In effort for full disclosure, I'm purposefully running a limited play offense and defense this year as a way of testing play overuse. I'm limiting myself to 15 plays on defense and 20 on offense. The plays I'm using are some of the more common plays that I see being abused. I don't have all of the offensive plays that I want in this playbook, but it should be close enough.

Cheater preseason defensive averages:

Passing %: 56.76%
Gross YPG: 250.25
Sacks: 7.5
Yards: 66.5
Net YPG: 183.75

Carries: 22.5
Rushing YPG: 40.25
Average YPC: 1.79

So without doing _any_ game planning at all during preseason, my team gave up 110 fewer yards per game in the preseason than I did last season.

Why does this matter? In games three and four, I only played starters 1 quarter. In two of the games, I held my opponent to negative rushing yards. And, in fact, had it not been for the Cincy game, I would have held teams to a negative average for all four games.

The regular season should be interesting.

Through 4 games, my defense is doing to the run what I thought it would do to the run. Will mix up my passing defensive plays to shut down the pass next.

Cheater Defense

Passing Yards/Game: 291.5
Completion %: 75.7
Passing TDs/Game: 0.5

Rushing Yards/Game: 18.5
Yards/Carry: 1.2
Rushing TDs/Game: 0.0

Analysis: I'm giving up too many passing yards, so I need to swap out my defensive plays for a few of the others that I have seen work over-and-over. I'm doing exactly what I thought I would do against the run however. It's nearly impossible to run against a team that is going to run blitz effective or every down.

Vanilla Offense

Passing Yards/Game: 283
Completion %: 83.9
Passing TDs/Game: 1.5

Rushing Yards/Game: 101.5
Yards/Carry: 4.1
Rushing TDs/Game: 0.8

Analysis: My QB has turned into the ultimate check down machine with my RB1 having 30 catches through 4 games. It feels like I'm running a WC, but really, I'm just running some random plays. I probably could be doing a lot better if I were game planning.

I think this experiment has shown that a 15 play defense and 20 play offense is still viable in 0.4.3, and may even be preferable.

I'm going to start offensive game planning again so that I can find an offense that works for me that uses more than 20 plays.