I really love this game. I have a blast with it and really make an effort to have my teams prepared to play.

So it makes it that much more tragic that a seemingly fixable flaw just shatters the overall realism of the game.

I don't need to go into too much detail about it, everyone knows the flaw, but occasionally you get into a game where field position and every first down really matters, and then when you have done everything right and have to punt to a guy whose return stats shatter every league record (including high school, CFL, NFL Europe and TemcoBowl) and that play (or plays in many cases) decides the outcome of the game....

Is this being addressed?

Based solely on your comments here, it sounds like you had a good, close game that was decided by special teams (punt return TD).

That sounds pretty realistic to me.

Or, are you saying the punt returner shattered records in this one game?

I thought this would be obvious. Apparently not.

Let me help then...

Lets start with an easy one. The player in question is todays game had 203 PR yards against me. The all time NFL record for PR yards in a game is 207 by LeRoy Irvin in 1981. My guy fell 4 yards short.

Ok, you say, I had a bad game, I should stop whining. Allow me to continue...

The all time NFL record for PR yards in a single season is 875, set by Desmond Howard in 1996. In my league we currently have 12 players who have broken the all time record, 6 who are on a pace to double it, and our leader has 1,373 PR yards.

It's week 12.

... but wait, there's more!

The all time NFL record for PR avg in a season is 23.0 set by Herb Rich (Herb Rich?!?!?!?!) in 1950. In the league we have ELEVEN players who are currently breaking a 66 year old record set by some guy named Herb who probably played against a bunch of fat dudes who sold aluminum siding on weekdays.

The all time record for PR TDs in a season was set the very next year, 1951 by Jack "you never heard of me either" Christiansen with 4. 8 guys have already tied or beaten poor anonymous Jack's record, and a few will more than double that too.


So tell me... is your league very different?

By the way, I would rather light a candle than curse the darkness so allow me to suggest a simple fix.

Just slow down the SPEED at which the punt itself travels through the air. The big returns always happen the same way. The gunners get lateral to the returner while the 'blockers' (punt team players on the line) are slowed down by interference and blocking. This creates a massive gap at either an up or down angle for the returner to shoot through and then is off to the races.

Slow down ball flight on punts (probably not even that much) and punt team has more time to converge on returner. Some would still pop, but not at the record-pulverizing level which is currently the case.

My response was based solely on your comment, which seemed to be referring to a single game, and did not mention his total stats for the game. I did not research any stats for your game or league. I thought you were simply saying a close, tight came was decided by a punt return at the end, which to me would be realistic.

In my opinion, the NFL records would be much higher if the punters had no choice but to kick the ball straight down the middle to the return man every time. In real life, they kick away from the returner, try to get a lot of hang time, kick it out of bounds, skip kick (rugby style), etc.

They also have players on the punt coverage teams that know what they're doing.

There are a lot of punt returns in this game, but not against my teams. I have a lot myself, but give up very few (maybe 1 or 2 per season) because I put players with high speed/tackle ratings on my special teams.

Judging by the leagues that you're in, it looks like you're new to the game. If so, welcome.

I would suggest digging through the forum regarding punt returns. We had pretty substantial conversations about Punt Returns about 8 months ago when the PR code was tweaked. There are a lot of good posts about how to slow down returners, not give up a lot of TDs, etc.

There are also a lot of good posts out there that talk about the problems with defending punt returns - defenders not staying in their lanes, overrunning the return man, missing tackles badly...

There are a lot of factors that come together in the punt return game, but the simple fact is that you can stop most punt returns by making sure to have the right players on the field.

Maybe it's just me but the punt returns seem to have gotten much better since we all discussed it a few months back. It could prolly be scaled back a lil more but seems to be headed in the right direction to me. And the kick returns seem to be spot on.

But then again I haven't logged any data to support what my imagination might be seeing. :)

I think STs is much improved, from someone who spends more time on it than they shoud do, when JDB made the changes it did makes things quite hard for a while, until you can figure things out. I don't see anything wrong with PRs.

i think the fastest fix would probably be to have the gunners converge on the ball while it's still in flight, not run past the returner(while staying off to the sides of him, usually by 10-20 yards) then go "oh ****, he caught it!!!" and have to turn around and try to catch back up to him, this to me is completely unrealistic i can't think of a single game i've EVER seen where the gunners ignore the flight of the ball till it is either in the returner's hands or has hit the ground

Yep, they should be breaking on the ball slightly earlier