To quote Aaron Burr’s significantly cooler imitation in Broadway’s Hamilton, “Okay, so we’re doing this.” In case you missed it, yesterday we announced our plan to replace the cancelled on-field B1G football season with our own video game version. We are anticipating a media statement from the conference thanking us for our efforts any moment now. The first part of our process is looking at the rosters we’ve inherited to find any necessary ratings adjustments, and we will expand on that process to build understanding of what lies ahead.

Setting the Table

A few things that are important to note:

• The NCAA ‘14 video game caps rosters at about 70 players. Extensive, but still significantly lower than a real roster, especially for a home team. As a result, there will be some names missing from your team roster, likely incoming freshman that weren’t your crown jewel. There’s no getting around this and while we would love to yeet lower-rated players of your choosing and create those players by hand, ain’t nobody got time for that. Let us know if any likely contributors are missing anyway, the bigger the omission the more likely we’ll take a look at adjusting it as the season unfolds.
• These rosters, both before and after, will not, Will Not, WILL NOT be perfect. Debate your stances, appeal to the masses, but once we are all done with this process everyone will likely have something they dislike about the setup and that’s okay. We’re not trying to be perfect, we’re just trying to make things more accurate.
• There are a billion attributes for players in this game. For the sake of not burning out everyone involved in our project before games even start, we have cut some of the “lesser” attributes from our data entry and our consideration for adjustments. We know they have value and we know they may have good edit candidates within them, but we have to keep the workload human.
• On a similar note, some attributes are more important to some positions than others, and we will focus on the main significant attributes to each player based on the position they play.
• We do not have direct control over what the Overall rating is for a player/team, the game determines that based on attribute changes made. As such, “writers” won’t know the impact to Overall rating based on the adjustments they recommend in their team articles, but we’ll take a look at those once each team has had a round of edits.

Ratings Primer

Some quick notes on what these ratings are and what they mean. I won’t go into what each attribute means because I think the ones we kept for review are mostly self-explanatory, but you’re welcome to ask questions in the comments. As for the ratings scale, for those that don’t know each attribute is given a rating from 1-99 and based on a player’s attribute ratings and the position they play, they are given an Overall rating, also 1-99. But what does, say, 65 mean on that scale? 90? Below is a rough (I emphasize “rough,” we get that you may disagree by a few points) guideline. This applies most directly to Overall ratings, but roughly correlates to attributes as well though those skew a little higher:

90+ rating: Impact Player. This player certainly contends for All-Conference or even All-American honors and is constant problem for the opposition. Once you get to about 97+, there should only be maybe 5ish(?) guys in the country capable of that rating.

85-89 rating: Decidedly above average to great even for a Top 25 program. Almost guaranteed to be on the field and producing at a high level. Still high All-Conference caliber players here with occasional All-American ceiling. The best player on even an above average team can end up here.

80-84 rating: Very good player, very likely to start at the Top 25 level and be an asset. Plenty of Power 5 All-Conference Talent still here.

75-79 rating: Good player, a healthy chunk of P5 starters will end up here and you start to see bench players around here for good teams. Still capable of seeing difference makers at this level, but a lot of players begin to fall into this category. Best player on an average team can be here.

70-74 rating: Below average to average player at P5 level. Might start but also represent a weakness in the lineup. Another range with a ton of players.

Below 70 rating: Almost certainly a below average player that rounds out the bottom of the roster. Liability to have on the field at the P5 level. Most teams should have much fewer players in this range than the 70s. For attribute ratings, attributes of secondary importance to a position can fall into the 60s even for good players.

Once again those descriptions aren’t religion, but we think it is helpful for getting an understanding of what everything means. You’ll begin seeing team articles today and continuing over the next couple weeks. As always we value your input, and worst of luck to your garbage team. Go Badgers!