Okay, call me naive... but I think that when a sports game is developed that the way the players are rated should work with the AI that runs the games. Unfortunately the creators of the FBPro series didn't look far enough into the future to see this. Sure, the NFL players that shipped with the game worked for the most part, but when training camps are run or rookie pools are created, the ratings assigned to the players change, and suddenly they stop working.

Leagues that have been around for a while know that the ratings of their fifth season look drastically different than those during their first. And by the tenth they're just crazy. The game creates new players in a way that never reflects their position, and that doesn't work with the AI of the game engine. There are DB's with the strength of linemen, and DL able to jump out of their stance like Jesse Owens. There are WR that catch balls in the middle of 3 or 4 defenders. And the OL still can't block a lick.

A few years ago... 1998-99 to be exact... a bunch of guys got together and said "enough is enough". They decided to do whatever they could to make the FBPro games they watched each week on their computers look like the real football games they watched on their TV's. They developed something they called the "Vaguely Plausible NFL", which became known as the VPNFL.

They re-rated each position so that the players would perform like real life players. They developed a huge library of plays from realistic formations, and profiles that made intelligent and realistic decisions about what plays to call. To simply call their work "groundbreaking" would be a huge understatement. They redefined how FBPro was played, and made it possible for this flawed game to be used to at least simulate the experience of coaching real football again.

But... isn't there always a "but"?... there was one small flaw with what the VPNFL team did. They did their job a little TOO thoroughly! In order to experience the joy of playing realisitic football, a league or coach had to embrace their entire system... not just the player ratings, but the play library and all that. For a league looking for the ultimate in realism this was great. But for a league where the coaches wanted to design their own plays and call them their own ways, a problem surfaced.