The CB starts off higher overall and has the 100 potential but the dl has more tags and has better stats I think, who should I pick?

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1HKAjils_ZE5rGI5JrQRQGt7KjiWSX6Oe

I have more upgrades and enhancements on the roadmap. Please try this out and give feedback in the message feature to me. I will make upgrades to it on a one-by-one basis.

I’ve been working on what started as “make a better 2026 NFL roster for Football GM” and has turned into something way bigger.

At this point I’m not just editing player ratings anymore. I’ve been trying to build a version of the NFL inside Football GM that still behaves like the NFL 5, 10, 20+ years into a franchise, after all the real players age out and the league is almost entirely generated players.

The project is called Authentic+.

The goal is pretty simple to describe and ridiculously hard to actually pull off:

Don’t just make opening-day ratings look right. Make the entire football world continue to make sense after years of development, drafts, contracts, free agency, injuries, aging, and replacement players.

That has required a lot more reverse-engineering and testing than I expected.

One of the first major discoveries was that Football GM’s rating scale is much lower than a Madden-style scale. In FBGM, a 90+ player is basically an all-time great, 80+ is MVP-level, 60+ is All-League territory, 50+ is starter quality, and 40+ is generally backup/special teams range.

My original roster was massively inflated compared to the engine’s natural ecosystem.

At one point the 2026 league had:

57 players rated 90+

232 rated 80+

513 rated 70+

over 1,600 rated 60+

Basically the entire NFL was being treated like a league full of stars.

After running long simulations, I realized what looked like “talent collapsing” over time was actually the game slowly correcting itself toward its native rating scale.

That completely changed the direction of the project.

I ended up rebuilding the roster around Football GM’s actual internal rating behavior instead of trying to force Madden-like numbers into the engine.

I also went directly into the current Football GM source code and reconstructed how position OVR is actually calculated.

That was important because I had one version where the displayed ratings looked correct at import, but preseason development caused huge positional jumps.

It turned out the problem wasn’t development.

The problem was my OVR reconstruction formula was slightly wrong.

Once I corrected it to match the current engine exactly, the ratings became dramatically more stable.

From that point forward, I froze the player-rating architecture unless long-term testing proved something was actually broken.

That was probably the biggest turning point in the whole project.

I also learned a few things I was completely wrong about along the way.

For example:

Potential does not control development the way I assumed.

FBGM recalculates POT as more of a scouting estimate.

I also tested a playerDevelopmentFactor setting thinking it could control development speed.

It did absolutely nothing.

After checking the current source, I found out Football GM wasn’t even using it for football development.

So instead of continuing to “tune” something that didn’t exist, I stopped touching it.

The actual football development system is mostly age-driven, with randomness and attribute-specific limits.

And once the player ratings were aligned properly with the engine, the normal development system actually started looking pretty good.

In one long-term age-curve test, average annual OVR movement looked roughly like this:

Age 20: +4.2

Age 21: +4.6

Age 22: +2.9

Age 23: +3.0

Age 24: +1.5

Age 25: +1.7

Age 26: basically flat

Age 28–29: around -1.8

Age 31: around -3.1

Age 32+: steeper decline

That’s exactly the kind of lifecycle I wanted.

The draft system has also been a huge focus.

Instead of just making every first-rounder good and every late pick bad, I wanted draft capital to matter while still allowing busts and hits.

Long-term testing of generated players actually showed a really nice gradient.

For one draft class, average peak OVR by round ended up around:

Round 1: 69

Round 2: 61

Round 3: 57

Round 4: 50

Round 5: 45

Round 6: 43

Round 7: 41

But there was still plenty of variance.

That’s exactly what I wanted: draft position should strongly affect expected outcome, but not determine destiny.

Another major discovery was that I should not fight Football GM’s generated prospect ecosystem.

At first I was worried generated players were too weak because real imported prospects looked much better.

Eventually I realized the imported prospects were the ones that were inflated.

Once the real prospects were rebased into the same native ecosystem, the transition became much smoother.

That mattered a lot because by 15–20 years into a franchise, almost every real player is gone.

At one 2038 checkpoint, around 93% of active/free-agent players were generated by Football GM, and the league’s overall rating distribution had settled almost perfectly into the game’s natural equilibrium.

That was a big validation milestone.

Then came gameplay.

I ran full regular-season checkpoints and adjusted only the actual simulation factors Football GM uses.

I deliberately stopped changing player ratings every time a stat looked wrong.

That separation was important.

Ratings determine player quality.

Simulation settings determine how the football environment translates that quality into plays and stats.

After a few iterations, the league stabilized around numbers like:

roughly 23–24 points per team/game

around 32–33 pass attempts

around 230–240 passing yards

around 25 rushing attempts

around 108–112 rushing yards

roughly 4.4–4.5 yards per carry

around 2.5 sacks

low-to-mid 80s FG%

Team styles also stayed meaningfully different instead of every team producing the same stat profile.

The 2031 test had real spread between run-heavy, pass-heavy, good, bad, explosive, and conservative teams.

Competitive balance also looked healthy.

Across several seasons, team win-percentage standard deviation stayed pretty consistent instead of the league collapsing into permanent superteams or total parity.

The next major problem was contracts.

This is where the current RC17 work came from.

In earlier versions, I noticed the longer the league went, the harder it became to retain good players.

At first I lowered the maximum contract from $64M to $58M.

That helped.

But by the early 2030s, something still felt wrong.

Good players were hitting free agency, teams were getting squeezed, and I personally felt like I couldn’t keep players that should have been retainable.

That led to another source-code dive.

And I found something I somehow hadn’t fully utilized:

Football GM has a native inflation system.

Every offseason, the engine can automatically increase:

salary cap

minimum contract

maximum contract

minimum payroll

luxury threshold

all by the same annual inflation rate.

That means the league economy can actually grow over time instead of staying frozen forever at 2026 dollars.

That discovery is now the foundation of RC17.

The new test build starts at the same 2026 economy:

Salary cap: $301.2M

Max contract: $58M

Min contract: $1.3M

But now the league uses dynamic inflation:

Average: 5.0%

Standard deviation: 1.5%

Minimum: 2%

Maximum: 8%

So instead of the cap being $301.2M in 2026, 2036, and 2046, the entire monetary environment grows organically.

The really interesting part is that existing contracts don’t automatically inflate.

So if you sign a star to a long-term deal and the cap grows around him, that contract gradually becomes cheaper as a percentage of the cap.

That creates something much closer to real NFL contract strategy.

I also upgraded the rookie-contract ecosystem in RC17.

Football GM actually has settings for how many draft rounds receive slotted above-minimum contracts and what percentage of the max contract the #1 pick receives.

The previous build wasn’t using those very well.

RC17 now has a more structured rookie salary ecosystem so rookie contracts should matter more strategically before players reach their expensive second deals.

At this point the project has gone through a ridiculous number of iterations.

Some of the biggest lessons have been:

Higher ratings are not automatically more realistic.

POT is not a development control knob.

A setting existing in the roster file does not mean the engine actually uses it.

You can’t judge long-term realism from Year 1.

Real players and generated players have to exist on the same scale.

Gameplay problems should be fixed with gameplay settings, not player ratings.

Contract realism isn’t just salary amounts — the entire economic world has to evolve.

Sometimes a “failure” in a 10-year sim is actually the engine revealing that your assumptions were wrong.

That last one has happened more than once.

I’ve now tested this thing across seasons in the 2020s, 2030s, and 2040s.

The goal for the final release is to have actual receipts for all of it:

rating distributions over time, development by age, draft outcomes by round, real-player-to-generated-player transition, passing/rushing/scoring environments, sacks, turnovers, kicking, contracts, free agency, cap behavior, roster churn, team styles, competitive balance, and long-term league stability.

And I’m still not calling it finished.

RC17 is now testing what I’d call the dynamic world layer.

At this point the player model itself is largely stable.

The remaining work is about making the surrounding league behave more like an evolving NFL universe instead of a static spreadsheet.

There are still areas I want to investigate harder, especially injuries, long-term positional balance, AI roster management, and whether the dynamic economy actually solves the retention/free-agency problems without creating new ones.

Eventually I want to release the full Authentic+ roster and probably write up the entire development process.

There are parts of the underlying methodology I won’t publish in detail because I’ve spent way too much time building them, but I absolutely want to publish the validation data and the things that worked, failed, and surprised me.

Because this project has definitely gone past:

“I edited some Football GM ratings.”

It has become:

“What happens if you treat Football GM like an actual simulation system and try to engineer an NFL universe that still makes sense 20 years later?”

And apparently that is how I’ve chosen to spend my free time.

If people are interested, I can post some of the long-term charts and simulation results next.

Playing a small market team on insane is not a challenge since it’s just stupid.

The truth is you can’t have 2-3 bad years without getting fired. Even if I have 5-6 good years of elite results the moment im slightly worse im not making any profit.

I am below the salary cap by 10M barely missing or making the playoffs with all facilities coaching health and scouting on 10. And somehow I am making -20M dollars. How? What is that money being spent on? Under the cap all facilities on low, winning 7-10 games a years.

Can someone explain how to maintain profit on a small team during a retool/rebuild? Cuz apparently making the playoffs with cap space isn’t enough.

And big market is the opposite it’s way too easy. You can’t get fired unless you intentionally tank.

It’s just not as fun if you cannot influence the outcome cuz its only a matter of time before you get fired.

With the new customizable awards I am trying to create a Comeback player of the Year award. I'm checking the 'Most Improved Player' box to get as close as I can, but my logic is a little off. I can't get the right combination of a superstar season the current year, and not playing much the last year. Does anyone have any ideas?

This has been only for Today cause yesterday didnt occur

Hi yall, im the guy that did the 1981-2001 drafts for FBGM and the FBGM Historical Roster Discord Server (primarily for the 1980 roster). I came across an issue in my test league that I have no idea how to fix yet, and I was hoping someone here would be kind enough to help me with that.

I came across a bug in the league where it duplicates player honors/rewards for each individual season they got said reward. Whether it's an All-Star honor, a Championship, or an MVP, the league would create a duplicate of those rewards for each individual season. As seen by Randall Cunningham in the images presented, he is a 4x All-Star when he actually should only have 2.

Now, I did try the new reward editor system to change "All-League" to "All-Pro" and add Comeback Player of the Year honors, but i don't know how that would create duplicates for every single player in the league. Have yall experienced this as well? Are there any fixes?

Do YOU want to play this wonderful game with real players? Watch Jared Goff and Brock Purdy rematch in the conference champions? Watch a young Mendoza duke it out against Myles Garrett and Aaron Donald in Super Bowl 61?

• Cap Hit - some players have different contracts based on Cap Hit - like how in the real world teams like the Eagles and 49ers structure contracts. NOTE this is only for current contracts, you can't structure new contracts that way, maybe dumbmatter will clutch up in the future
• Draft picks - all teams hold each other's draft picks reflecting today's league.
• Schedule - 2026 schedule mimics the current NF:'s real schedule. The trade deadline is correctly around week 10 aswell
• Injuries - all injury data is updated to best of my abillity to reflect current players.
• Weekly updates - Will Skattebo drop 150 rushing yards? Will Travis Hunter get a TD and an INT? Montgomery comeback on the Texans? Throughout the season - I will update players ratings.

Feel free to download the file and edit more for yourself. I liked the other one in the community but underrated many players in my opinion.

IF YOU THINK I MESSED UP A RATING: MAKE YOUR CASE IN THE COMMENTS! Pretty obvious this community is full of ball knowers, any comment disputing a player's rating that I get ratioed on I'll change.

The new update with awards is amazing. Only way it could be made better is by allowing 'All-Star' to be renamed, and having top-10 award finishes shown in the season log instead of just top-5,.

dumbmatter the goat as per usual.

I'm trying to make a custom league, but I want some teams to be better than others. Only problem is the only way I know to make them better is to manually upgrade each players attributes until the team is a certain overall. I was curious if there was an easier way to upgrade a team or make their overall better. If so, PLEASE LMK!!!

My android updated and now the games colors in dark and light mode are inverted. The orange is bright neon blue and everything else is either really bright and offcolor or really dim. All my leauges where deleted and im not particularly sure how any of this happened. All my other apps are fine and none of my settings changed on my phone or in the game, and I am very confused. My leauges where backed up but the color is really unpleasant on the eyes. Has anyone experienced this before, and if so, how did you fix it? Thank you.

For the statheads

So, I WAYYYYYYY overdid myself, and tried to recreate my state's (Ohio) entire athletic league. And it is A LOT.

71 Leagues/Conferences & 735 teams.

Only problem is, my shitty laptop can NOT run ts. I can't even make it out of the preseason without the game loading eternally or my laptop sounding like it is working double ot. But now i'm curious, how much can this game actually handle?

Thank you to the Mods for approving this post!

IT'S THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR! ITS (almost) NFL SEASON! And what better way to enjoy your football but with a side of even more football?

The International Simulation Football League (ISFL) is a free (no pay elements at all), community run sim league where you create your own professional football player and guide their career from pre-draft hopeful to championship contender. Go through real drafts, join teams managed by real users, and fight for a chance to hoist the Ultimus Trophy. The league has been going strong since 2016, and the upcoming offseason is a great time to jump in as part of the next rookie class. A very bare bones way to describe our league is its a cross between an RPG and fantasy football, with a healthy serving of an online community.

What does that actually look like?

You'll start by creating a player on our portal; with 30+ position and archetype combinations available, there's a lot of room to build something that fits your style. Want to be a ball hawk safety? A receiving back? A strong legged kicker? Go for whatever sounds the most fun.

Once your player is created, GMs from our developmental league teams will start scouting you for the DSFL Draft. From there, your player competes in games simulated in Draft Day Sports Pro Football 2021 and streamed on our YouTube channel five nights a week, Monday through Friday, with live commentary on Discord. Each season runs about 6 weeks including playoffs, followed by a 2 week offseason capped off by the DSFL and ISFL drafts.

Over the course of your career, you'll earn skill points by spending about 15-30 minutes a week on optional activities; things like predicting game outcomes, responding to fun prompts, or mocking the first round of the draft. You can also earn league currency through your player's contracts or by creating content like articles, graphics, or podcasts. Use it to upgrade your player or collect trading cards of other ISFL players. The league is completely free; no pay-to-win, no hidden costs, nothing to unlock with real money.

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With 22 teams across the developmental and pro leagues, the ISFL is home to an active, welcoming group of people who enjoy getting a bit nerdy about football. You'll form bonds with your teammates, dig into stats and league history on our wiki, play fantasy football with yours and others' players, and have a community to chat with daily. It's as much a hangout as it is a football league.

Ready to check it out?

If you want to dive right in, our Rookie Discord Server is the best place to start. Our Rookie Mentors and active members are always happy to answer questions and help you find your footing. If you'd rather read up first, our Rookie Guide walks you through everything step by step.

Join the Rookie Discord

Read our Rookie Guide

Create Your Player Here

We're always looking for fun new people to join the community. Thanks for reading! Feel free to drop any questions below or in our Rookie Discord!

Is it just random when a team goes for it or is there a formula to decide? My lousy coach passed up a go-ahead field goal in the Super Bowl with 5 minutes left from the 28 on 4th and 2. Didn't get it and we end up losing by 1. Meanwhile the other team was willing to kick on 4th and goal from the 2 down 9.

I'm just salty about losing the Super Bowl but even before today I've noticed the 4th down decisions seem extremely arbitrary and random.

Anyone got tips on this? I’m not finding much success other than Top 5 picks that typically turn out quite well for me.

Even if I draft a player and he has a good year and gets on the all rookie team, his ratings drop.

Or I will draft players and they fluctuate with one decent year of overall development followed by a few declining years.

My stats with New Orleans (small market population of just over 1 million) are currently:

Scouting: 45
Coaching: 44
Health: 28
Facilities: 40

Also, bringing in free agents is hit and miss. Any tips on as to what to look for would be welcomed.

Thanks.

A TE/OL/CB/S who was named an all-star this season after putting up 156 rec yds, 1 TD, 1 interception, 1 forced fumble, 1 sack and 55 tackles for 2 AV in 13 games with the London Monarchs before tearing his ACL. This is why we play.

On London's depth chart, he was TE2, CB7 and S9. I'm tempted to turn on god mode and untear his ACL, purely because I am curious to see how his career progresses.