This year’s Super Bowl matchup between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks isn’t about two elite quarterbacks going to war. It’s a coaching battle. On New England’s side, Mike Vrabel reversed last season’s 4-13 record and helped turn Drake “Drake Maye” Maye into a star in his second year. For Seattle, Mike Macdonald finally capitalized on Sam Darnold’s untapped potential to get the Seahawks back to the big game for the first time in over a decade. Star players and highlight-reel catches are fun, but you don’t get them without great coaching.
EA understood that all the way back in 2006. As its ever-popular Madden series was reaching new heights in the PS2 generation, EA created a spinoff entirely dedicated to the art of coaching. The result was NFL Head Coach, a failed attempt to turn Madden’s Franchise Mode into a hyper-specific strategy game built for the most hardcore of fans. It was complicated, ruthlessly boring, and so committed to its painstaking business simulation that you can’t help but respect it. The world wasn’t ready for it in 2006, but it might just be now.
In NFL Head Coach, you play the role of a coordinator for the Pittsburgh Steelers, who is riding high after the team’s Super Bowl victory over the Seahawks. Every team in the league is interested in elevating you to a head coach. To celebrate this year’s Super Bowl, I started up a file and created a defense coordinator named Tony Scramble and took a job with the New England Patriots. (This effectively meant displacing Bill Belichick from his job, perhaps explaining why he is not a first-ballot Hall of Famer.) My goal was simple: continue the Patriots’ dynasty and dethrone Don Shula to become the greatest coach in NFL history.
It sounds glamorous, but the reality is comically mundane. It will be hours before you ever actually see a football field. Instead, the first few months on the job are almost entirely spent behind a desk. On day one, the Patriots’ owner tasked Coach Scramble with tweaking his coaching staff. I spent weeks assessing my current roster, giving weak links the axe, scouting new prospects, conducting interviews with candidates, and negotiating contracts. It’s straight-up spreadsheet work, most of which happens in the old computer on my desk.
After that was settled, I was ready to get to the game. Well, not quite yet. The next step was looking over last year’s roster and deciding if I wanted to make changes. That meant another two weeks of firing and hiring, all while managing my salary cap and adjusting my depth chart. Of course, I’d also need to consider which players would gel with my new coaching staff, including one hardass I hired who openly told me that he thinks special teams is for players who aren’t good enough to play a real position.
If you can make it through the initial hours of micromanaging, you’ll eventually see something other than your office. Practices let you test out all the plays you’ve designed in the offseason, and you’ll eventually get to coach a team through a season. But crucially, you will never actually touch the ball yourself. You never control a player or experience the thrill of catching or throwing a touchdown pass. You are a coach, and so you coach. It’s a pure simulation, which means that your players can absolutely beef your best-laid plans and ruin your season. Oh well, back to spreadsheet hell!
Is any of this fun? Jesus Christ, no, but that’s not the point. NFL Head Coach has a scientific appreciation for football. It wants us to care about the minutiae that goes into running a team just as much as the touchdowns. It’s a demystification of every bit of dry terminology that you hear on sports podcasts and just pretend to understand. A team can’t function without a bunch of people huddled around a boardroom table mulling over annual budgets. Star players cannot be born without someone scouting their potential from the sidelines. Super Bowls aren’t won until coaches get on the phone with a key player’s agent and offer a lucrative bonus. That’s how a promising team turns into a dynasty. (It’s especially fun revisiting NFL Head Coach now, because the Patriots’ current coach, Mike Vrabel, is in the game as a player for the Pats.)
While it may have been too boring for Madden fans in 2006 (and again in 2008, when a spruced-up sequel failed to generate interest), there’s a foolish part of me that thinks NFL Head Coach could work today. Both the Football Manager and F1 Manager series have successfully turned their respective sports into popular sims. There’s a hunger for nitty-gritty games that get into the strategic aspects of sports. In a time when we have more insight into the inner-workings of the NFL than ever before, maybe fans are better primed for a game about managing salary caps.
Here’s a free pitch for EA: Following the New England Patriots’ win over the Seattle Seahawks at Super Bowl LX, disgraced North Carolina Tar Heels coach Bill Belichick returns to the NFL in pursuit of redemption. Can he defeat the man who picked up his legacy and finally punch his ticket to the hall of fame? Or will he be too distracted by his 24-year-old girlfriend to keep his eye on the ball? Find out in NFL Head Coach 26, featuring cover star Sean McDermott!
