A new update (23-02) of Old School Football Coach is here! The new changes include the following:

Coaching Carousel in Career Mode

• After the season ends you can now get offered coaching jobs at other schools depending on how your team has been performing.
• AI schools can now fire under-performing coaches between seasons and attempt to hire better replacements from less prestigious schools or from the pool of unemployed coaches.
• There is now an off-season period between seasons where you can fire your assistant coaches and hire new ones
• Assistant coaches can now develop and gain new abilities between seasons

Other Improvements

• New career mode saves will begin in the year 2023.
• Several balance changes have been made to recruiting to help prevent the skill level of all teams from averaging out over time
  • Talented recruits are now more likely to care about high prestige and recent success in schools.
  • All recruits are now more likely to care about a school’s proximity to their home.
  • Recruits are now more likely to commit slightly earlier if a good team has given them the best offer.
  • On average there will be less good recruits each season and more recruits on the lower end of the skill rankings
  • The number of available recruiting points has been halved so that a recruit’s interests have a bigger impact
• Additional types of media headlines can pop up during the career mode season to, for example, report on coaches that are on the hot seat or to report on post-season results.
• Improvements have been made to the preseason ranking algorithm.

Happy Coaching!

A new update (22-11) of Old School Football Coach is here! The new changes include the following:

Import / Export Teams

This long requested feature is finally here! It is now possible to easily export your custom teams from the League Management screen! Likewise, you can now also easily import teams that have been created by others! Now you can share your favorite custom teams with friends and build up a league together. Note: implementing this feature required substantial changes to the inner workings of the game, which has broken backwards compatibility. You will not be able to carry forward leagues, teams, or career saves from a previous version of the game.

Stamina Management Improvements

When playing a football game, players now have an animation that shows when they are starting to get tired. Additionally, keyboard hotkeys have been added to the play call screen to help you quickly manage your players. By default you can press [Tab] to quickly switch to the Substitutions screen, arrow keys to navigate through your players, and [Enter] to bench or activate a player.

Happy Coaching!

A new update (22-08) of Old School Football Coach is here! The new changes include the following:

Free Demo!

Old School Football Coach now has a free demo available for download. The demo limits career mode to just 2 weeks of play, but is otherwise fully featured! You can now try the game out before you buy.

New Features

• Each team now has 3 coaches, a head coach and two assistant coaches.
• Head coaches and assistant coaches can now have abilities to help (or sometimes hurt) their team! These abilities, for example, might increase the rate of player development, help reduce the number of injuries, or help pull in new recruits.
• Fumbles are now part of the game. Players have a new attribute, “Ball Security”, which determines how good they are at holding on to the ball. Low ball security can translate into an increased number of fumbles.
• The game now keeps track of more player stats such as QB rating, pass completion percentage, dropped passes, average rushing yards, fumbles, FG percentage, and broken tackles.

Note: This build of the game is not backwards compatible with saves from previous versions.

Happy Coaching!

A new update (22-05) of Old School Football Coach is here! The new changes include the following:

Career Mode News Headlines

It’s now easier than ever to stay up to date on what’s going on around your league. Each week new media headlines will be generated and displayed on the revamped career mode home screen. This will help you keep up with things like important games, major upsets, and who’s pulling in the top recruiting classes.

Other Improvements

• In career mode there is now a menu that will show all of the games happening that week.
• The team ranking formulas have been slightly tweaked to lessen the wild swings that were happening in the early season
• Various other minor changes

Happy Coaching!

A new update (22-04) of Old School Football Coach is here! The new changes include the following:

New Major Features:

• In career mode, if you want a recruit to join your school you now have to offer them a scholarship. Recruits will no longer automatically join the school with the most recruiting points at the end of the season. Instead, they will join the school with the most recruiting points that has also offered them a scholarship. Additionally recruits can also now commit to a school in any given week, not just at the end of the season. This adds another layer of strategy because you only have 25 scholarship offers to give out each season, and revoking a recruit’s offer has consequences!
• There is now a menu page to see recruit class rankings. The rankings get updated as recruits begin committing to schools. You can use this page to see how your recruiting class is stacking up against the competition.
• Three additional defensive stats are now tracked during games: Number of tackles, sacks, and passes defended.
• There is now support for pitch plays. Meaning, when the play calls for it, the QB is now able to pitch the ball to the running back during running plays. New built-in plays have been added to the game that utilize this feature. Additionally it’s now also possible to create your own pitch play in the Play Designer.
• It is now possible for defensive players to attempt blocking Field Goal and Punt kicks. Proper kick defense built-in plays have been implemented, and it’s possible for you to implement your own in the Play Designer as well.

Other general improvements and bug fixes:

• Quick Sim games have been tuned to reduce the number of interceptions.
• Quarterbacks were previously going through their WR progression in the wrong order during quick sim games. This often resulted in the HB being the primary target on passing plays. This has been corrected.
• Some built-in plays have been given better names.
• AI coaches are now smarter about calling FG plays when time is running out, even if it isn’t 4th down.
• Fixed a bug that would cause the wrong team to kickoff if there was a turnover during an “extra point” attempt.
• Some visuals have been slightly improved.
• Other minor bug fixes.

Happy Coaching!

A new update (22-01) of Old School Football Coach is here! The new changes include the following:

New Major Features:

• Rain and snow weather effects have been added. These effects can be turned on or off when setting up an exhibition game, but in career mode the weather is random. Rain and snow slightly impact QB throwing accuracy and other player skills.
• In career mode there are now two new topics you can talk to recruits about when trying to sway them towards your school. These topics are conference prestige and conference strength. This makes recruiting slightly easier for teams in a better conference.
• It is now possible to get an overview of the general strength of each team, broken down by offense, defense, and special teams.

Improvements / Tweaks / Bug Fixes

• Career Mode early season team rankings have been improved. Rankings were previously completely based on team performance. However, this would cause early season rankings to be very inaccurate due to there not being many game results yet to judge teams by. Preseason rankings in particular might as well have been completely random. Now early season rankings have a bias towards how well a team is expected to perform that season.
• In career mode you are now warned when you try to end a week without using up all of your recruiting points.
• Fixed a bug that made FG kickers 100% accurate when the game was run through a quick simulation.
• Fixed a bug that prevented a 2 point safety from being registered properly if it was 4th down.
• Various other miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements.

Happy coaching!

A new update (21-12) of Old School Football Coach is here! The new changes include the following:

New Features:

• Timeouts have been implemented! It’s now possible to call a timeout during the game. Calling a timeout allows you to stop the game clock, reset the play clock, and select a new play before the ball is snapped. Timeouts can be called from the game menu.
• Computer controlled players are now smart enough to take a touchback when appropriate after receiving a kick, interception, or fumble. They now no longer always try to run the ball out of their endzone.
• Players now celebrate after scoring.

Improvements / Tweaks / Bug Fixes

• The ESC key will now launch the in-game menu while playing a football game
• The simulation dialog is now more responsive while running a deep simulation.
• The game clock now correctly stops when there is a change in possession

Happy coaching!

A new update (21-10) of Old School Football Coach is here! The new changes include the following:

New Features:

• Teams now have head coaches associated with them that modify different aspects of the team.
  • Coaches now have their own playbook, meaning teams no longer have the same plays available to them. You can likewise set up your own playbook in career mode.
  • Coaches can set a desired offensive philosophy, such as “power run”, “quick pass”, and more. Offensive philosophy Impacts the AI coach play calling.
  • Coaches can set a desired balance between run and pass plays. This impacts the AI coach play calling.
  • Coaches can set their base formations. This impacts recruiting focus and AI coach playbooks.
• There is now support for QB run option plays. Not only are option plays available to call during the game, but you can also now design your own QB run option style plays as well.

  

• AI coaches will now adjust play calling based on player abilities. For example, they will pay attention to how strong of a leg their kicker has before attempting a long field goal.
• More built-in plays have been added to the game.

Improvements / Tweaks / Bug Fixes

• Defenders now have more of a random reaction delay when figuring out when the ball is run or thrown. This change slightly buffs offensive production.
• When the ball is thrown to a receiver, other receivers will now attempt to block for them.
• A player’s height is now properly used when determining collisions with the football. Previously the game assumed all players were 6ft tall.
• In the play designer it’s possible to tell a receiver to stop once their route is completed, but they previously wouldn’t actually stop. This has now been implemented properly.
• The play designer no longer allows you to give players bogus behaviors. These bogus behaviors were stand-in ideas for future additions to the game, but hadn’t been implemented. Thus players wouldn’t behave correctly if you gave them one of these behaviors.
• Players no longer get fatigued when simulating plays in the play designer.
• The stadium around the field has received some updated graphics.

Happy coaching!

A new update (21-08) of Old School Football Coach is here! The new updates include the following:

New Features:

• It is now possible to create and edit players. This can be accessed by editing a team through the league management menu and clicking a button to edit the team’s roster. From there you can select new options to add/edit/delete players.
• It is now possible to set a team’s desired text font, similar to setting team colors. The football field will now display the home team’s mascot name in the end zones using the desired font.
• Player names are now shown during the game action

Improvements

• Players in the defense secondary are now smarter. If a play utilizes multiple safeties, they will try to do a better job covering different sides of the field and not bunch up. Secondary players will also now do a better job recognizing when they need to contest a catch. The latter improvement is actually more of a bug fix. When the ball was thrown by the offense, there was an error that made defenders ignore offensive players and thus always assume they could make an easy interception without worrying about an offensive player jumping in front of them to make the catch instead. This has been fixed so that defenders do a better job of recognizing when they should try to jump and “high point” a catch.
• A consequence of making defensive players smarter, as described in the previous change, is that interceptions would occur a lot more often. To combat this, defender catching abilities have been reduced to bring the rate of interceptions back down.
• Punters now try to kick balls at a slightly higher angle so that they don’t out-kick their coverage team as often.
• Depth chart generation has been improved so that players aren’t placed out of their main position so much.
• Added initial support for backwards compatible career and league saves. Up until this point, trying to use old save files with new builds of the game could lead to silent corruptions and crashes. Starting with save files generated by this build and going forward, save files will either be upgraded to be compatible with the new build, or you will be explicitly notified about the incompatibility.

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue that would prevent independent teams from generating a proper schedule in career mode. This bug would cause independent teams to only have 1 or 2 games on their schedule instead of the desired 12.
• Fixed a few rare bugs that could lead to the game crashing

Happy coaching!

A new update (21-07) of Old School Football Coach is now publicly available! In addition to various bug fixes it includes a new major features!

Player Injuries

Football players can now get injured during games. The chances of injury increase as the player’s fatigue worsens. An injury to a player in career mode might mean several weeks of healing, resulting in players missing games. Be sure to bench your best players when you find yourself in the middle of a blow-out to prevent costly injuries!

Happy coaching!