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You'll also be able to examine your assistant coaches and fire as many of them as you like if they're not up to your standards. Of course, this means you'll need to hire replacements, which involves a rather annoying interview process where they all say pretty much the same thing. You've also got to go through a bunch of negotiations with free agents; or, rather, the agents of these players. Balancing the salary cap against the salaries by position will require some creativity and a willingness to gamble on not covering all of your bases as much as you'd probably like. This is the NFL, after all, and guys will get hurt.
Going gray was never so easy
Eventually - and it feels like forever - training camp begins. Playbooks will need to be finalized, depth charts must be set, and practices will need to be run. Should your players wear pads to build up strength, or practice in shorts and t-shirts to preserve energy? Should you run two-a-days to gain more expertise or a lighter schedule to not wear them down? All questions that have no right answers but will impact your team no matter which way you go. Practicing a certain play enough will allow it to be a "money" play, increasing the chances that it won't be a disaster on game day. Of course, running the same play too many times will mean ignoring other ones, meaning you'll be lucky if the quarterback and running back don't collide into each other and fumble the ball.
Speaking of game day, when it does finally arrive, the Madden game engine is used to show the action on the field. It's up to you to call each of the plays, but there will be times that your quarterback will be stinking the place up and will need a sharp talking to. The game won't wait for you to do this, though, and while you're giving that QB a tongue-lashing, your dumb-as-a-stump coordinators will call the plays for you in absentia. For some reason, these guys think that a run up the middle is the best play to call even when down by a couple of touchdowns on a 3rd-and-15. Those QBs will kill you too, though, since some of them have a tendency to make ridiculous decisions or even throw the ball backwards. If these don't cause you to kick your console, we'll be really surprised.
At the end of the day, NFL Head Coach is the kind of game that will appeal to a specific type of strategy and sports game enthusiast, and we're not too sure how many of those people actually exist. Its overly repetitive aspects of conversation and player interaction, mind-numbing amount of menu navigation, and shockingly high number of required mundane tasks will test the patience of all but the most fantasy football stat geeks. Combine those attributes with lots of load screens, terrible coordinator intelligence, and a clunky interface, and you'd be best served waiting for the next installment of Madden (or at least NCAA Football) to quench your football video game jones.
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