and gameplan properly?

Possible? Yes. But, if you were the coach for both teams, running same/similar gameplans/offense/defense, I think the chances of the lesser talented team (in this scenario) winning would be about 10 percent. But, there are always many factors, thus its not a simple answer.

One CAN get mismatches based on personnel on the field. This can happen in several ways. Rosters may be simply not equivalent (offense vs defense, position vs position). Formation IQ does have an impact on results. Choice of formation matchups has an impact. Choice of run/pass (on defense) has an impact.

Looking simply at a GUESS roster rating vs another is an "indicator". It is the specifics of the players and how they are employed that matters the most.