NFL Head Coach

"World’s greatest chair-spinning simulator"

With EA Sports sitting on the NFL license, a license that had kindly granted them huge profits with little fear of competition in the form of the Madden and Street franchises, one could not wonder if more games could be squeezed from that saturated sponge. And so one of the bigwigs at EA comes up with the idea for NFL Head Coach and anti-EA fanboys turn sour once again.

The gist of NFL Head Coach is that you play as a head coach of a real NFL team, from merely choosing plays in games to hand-picking your staff. As the story goes, you were an assistant coach to the 2006 Superbowl-winning Pittsburgh Steelers and you are now a hot commodity on the market. You can create a coach from a meager helping of customizable features and then receive an offer to be head coach of any team you interview with. Unfortunately, you cannot be any real-life coach (i.e., continue Bill Belichick's empire of doom or save Dennis Green from saying “crown their ass” on TV), so that's a bit of a bummer.

So the real argument is “If I can coach a team in Madden, why do I need Head Coach for anyway?” Good question. You cannot sit in a chair at a desk and swivel around in Madden. Actually, one of Madden's selling points is its schedule feature. Like a real-life coach, you take time to work in the office, consult with your assistant coaches, interview possible coworkers, examine and draft college prospects, manage your roster, hire free agents, trade players with other teams, run practice drills, and actually call plays during the big games, accompanied with all sorts of cool backdrops rather than the boring old menu. There's not a lot of room to adjust your schedule, but at least it guarantees you have time to handle every issue at any given moment. Be warned—if you are not a nutcase about coaching every specific detail about your team, this game is not for you.

After you are hired, you are shoved into your office and must work your butt off to get ready for next year's season. Like in Madden, you can examine your players' ratings and make substitutions when necessary. Not only that, but your coaches (such as QB coach, RB coach, DL coach, etc.) have ratings, and the game throws in another layer of evaluations to spice things up. You see, depending on your coaches' ratings, not only can they make your players perform better on gameday, but they can also pick out talent better than you can (call it standard deviation, if you will—a player with slightly higher overall than another may actually be much worse). Not only do your coaches have evaluation ratings, but so do you. And so, in a series of computer events and meetings, you can juggle your “trust” in your coaches by being nice or tearing them up in hopes of accruing a little knowledge yourself. You can also increase your knowledge by giving the right answers to your general managers. It's really complicated, but it's just the surface of the game.

Eventually, you will get your team set up and ready for the games. There are two ways to pump up your team—by running practice drills and by motivating them. When you run drills, you pick from your playbook's fifty-ish plays (divided into groups for certain situations, 1st and 10, 3rd and short, etc.) and run the plays over and over again. If you practice a play enough times, your team will be adept to it and thus it becomes a “money play.” You can also motivate players either by giving a passive or aggressive response, but this seems completely random as some players will get a performance boost while others will drop.

You can also check out possible draft picks by doing some research on them. Problem is you can only examine three picks in one sitting, which basically makes this the equivalent of scooping a handful of coins out of a jar and picking out quarters. Some picks turn out to be real gems, while others are busts. Leave it to you and your coaches' evaluation abilities to lead you to the really good picks. You can also trade players, draft free agents, or cut retired players from the roster, but it's very Madden-esque in nature.

But at the end of the day, all this stuff is great, but it's kind of boring. First and foremost, the menu is kind of clunky and confusing. Loading times are frequent and the myriad of quotes from legendary coaches doesn't make them any better. Most office hours and team meetings are usually unnecessary. You can sim through most of the game, but this takes a VERY long time—almost an hour from the start of the game just to get to the first preseason. And not only that, but you are obligated to manually run practices if you want to give your players a performance boost.

Eventually, you'll get to the game and this is where it starts to get fun. From the sidelines, you'll handpick plays from your playbook and watch as the players run them. This is actually pretty fun. Most of the things you do happen simultaneously with the game, so when you aren't picking plays, your coordinators pick them while you're talking with the players on the bench. You can opt to instruct your players to do certain things, such as to stay in the pocket or to not bite on play-action. The visuals during the games are decent--most of the players' animations are okay. The players are non-descript for the most part but from far away, the broadcast camera looks nice. During “clutch” plays, the game goes into slow-mo to emphasize the situation.

The only flaw is that, unlike Madden, there's a little too much “miscellany” going on—usually, you can run a draw play up the middle and watch as your guy busts through untouched for the TD, or watching a WR drop a wide open pass. This happens a bit too much, so I'd say the problem is with the football itself, not the extra features. Also, there's no press conferences after the game, so you can't live up to the likes of Jim Mora's “we did diddly poo...we sucked...playoffs?” and other wacky quotes (obviously, I was looking forward to this very much).

And so the season continues until its conclusion—with you the Superbowl victor or just another loser. The goal is to keep playing until you are inducted into the Hall of Fame, as you continue to absorb NFL Films music and quotes into your noggin, driving you towards insanity. Needless to say, this game isn't easy, so you are encouraged to keep playing for many seasons more. NFL Head Coach isn't that bad, but it needs to serious tweaking to become a playoff contender in the video game world. If you have any interest in this game, then go ahead and check it out in your local bargain bin.

Presentation: 7/10 – You're in an office spinning in a chair. Bill Cowher points at you while making a face. Yeah.
Gameplay: 6.5/10 – Tons of minutae poured into your team—coaching your team during the season is kind of fun, but off-season is rather boring.
Graphics: 7/10 – Borderline Madden-quality. Games look good but not great in motion. Other people look kind of generic.
Sound: 6.5/10 – It's got NFL Films music, but other than that, not much else.
Replay Value: 7/10 – Careers span over many seasons, and no season is ever the same. Still pretty monotonous though.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/28/08

Game Release: NFL Head Coach (US, 06/20/06)