Sim Engine Stats vs Real Life 2023 Stats

Hi everyone, by now most of you all know the sim engine is off and wonky results are abound. Not only are we seeing far too many upsets happen within dynasty to the point 2007 looks tame, we're also seeing the actual stats in the games be off, some by a little, others by quite a significant margin.

I took the time to gather all the data from all 134 teams in my dynasty and put it together in excel. While I am only in week 11 and each team has only played 8 or 9 games, I still feel the sample is more than big enough to compare to real life stats. After all, I filtered out the 2 user teams along with the teams that those user teams faced so that the only teams left in the table were those that had 100% of their games played out in the sim engine and that left me with 501 games worth of data to look at.

The results were interesting. Parts of them were surprising, others not so much.

Right off the bat we can see the plays per game is very low compared to real life. At 11.4 less plays per game per team that means the average simulated game within dynasty is 23 plays less than that of a real life game from 2023. On top of that, we also see the average yards per play are just under 1 yard more per play in the game vs real life.

That's because of 2 main things. 1) the yards per pass attempt are nearly 1.5 yards higher than real life. While pass attempts per game are very close to real life, the yards per attempt is 17% higher than it is in real life, not exactly a small number. 2) the rushing attempts per game is drastically lower in simmed games than real life at just 25.7 carries compared to 36.0.

You can see in real life the average team had more rushing attempts per game than passing attempts, but the opposite is true in the simulated games. While I didn't compile stats like sacks, which count as rushing attempts, it's quite obvious the run/pass ratios are off by a bit in simmed games.

When combining the fact teams are passing more and yards per attempt are higher than real life, it paints a clear picture as to why yards per play are so much higher.

I was shocked to see the yards per carry was just about right on the money, but was not shocked to see the rush TD frequency was quite lower than real life. Nearly just two-thirds of that in real life, but we can tell that is likely due to the run/pass ratios and if the carries were higher the pass TD frequency would drop and the rush TD frequency would rise.

I hope this data can potentially help EA get the stats to a much more authentic level. While this was only a look at the macro level stats for now, I may do a deeper dive at some point to see if I can figure out more about what is going on. I think this at least paints a clear picture that total plays in simmed games need to get an increase and run/pass ratios in simmed games need a bit of a tweak. If those two things were done, I think that alone would get sim stats closer to real life than where they are now. Things like yards per pass attempt would still need tweaking, but I am crossing my fingers the total play numbers and rush attempt numbers make up the bulk of the issues.

One thing I do want to note, especially for anyone from EA that may come across this post, is that when looking through each team's stats, I was a bit surprised at the number of teams that fed RB1 the bulk of the carries. I'm talking around 90% or more of the carries. And there were far too many teams where only 3 player combined to have 100% of the rushing attempts for the team.

I get teams all have varying levels of RB rotation they do in real life and that is likely hard to perfect with a sim engine, but the below is from my dynasty going on right now and seems very wrong.

This is Cal's rushing game breakdown

181 rush attempts with Jaydn Ott accounting for 85 of them, Chandler Rogers, the QB, accounting for 90 of them, Kadarius Calloway, RB2, accounting for 5, and Kyion Grayes, a WR, having 1 carry.

After 9 games only 4 players have any carries for the team and 97% of those carries came from RB1 and QB1. This was a very common theme when looking at CPU teams. The number of players receiving carries was low and the carry distributions were very off compared to the average team in real life.

For comparison's sake, here's how Cal was in 2023.

While Ott had 49% of the carries in real life and had a comparable 47% in my dynasty, you can see the carry distribution for a team in real life often stretches across many more players than just 2 taking up 96% of the carries. 8 different players had double digit carries and accounted for 97% of the carries. So, the sim engine has 2 players accounting for 96% of carries while a real life team had 8 players all over double digit carries on the season accounting for essentially the same percentage of carries. If we used the dynasty mode carry distribution and applied it to the number of carries Cal had in real life, it would mean Ott and the QB would have accounted for 480 of the 497 carries on the year.

I point that out to show that if the sim engine can be adjusted to where the run/pass ratios are accurate and it leads to the right amount of plays, passes, and rushes in a game, the individual stats may still be a bigger mess if distribution values aren't adjusted as well.

I haven't looked into the receiving stats yet, only the passing stats, so I don't know if similar issues persist with receivers and the distribution of catches.

Thank you all for taking the time to read this. I hope this can help EA out in some way and they can work towards getting the sim engine much more authentic to real life college football. The gameplay on the field is absolutely stellar and I hate that issues like what we're seeing within dynasty right now are bringing the game down. If issues like this can get ironed out, this game will be something special.

You can see the passion from the team in so many areas of the game and it's honestly a bit heartbreaking that the effort and passion in so many areas is being ignored momentarily due to engines like the simulated stats issues. That's why I really want to see this get fixed so we can see this game reach its potential because that potential is sky high.