Can You Use Video Games To Simulate Your Fantasy Football Season?

If you’re a fantasy player, it’s tempting, once you have your roster, to see how it might play out. And with the draft quickly approaching, that might be a severe temptation. It’s possible… but it can be risky. Here’s how to use your game console to avoid tanking in your league.

What You Need

Essentially, a game console and the most recent copy of NFL Madden you can find are all you need to do this. What you’ll want to do is simulate seasons for each team that has players you’re thinking of drafting, after you tweak the roster to include the rookies. This is a “Saturday afternoon” kind of thing.

Once it’s done, just write down the results and tweak your draft decisions accordingly. And use your gut; Madden can sometimes pull some real wackiness out of its randomized number crunching.

How Effective Is It?

Despite Madden’s reputation for being an eerie predictor of football outcomes, I do need to hang a caveat or two on this. The first is that Madden can’t predict career-ending legal disputes or a quarterback getting his jaw busted by a teammate with any particular accuracy. You’re just crunching the raw numbers EA’s generated.

The second is that this won’t give you a precise fantasy score for each player, partially as a function of the issue above. So don’t run this and assume the exact numbers you get will be what actually happens; don’t forget the coach is a major factor here as well, and Madden appears to be overly optimistic.

You should also probably simulate a few times over the course of the season. Things change, and fast, so that might save you some points

In short, it’s a useful predictor of overall trendlines. Madden does tend to nail pretty well which teams will have a good year and which won’t. So, keep your game console handy as the draft approaches; it’ll help keep you in decent picks.

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