Flotsam League Files

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Dear god, what have you done?

Other than spend several years and hundreds of hours tracking down trivial bits of information only to come out the other end with a spreadsheet? Well, I mean, nothing. That’s exactly what I did. The spreadsheet itself contains nearly every player who has played in the NFL, CFL, AAF, XFL, USFL, UFL, WLAF and its successor, NFL Europe from the years 1981-2021. Each player has their name, birthday, college, position, home town and other vitals necessary for that players inclusion in pretty much any football management sim draft file. Each year of the that players career is recorded with regards to what roster they were on at the approximate beginning of the league year. And there are currently 150,000+ player seasons recorded. Will you find *every* player who suited up for every team? Alas, no. Some records of players who only were on rosters a for training camp or for a single game in the early 80s remain quite elusive. Will you find that assistant principal from your high school who had a cup of coffee with the Raleigh-Durham Skyhawks in the 1990s? I did.

Why did you do this?

I’ve been playing these games for 20+ years now (longer if you count roster fiddling in Madden and Tecmo) and I love doing the historical play throughs. The only problem is that I have niggling issues with the historical rosters that have been made. Most are great, but I don’t know how many times I’ve had to use draft files from two different modders and had a player appear twice (once when they went were drafted, again when they first started playing in the league) or had a fringe player I like left out or just had wild swings of player ratings from one author to the next. The logical solution was to make my own mod, but since I’m a damn idiot, I insisted on having ALL the data I could before even starting. I actually started this process because I like playing through the 1980s, and the two players strikes and USFL make the draft years fucking goofy. It needed to be sorted.

That was what started my draft files, anyway. After I released those, I was contacted by someone in charge of the historical rosters for the since cancelled collaboration between Front Office Football and OOTP Baseball. Not to overstate my contribution but I basically saved that project, which is why you’ve played nothing but Out of the Park Football since. 

Anyway, my limited exposure to that proposed game was more than enough to convince me to rework my draft spreadsheet into a roster spreadsheet. Maybe now I’ll see my dream come to fruition, Out of the Sponsored Stadium Handegg Manager or WestSide Football Mogul. Seemed easy enough. That was 2019. I worked sporadically for a few months here and there, initially overwhelmed by how much time I would need sitting in front of the computer, neglecting the outside world. “That’ll never happen. I’ve got stuff to do.” Well.

What does it...do?

It provides a base for once and future modders of Front Office Football games past and future. As well as other games that might offer a historical draft option, like Draft Day Sports or even the Football Mogul series, if that’s your bag. The data included is parsed into as many editable useful bits as I could. So instead of you having to hunt down and type out the names, positions and colleges of every player you want in your mod, I’ve done it for you in a format that should be pretty future proof. All you need to do is cut and paste.

What doesn’t it do now, but sometimes might?

Detailed player skill ratings.  Currently each player has a career potential rating, but like I haven’t rated every players tackling ability throughout the years or anything. Maybe some other intrepid modder will beat me to it. This is also where I figure people will want to do their own thing. Some players like it when you have a lot of maxed out HOF-level players with high injury rating, some like more nuanced rosters that require constant tinkering, and I’m sure some will turn the X Factor to 100% and have Kerwin Bell win multiple League MVP awards.

Historical Contracts. I had to stop somewhere and even though I do have some historical data here, I haven’t entered it yet. It’s even more of a slog than the rest of the data.

Relations. Not like shipping Suzy Kolber and Joe Namath but like noting that Antonio Brown is everyone’s 2nd cousin and that there is always a Clay Matthews in Winterfell. 

Ok, so what’s in the box?

First name: I’ve tried to keep most everyone as their functional given first name. So Stump Mitchell is in there as Lyvonia. Also, people named James who go by J.T. or the like will be James, but people who go by Chucky won’t be Charles. I’ve tried to make the distinction between nickname and diminutive, but it’s a blurry line. Also I’ve probably been wildly inconsistent in my application.

Last name: Pretty straight forward, though it is worth noting that some players changed their names mid-career. Maurice Jones-Drew was just Maurice Drew when he was drafted, but soon after added Jones to honor the Grandfather who raised him. 

Nick name: I kind of fell in love with the nickname feature in FOF, so I’ve noted many nicknames for players that aren’t based on where they played or any specific happenstance that occured way after they were drafted. IE, Sage Rosenfels doesn’t have his awesome nickname Rosencopter, since that was based on a specific awesome play of his professional career. I felt like that would make as much sense as nicknaming Willie Brown “Old Man Willie” as a 23 year old rookie. I did, however, make some exceptions for nicknames acquired later in the career but that still made sense, like Jerome “The Bus” Bettis.

Full name: Typed out as their commonly known name for ease of searchability. IE, “Esiason, Norman” is here as Boomer Esiason. This is mostly for searchability.

Jersey number: Gonna be a fair amount of gaps here simply because the roster files are meant to be set during the time after training camp but before pre-season and there are going to be players who didn’t make the roster and therefore didn’t get a game jersey number. 

Draft year: This is represented as the first year the player was eligible to be drafted into the NFL. This may result in players appearing (and performing well) long before they showed up in the NFL in real life. James Harrison, for instance, will show up in the 2002 draft, and likely be taken very high in the draft instead of bouncing around the NFC North for five seasons before earning a starting spot. This mostly affected fringe players in other leagues, however, as there seemed to be a trend of guys going undrafted, then either sitting around a year or being on a practice squad somewhere before playing in the CFL or AAF or what have you.

Team: Again, as this is based on the idea that each league year starts in that late Aug/early Sept time before games actually start. Why? Well, the games we’re talking about are roster management, so why not give you 80-90 players to start with? This might make some careers seem longer that most people might be familiar with, since it is not uncommon for aged players to stick around as a FA at the beginning of the season and latch on after other teams experience injury or spend an offseason with a team before retiring after training camp. Also of note are players who play in two different leagues in one league year. Not terribly common, but since the USFL was a spring league it does happen. 

Year Joined: For current listed team, for games like FOF.

EXP: Basically years since drafted. Even if a player spent the year not playing, a season of EXP is accrued. 

Positions 1 & 2: I started the process with the intention of forcing everyone into one of the specific but not too specific position designations from FOF, since that seemed a happy medium between calling everyone just “LB” and going gnats ass and finding out who played strongside LB and who played mike LB. But part of the way through the process I decided this did a disservice to true multi tool talents like Kordell Stewart and guys who were forced to change position in the pros, like Denard Robinson. I added that Pos 2 for two reasons, really: 1. In case a future game has the ability to designate multiple positions for a draftee and 2. For leagues with way more than 32 teams, there might be room for a player like Shoelace to stay as a QB.

Height & Weight: As accurate as I could find from my source. Static, so unfortunately we don’t get to relive the expanding waistline of Eddie Lacy.

Birthdays: As accurate as I could find from my many sources, special thanks to Rotoworld, Facebook and the spooky-ass Mylife.com website. Protect your data people, or you might end up in a video game or a spreadsheet somewhere.

Colleges: As indicated, these colleges are the universities that players were drafted from. Since I have yet to see a game accept a player with two colleges like Russell Wilson or Troy Aikman, I defaulted to the final college a player attended before going pro. I’ve included this data as a standardized numerical code with the contemporary name of the University (So older players will have Chico State or Fullerton while the newer players will have Cal State Fullerton, etc). 

Hometown: This is where things get a little wild west. After all, if someone asked you where your hometown was, what would you tell them? Where you were born? Where you grew up? Where you graduated high school? Since I didn’t have *each* of those data points on each player, I tried to default to where players were born. Unfortunately, many college websites (where I could get data on a good many players) only listed what high school where they played, which isn’t necessarily the town where the player may have lived. Best I can say about this category is that the player probably has been in or near this town at some point in their lives and that including this slightly fudged data won’t likely mess up any game you use it for. But who doesn’t love fudge?

Potential Role: This is essentially just a description of career cap potential. IE, if a player ended their career with several pro bowls in the NFL, they’d be listed as a “NFL Very Good Starter” or if they spent their career bouncing between CFL teams as a backup, well they’re a “CFL Backup”. Gets a little dicey when a player spent time and had various levels of success in multiple leagues, but I tried to reflect their highest point of success. So if they were a very good CFL who tried to switch to the NFL later in their career but did nothing, then they get to be a “CFL Good Starter” or the like. 

Rating: A numerical representation of the above “Potential Role.” To put it simply, every description reflects a numerical range out of 100. “NFL Low Starter” is players rated between 30-40. To put it non-simply, there are 8 levels of player quality (Super Star, Very Good, Good, Mediocre, Fair, Low, Backup and Camp Body) for three levels of league (NFL being top, CFL/USFL being one strata below, and other Minor Leagues like NFLE or Arena one strata below that). So a player who rates 55 would be a Mediocre starter for the NFL, a Good Starter in the CFL, and a Very Good starter in the XFL. It isn’t the most detailed way to rate a player’s potential, but it’s a start.

Sooo...what else is wrong with it?

Well, this data is only as accurate as my sources, which include Pro Football Reference, Pro Football Archives, The Stats Crew, NFL.Com, Wikipedia, Rotoworld, MyLife.com, a bunch of other websites I can’t remember and even a few data gleaned from Facebook. There are likely typos. I tried as hard as I could to remove any duplicate players, but with guys out there going by nicknames or abbreviations or diminutives and changing their last names and positions, it was a struggle to eliminate them all. Could be some of the Clone Menace among us so if you see something, say something.

So that’s the big file, what’s this other crap?

Well since I went through the trouble of giving every player a unique ID, I was able to expand (scope creep) to other aspects of historical football like stats, draft records, league awards, team and league halls of fame, etc. Each team also has a unique ID as well, in an attempt to track records and championships. Not as difficult a thing in recent NFL history, but tracking things like AFL franchises that share the same name or old NFL teams that moved around quite a bit it gets more important. 

Ok, I’ve downloaded this and am immediately overwhelmed. What do?

Well, if you’ve always wanted to do your own mod, now’s the time. Pick your game of choice and look at the mods that are already out there. Play with the data, you can’t break it. Fuck around, find out. Think about what those mods and even the base game did well and what they perhaps didn’t do well and fill in those gaps. Or just waste your time building something that will be fun for you and don’t even think about releasing it to the savage public until you’re done with it. You’re also free to do whatever you want with this data file; post it, send it, grip it, rip it, and watch it go. Just don’t sell it. Don’t be that guy. It’s just data.

So what will you do now?

I finally rest and watch the sun rise on a grateful universe. Or perhaps I’ll finish the 2022 draft prospects or work on contracts, or an Access Database version. Then maybe I’ll add the rest of the Arena League, once I get a good source on that. Or maybe you’ll all bombard me with boneheaded mistakes I’ve made and I’ll rush to correct them? The future is an empty canvas.