I just returned this season. My last active season here, from my players' records, was Season 16, late in which I burned out from accepting too many front office offers, plus while this is a very good game it's fairly expensive when an agent for lot of players, while the only way it's enjoyable is with a lot of players. But I remembered it positively enough to come back.
When I was here, the O/D balance was good. Top players had "too many" yards rushing or passing, but that was due to being inflated by blowouts. Good, close matchups were about right. Passing didn't move the ball quite like real life passing, but there were too few interceptions, so on balance passing was about as good as reality. I'm glad there are more interceptions now, but that means passing should be really good at moving the ball. The tradeoff is that if you pass, you move the ball very well, but you risk turnovers, especially on long passes.
I'm seeing mostly rookie games now, which are the old sophomore (that part being a fantastic change, by the way: Old rookie games were like Pee Wee games and awful to watch-- Sophomore is when it started looking like the kind of football one would watch, maybe good high school games)-- but the Sophomore leagues weren't that differently balanced than the rest of the game, so it's good to have that with "Rookie" players, except right now the balance is all defense. Rookie games that aren't blowouts seem to tend up 10-7 or something most of the time.
The top offensive players' stats in Vet leagues I've looked at look like top real life players' stats; but they should look better, inflated by blowouts as they are. They're the best builds, usually S*'s, with good teammates and top coaches. They aren't always playing good builds and top coaches. Sometimes they're even playing cpu players and cpu owner/coaches.
From other posts, I may have come in on a weird season for O/D balance, when offense may have been too powerful last season, and maybe for a few seasons before it as well, and the changes to balance things pushed things too far toward defense. I really hope it's dialed back. There shouldn't be a lot of 49-42 games, but there should also be very few 7-3 games as well. Neither extreme is much fun. Blowouts never will be much fun, but those can't be helped when competitive balance isn't great; but the close games should tend toward the more realistic 27-21 type scores much more than either extreme.
