Everyone who is paying attention is pretty familiar with how broken "Over Smoke" is. But, I don't necessarily think it's just that play, but instead, it's how the sim assigns coverage overall.
I recently built a new playbook that makes this painfully obvious. Instead of limiting myself to only the 'suggested' defenses types (ie. Nickel & Nickel 3-3-5 vs 3 WR), I instead went ahead and counted the number of guys I had who would be in man coverage in the secondary and made sure that matched the number of WR's. (side note: I already had discovered that an LB in man coverage won't cover a WR and will go so far as to stand around doing nothing rather than at least make the attempt).
My new defense had big gaping holes. Thankfully, the extra pass rush covered most of them. Did give up a few big plays to uncovered receivers, but nowhere near as many as could have happened.
So my suggestion is that the devs rework the assignment algorithm so that the sim basically has a list of players in man coverage on each play and then locks them onto the potential offensive players who will be running a route. The default list should be something like CB1, CB2, CB3, CB4, FS, CB5, SS, LILB, MLB, RILB, LOLB, ROLB. Make the same sort of list for offensive players going out on pass patterns.
There should be some logic to the coverage such as using CB's over anyone else to cover WR's. The FS over the SS to cover WR's. LB's should first look for a HB or TE to lock onto before going to a WR if they end up not having anyone to cover (ie. quarter defense against something other than 5WR's), but LB's should actually look to cover a WR if nobody else on defense has because while not idea, it's definitely better than nothing.
Such an algorithm would go a long way to not only fixing broken plays like "Over Smoke" but it would give us poor, already-at-a-huge-disadvantage DC's more flexibility in playcalling, especially against the spread offenses that are becoming more and more common each week.
I recently built a new playbook that makes this painfully obvious. Instead of limiting myself to only the 'suggested' defenses types (ie. Nickel & Nickel 3-3-5 vs 3 WR), I instead went ahead and counted the number of guys I had who would be in man coverage in the secondary and made sure that matched the number of WR's. (side note: I already had discovered that an LB in man coverage won't cover a WR and will go so far as to stand around doing nothing rather than at least make the attempt).
My new defense had big gaping holes. Thankfully, the extra pass rush covered most of them. Did give up a few big plays to uncovered receivers, but nowhere near as many as could have happened.
So my suggestion is that the devs rework the assignment algorithm so that the sim basically has a list of players in man coverage on each play and then locks them onto the potential offensive players who will be running a route. The default list should be something like CB1, CB2, CB3, CB4, FS, CB5, SS, LILB, MLB, RILB, LOLB, ROLB. Make the same sort of list for offensive players going out on pass patterns.
There should be some logic to the coverage such as using CB's over anyone else to cover WR's. The FS over the SS to cover WR's. LB's should first look for a HB or TE to lock onto before going to a WR if they end up not having anyone to cover (ie. quarter defense against something other than 5WR's), but LB's should actually look to cover a WR if nobody else on defense has because while not idea, it's definitely better than nothing.
Such an algorithm would go a long way to not only fixing broken plays like "Over Smoke" but it would give us poor, already-at-a-huge-disadvantage DC's more flexibility in playcalling, especially against the spread offenses that are becoming more and more common each week.
