Dan O'Mac wrote:

Veras' simulation was different. For the regular season, he did a more generic method based on ratings.

When it came to his championship, it wasn't so much as by play as it was by time. He'd roll to determine the time of the score, using a couple dice. From there, he'd determine what type of score it is and build the story. So he determined it by the time of the score, not every play.

That's helpful to know, and it's given me some ideas.

I think I will be able to break down any score into parts, using some simplified rules. In essence, in football, the most point you can score at once is 8 points (I include extra points in with the touchdown score, because it is an untimed down). Any score greater than 8 points can be broken down in a finite number of ways, so from there, it's down to randomly selecting which individual scores add up to the final score. Since I'm automating this with code, once the rules are written once, I can always run the code to split the scores.

The next problem to solve is assigning scores to a game time. Each game is 3600 game seconds. I can randomly select a second, and assign an individual score to that second. But, the score can only be assigned to that second, if it meets another set of simple rules. For instance, a certain amount of time must pass between field goal scores (because rarely will you see a team score a field goal in less than a minute after gaining possession of the ball). So rules that account for things like that, and also when in the game a score occurs. 

Once I've assigned each individual game score to a game second, I can assign a game second to a real time second. In the simplest form, if a game lasts 3 hours, each second of game time takes 3 seconds of real time, if I divide real time evenly by game time. I'd like to add in a half time, and some variability. To do that, each game second can take a variable amount of real time seconds, but I will only allow for a minimum and maximum amou

I'm wondering if any of you have ever taken a simulated score, like a football score, for example, and then broken it down into a scoring summary, as a way to give a game more realism, rather than to just have a score at the end of the game. If I remember correctly, Veras used to have quarterly scoring broken down for the AFA back in the day, but I'm not sure if each quarter was simulated, or if a final score was broken down into quarters.

Here's what I'm getting at with this: I currently simulate the GSL, where the output is a single final score for each team. I would like to find a way to give "live" game updates, instead of posting the score 3 hours after the game start time. For live game updates, I would want to simulate the game at game start time, and then break down the team scores, into reasonable scoring chunks (20 points can be divided down to two touchdowns, and two field goals, or three touchdowns, and a missed extra point, etc.).

Finding a way to break down the scores is one problem. The other issue is, giving each of these scores a game time in which they were scored. There would have to be certain rules associated with scores, for example, a team probably wouldn't score a field goal in the first minute of a half, as that's very unlikely. Same with, a team probably won't score a field goal in less than a minute of game time after the other team had just scored.

By hand, I think this problem is easier to solve, but my goal would be to create a set of rules to break down scores, then give scores a game time when the score occurred, so that I can automatically break down a score at simulation time. This would make it easy for me to then also show live score updates, based on when in the game a score happened.

I'll take any and all thoughts, ideas, and experience you all may have on something like this.

Hi everyone, I've been working on football scheduling formulas for 18 game football seasons, over 19 regular season weeks, so I can create schedules for Gridiron Uniform Database Simulation League (GSL).
In case someone might find them useful, I'm going to share a read only version of my scheduling spreadsheets:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1V-jVQ8iMFSIRGfevjr_7COZMRYTY52JxSTYS0EZuQSg/edit?usp=sharing

There's a few things I've got so far. First, is how double round robins can be played in 4 and 6 team divisions. Next, I have scheduling formulas for 18 games season over 19 weeks, with leagues that have 16, 18, 20, 22, and 24 teams (thus far). I figure for leagues 26 teams or more, schedules can be mapped to past NFL seasons.

The last few sheets are actual game schedules by week. The formatting may look a bit odd, but it matches what I need to create the schedule in the database for the GSL.

I'm not sure if this will be useful to anyone, but if anyone plans on scheduling full seasons worth of games, this should help. Having the division round robin formulas should also help when creating schedules for leagues of different size as what I have, since these schedules follow similar patterns.