Game Review: EA Sports Head Coach

by Mike Tanier

EA Sports' Madden football games are already so in-depth that they allow you to offer contract extensions, participate in off-season drills, and set the price of stadium hot dogs. Is there anything left? What element of the NFL experience hasn't already been simulated by the Madden series?

The answer, according EA Sports Head Coach, is the tedium. Head Coach literally puts you behind the skipper's desk and introduces you to a weekly grind of staff meetings, scouting sessions, and conference calls, with some practices and football games mixed in. As coach/GM of your favorite NFL franchise, you have total control over your roster, coaching staff, and scouting department. You develop your own playbooks and implement your own gameplans, and you decide who gets practice reps and what gets emphasized in training camp. You can't actually control the players on the field, but you direct every other element of management, micromanagement, and nano-management.

Hey, we're the Football Outsiders -- the micromanagement people. We can tell you which running back gained the most yardage when it was second-and-3 in the third quarter (Willie Parker). This game seems tailor-made for us. I'm a veteran of the Railroad Tycoon series of strategy games, and I've wasted many hours merrily assigning freight cars to the Altoona-Binghamton run. For ham-handed video gamers like me, Head Coach promises the cerebral challenge of assembling a Super Bowl team without having to worry about the juke stick or the spin button. This game seems tailor-made for the Football Outsiders audience, which is why we wanted to give it our first-ever video game review.Unfortunately, the game's shoddy AI and clunky interface detract from the fun.

Head Coach offers Bill Cowher wannabes a wealth of options for assembling and helming a perennial contender. The familiar player ratings of the Madden series have been expanded, so you can now select a quarterback based on his play-action passing rating, a receiver for his route accuracy, or a safety for his ability in man or zone coverage. The ratings are dynamic and will go up or down based on practice time or game performance. Scouting reports on rookies and opponents are incomplete, so you need to budget your scouting efforts properly: you must balance between game-planning for opponents and preparing for the next draft. Menus loaded with coaching options allow you to fine-tune plays, so you can tell cornerbacks to go for the interception or play it safe or tell your quarterback to tuck and run if no one's open. You can also motivate players using either the Stuart Smalley or Facial Expectoration methods of interpersonal communication.

But a sim like this has to meet gamers halfway on the complexity, and Head Coach doesn't. With thousands of variables to consider, information management becomes a big issue. It's hard to tell what impact your decisions make without checking and rechecking multiple screens and menus, and screen navigation is a headache. After a few hours of play, Head Coach starts to feel too much like work.

The complexity and weak ergonomics of the game would be forgivable if the designers didn't cut so many corners. But you'll discover the first major oversight soon after you load the game. You're asked at the start of Head Coach to customize your coach's appearance, from his body type down to his headgear. There's only one problem: there are no facial hair options. What gives? I've been customizing lifelike avatars of myself in EA games for almost a decade, some of them convincing enough to fool my three-year old son. But instead of creating a realistically paunchy, gray-whiskered doppelganger to roam the sidelines, I was forced to watch a baby-faced imposter carry out my directives. It's seems like an odd omission for a game that features Cowher on the cover.

The "no beard" gaffe seems like a minor issue, but takes away from the game's immersion factor. It's one of many elements of Head Coach that feel unfinished. There's a lot to do in the game, from selecting assistants to developing "money plays" through multiple practice reps, but unless you have the patience of Job you'll be frustrated by the repetitive gameplay and dopey AI long before you scratch the surface of the features.

Here's a partial list of the problems that plague the game:

• The game is built around a year-long schedule of activities, but there's too much filler, starting with the endless "Office Hours". After every meaningful event, like a scouting session, you're dumped back into your office to check e-mails or design plays. You can only perform so many actions during each Office Hours session, so you have to perform a task, go back to the office, perform another task, and so on. One example: you can only adjust two places on the depth chart in one Office Hours period, so if you sign a new free agent and want to make him the number one receiver, you have to put him in the top spot and move your old #1 receiver to the #2 slot in one Office Hours period, then remember to go back and put your old #2 receiver in the #3 spot in the next Office Hours period. When you finish your two Office Hours tasks, it doesn't just take you to the next part of your schedule -- you have to hit the "back" button four or five times, over and over and over again.
• In the early part of the game, the computer schedules a weekly opportunity to change your coach's appearance. It's just a persistent reminder that you can't grow a beard, and besides, what head coach changes his mind about his on-field gameday clothes 20 times during the off-season?
• The draft has the potential to be fun, with a real clock hurrying you along, incomplete scouting reports on obscure players, and analysis by Mel Kiper Jr. himself. But the computer demonstrates the same idiot savant decision making that you've come to tolerate in the Madden games. The computer never misses a "sleeper," so players like Chris Gocong leave the board early in the first round. But it doesn't draft for need, so the Eagles might draft Jay Cutler or the Giants Vince Young.
• Free agency is a big part of any sports management game, but for some reason Head Coach doesn't simulate the 2006 free agent class. No Antwaan Randle El. No Steve Hutchinson. All the major free agents are re-signed by their previous teams before the start of the open signing period. If you are a Cowboys fan who wants to play with Terrell Owens or a Cardinals fan who covets Edgerrin James, you'll have to trade for them. The only free agents on the market at the start of the game are the rummage sale guys who weren't on 2005 rosters.
• Practices are dull: you call a play, watch your troops run it, and maybe select some criticism from the "strategy" or "motivation" menus. Drills are worse: in one drill, you select a running back and linebacker, and they just smash into each other. You can sim past all the practice, but then you can't control which players improve or what Money Plays are developed. The designers should either have allowed users to jump in and control players during drills, or they should have created macros – a "focus on play action passing" or "give rookies extra reps" command during the game's Gameplan Meeting phase would save users a lot of time.
• Skipping any period of the game is necessary but dangerous. If you don't sim ahead, you'll repeat the same tasks for hours, but if you do, the computer will countermand many of your decisions. If you don't want to re-sign a useless free agent but sim the end of the free agency period, the computer will sign the guy for you. Move an outside linebacker to defensive end on your depth chart, sim ahead a week, and the dude may be back at linebacker. Practice injuries are far more common when you are simming than when you are in control.
• Assistant coaches are pretty useless. They affect player improvement, and they make depth-chart suggestions at team meetings. But they don't provide the type of information the user needs in a game teeming with tiny variables. A message from the running backs coach like "Reggie Bush's pass catching really improved in practice" would let the user know that his strategic decisions were having a real impact, but the assistants aren't that interactive. Furthermore, some of the assistant coach's opinions are loopy. My special teams coach kept insisting that I replace kicker Kris Brown with punter Chad Stanley. When you shoot down an assistant's advice, his trust in you drops. After a few hours of gaming, my special teams coach wanted to blow up my car.
• Actual football games can be fun, and I played through some 23-20 nailbiters that had me carefully calling plays and making adjustments. But games themselves contain two major flaws. First, the offense snaps the ball before you can make any defensive shifts. You access the shifts through a drop-down menu, and unless you memorize the menu and read the formation as the offense breaks the huddle, you aren't going to be able to make many adjustments. Second, there's no "sim to the end" feature to get through 31-10 blowouts. Like the beard error, that's an example of poor game execution.
• Play a full season, and Kevin Jones will likely win the rushing crown [1]. Maybe the designers wanted to make the Pro Football Prospectus staff feel better.

Ultimately, Head Coach cannot decide whether it's a strategy game, an RPG, or a management simulation. The game has many role-playing elements – changing ability scores, character creation, dialog menus – but there's not enough to make you think of the owners, assistants, or agents as actual characters. Gridiron contests themselves feel a little like real-time strategy battles, but there's far too much drudgery to be done in the office and on the practice field to get your troops in top fighting form. When you watch your computer avatar sitting at his desk, fidgeting, and conducting interviews, you'll swear that you are playing an educational management simulation. That's probably not what EA had in mind.

I've given up on this year's edition of Head Coach, but not on the series. If the designers scrap "Office Hours," automate the practice process, and improve the AI, I might come back. If they add more dynamic elements – how about shouting matches on the sidelines? – I might come back. Until then, well, I'm waiting for Madden 07.