So, we have this fancy new stat competitiveness and I was wondering how people are treating it. I am going to have a look at some positions and see how much players are putting into competitiveness and whether it’s having much of an effect on their on-field performance. Before we dive in, I first want to point out some flaws in this investigation. People with high competitiveness probably also have a lot of tpe in general and so their other stats are more likely to be higher as well. This could explain the differences we see. There are also traits to take into account, which could be helping them in other ways. I won’t look at who has traits and who doesn’t too much in this post, but if I find an outlier who has a trait that is of importance, I’ll be sure to mention it. Future investigations could look at the difference between getting a trait and putting the tpe into other stats but I’m going to focus on competitiveness at an initial exploratory level.
I will start with Quarterbacks in my basic look at whether competitiveness is worth it. Quarterbacks competitiveness is meant to help them with completing passes. It will also help them in the stat check involved for fumbles, if they have higher competitiveness than their tackler, they are less likely to fumble the ball. I will look at all the ISFL starting quarterbacks and group them into tiers of different competitiveness levels and see how they performed in each of these categories.
Competitiveness
![[Image: UpoHgfk.png]](https://i.imgur.com/UpoHgfk.png)
So weirdly enough the higher the competitiveness you have the more likely you are to lose a fumble if you are sacked. 4 of the quarterbacks with 80 competitiveness had higher than usual rates for fumbles per sack, with the other two being closer to the overall mean. These quarterbacks were not facing more sacks than the lower competitiveness quarterbacks, it just seems that they are more likely to lose the fumble. One thing that could be driving this difference is the quality of defenses faced, possibly they have played defenses with higher competitiveness. We are 12 games into the season though, so I would think that over the 6 high competitiveness quarterbacks they have probably faced a wide selection of defenses, I haven’t looked into this so it could be a factor. I noticed that although Howitzer (at 65 competitiveness) hasn’t lost a fumble yet this season, he did fumble the ball when being sacked in one of the games at least. Howitzer managed to recover the ball, so it wasn’t recorded. I couldn’t see a place where the fumbles lost were tracked, without going into every single game and looking at the play by play. So, this could be misleading and maybe the lower competitiveness quarterbacks are just being a bit luckier in recovering their fumbles. The completion percentage also seemed to get better the lower competitiveness you have. This could be lots of factors like the way the team plays or the quality of the receivers etc. It does seem from this very basic look at what’s happening with the stats that competitiveness doesn’t give quarterbacks that much of an edge. If you are an up and coming quarterback worried about what to put stats into, I would think twice before going too heavily into competitiveness.
I’ll now have a look at Defensive Ends. Competitiveness is used as a stat check against the offensive player to determine whether you can force a fumble or not as well as making defensive players able to keep tackling without getting tired. For Defensive Ends I will look at how many forced fumbles they make on tackles and how many they make on sacks. I’ll also have a look at their tackles per game to see if higher competitiveness helps with having a higher total number of tackles. It should be remembered that quite often high competitiveness players have high overall tpe, so they will probably also have a lot of endurance. I’ll create an average for people with the same amount of competitiveness and put how many there was in brackets beside the amount. All these stats are for 12 games. The two players with 57 competitiveness had such widely different sack numbers I thought it would be interesting to give them their own rows. I’ll add in the average total TPE for each of the tiers, and the range.
![[Image: 1lRuKbD.png]](https://i.imgur.com/1lRuKbD.png)
There are a lot more players playing defensive end so we get a bigger spread of competitiveness and makes it a bit harder to decipher. I’m going to focus on a few areas that I thought were interesting, namely the higher tpe players who didn’t put as much into competitiveness and how well the players with 80 competitiveness done compared to those who went above that threshold.
There were four higher tpe players who didn’t bother with competitiveness too much though it didn’t seem to hurt their numbers. This allowed some of them to pick up traits, so I’ll add a column in to show what traits they had.
![[Image: E8VeHZV.png]](https://i.imgur.com/E8VeHZV.png)
None of the traits helped with forcing fumbles, but they did help with getting to players and identifying them which we see in their tackle per games stats being high. An interesting comparison is between the players with 58 and 57 competitiveness. The player with 58 has very good numbers in fumbles per sack and fumbles per tackle whilst nearly all of their stats are lower than the player with 57. The only stat they are higher in is competitiveness, and it’s by one point. I tend to think that this is just sim luck, as the 57 player has more tackles per game and more sacks per game. I’m sure given time the higher tpe player would end up with better numbers. These players show that if you have solid stats everywhere else you don’t need that much competitiveness. They are putting up similar numbers to players who invested a lot into it. The 57 player is about the same tpe as the mean player from the 81 group and the 57 player is doing better in all stat categories.
We can see that competitiveness doesn’t have that positive an impact by looking at the players who have 80 and the ones above them. Pretty much all of them have multiple traits as these are mainly high tpe players. The only lower tpe player who went all in with competitiveness is the 573 one. They have 16 tackles and 4 sacks. They have yet to force a fumble though and I’d say they are a good example of why you should invest in other attributes before going into competitiveness. They might only be used in a rotational manner for their team, and so they could be lacking opportunity, if they forced a fumble on their next sack, then they would be round about the mean so it’s not the end of the world. Just a warning that competitiveness isn’t a shortcut to more fumbles.
Tackles per game Fumbles per tackle Sacks per game Fumble per sack
![[Image: PZfYR1E.png]](https://i.imgur.com/PZfYR1E.png)
This is where it gets pretty weird. The player with 90 is the highest tpe defensive end in the game, and they have great numbers in each of the categories. Well above average which should be expected. However, when you get down into the next load of people the numbers for fumbles seem to take a massive dip. Both the 85 players have yet to force a fumble despite having healthy tackles per game and sacks per game. The player with 84 is around about the average, and then the person with 82 competitiveness once again has hardly any forced fumbles despite putting up more than 1 sack per game and almost 3 tackles per game. The 3 players with 81 only had 2 fumbles between the lot of them despite also putting up above-average numbers for tackles and sacks. Then when you get to 80 competitiveness, we get really solid numbers from all the players with a pretty high fumble per sack number. That is boosted massively by one player who has a fumble for all their sacks. If we take out that person, the rest of the players still get 0.22 fumbles per sack which are average. It looks like there isn’t really any benefit from going above 80 competitiveness for Defensive Ends. They end up actually doing worse. The problem with these numbers is that it’s a very small sample size for what can be a very rare thing in a fumble. We shouldn’t take them too seriously unless we had a lot more games with a lot more players but it’s always worth doing some exploratory number crunching.
I think I have shown through this quick look that competitiveness should be seen as a nice modifier bonus for stats you already have, rather than a stat to invest in before others. Defensive Ends seem to get on fine without it if they have high numbers in other attributes and to be honest I’m not sure you would notice much difference if you didn’t bother with it in this position much like those brave souls who went for 51 and 57 respectively.
I think the best way to investigate competitiveness is to look at those players with around 500-800 tpe where they have to make sacrifices elsewhere to invest in competitiveness. It’s difficult to say with high tpe players if the stats they get are due to the high competitiveness or due to the high tpe everywhere else. So far, I haven’t found a very convincing argument for investing in it heavily, until you already have other base stats. I am going to look at it as a bonus multiplier that can boost my other stats and give me a slight edge over those opponents who can’t afford to invest in it yet.
I really like competitiveness as a stat as I like to imagine players who are scrappy underdogs that make up for it by being really competitive or those who just glide by on their natural athletic gifts. It’s an intangible stat which makes it kind of interesting but also makes it very difficult to quantify what it does. I’m not sure how the calculation works in the sim. I’m guessing it either does a straight check to see who has the highest competitiveness then gives them advantage on an RNG roll, or it could look at the difference between players and use a ratio to determine whether they make a forced fumble. I think if it was a ratio you could end up getting a lot of value for having a really high competitiveness stat. The issue with that then is it could be game-breaking if it was overpowered, or only certain positions could reach crazy high competitiveness. I’m not sure the best way to go forward but right now it seems a bit underwhelming of a stat. I do like it as a concept and the role-playing aspect so I would like to see it become more desirable as a stat you can get to once you have high attributes everywhere else. I think giving it too much power on its own would’ve been a mistake and so I get why the sim team have powered it the way they have. My idea of using it as a modifier could create players that are just too good though.
Another important point is that no offensive player has over 80 competitiveness. I’m guessing this is so it doesn’t become impossible to force a fumble on some players. I think defensive players should think twice before going above 81 competitiveness as it could just be wasted tpe. If the sim does use a ratio type system where the amount of tpe you have more than the opposing player has an impact, then it could be very valuable to go above that 81. However, looking at the stats for defensive ends that doesn’t seem to be the case as those players seemed to dip in forced fumbles.
I would like to look into more offensive players and see how competitiveness works with drops for wide receivers and tight ends, and if it stops running backs from fumbling the ball. I think that would be really hard to do with the current index though, as a lot of these stats are only on the player’s personal page. I would have to go into each individual profile and manually take all the stats from there. It’s not impossible but it would be much quicker if all these things where tracked somewhere like how all the receiving and defensive stats are tracked.
Overall, I’m really enjoying the new sim, and all the new stats and traits. It gives me something to work toward having traits, and those requirements feel like breakpoints and little goals to achieve and maybe guide your build a bit. The traits are also going to keep me involved more in the offseason as I want to make sure I have tpe to spend on them. I plan to use all my tpe in season on stats and then save up during the offseason for traits. Though maybe I’ll hold off investing in competitiveness for now.
Words = 2525
I will start with Quarterbacks in my basic look at whether competitiveness is worth it. Quarterbacks competitiveness is meant to help them with completing passes. It will also help them in the stat check involved for fumbles, if they have higher competitiveness than their tackler, they are less likely to fumble the ball. I will look at all the ISFL starting quarterbacks and group them into tiers of different competitiveness levels and see how they performed in each of these categories.
Competitiveness
So weirdly enough the higher the competitiveness you have the more likely you are to lose a fumble if you are sacked. 4 of the quarterbacks with 80 competitiveness had higher than usual rates for fumbles per sack, with the other two being closer to the overall mean. These quarterbacks were not facing more sacks than the lower competitiveness quarterbacks, it just seems that they are more likely to lose the fumble. One thing that could be driving this difference is the quality of defenses faced, possibly they have played defenses with higher competitiveness. We are 12 games into the season though, so I would think that over the 6 high competitiveness quarterbacks they have probably faced a wide selection of defenses, I haven’t looked into this so it could be a factor. I noticed that although Howitzer (at 65 competitiveness) hasn’t lost a fumble yet this season, he did fumble the ball when being sacked in one of the games at least. Howitzer managed to recover the ball, so it wasn’t recorded. I couldn’t see a place where the fumbles lost were tracked, without going into every single game and looking at the play by play. So, this could be misleading and maybe the lower competitiveness quarterbacks are just being a bit luckier in recovering their fumbles. The completion percentage also seemed to get better the lower competitiveness you have. This could be lots of factors like the way the team plays or the quality of the receivers etc. It does seem from this very basic look at what’s happening with the stats that competitiveness doesn’t give quarterbacks that much of an edge. If you are an up and coming quarterback worried about what to put stats into, I would think twice before going too heavily into competitiveness.
I’ll now have a look at Defensive Ends. Competitiveness is used as a stat check against the offensive player to determine whether you can force a fumble or not as well as making defensive players able to keep tackling without getting tired. For Defensive Ends I will look at how many forced fumbles they make on tackles and how many they make on sacks. I’ll also have a look at their tackles per game to see if higher competitiveness helps with having a higher total number of tackles. It should be remembered that quite often high competitiveness players have high overall tpe, so they will probably also have a lot of endurance. I’ll create an average for people with the same amount of competitiveness and put how many there was in brackets beside the amount. All these stats are for 12 games. The two players with 57 competitiveness had such widely different sack numbers I thought it would be interesting to give them their own rows. I’ll add in the average total TPE for each of the tiers, and the range.
There are a lot more players playing defensive end so we get a bigger spread of competitiveness and makes it a bit harder to decipher. I’m going to focus on a few areas that I thought were interesting, namely the higher tpe players who didn’t put as much into competitiveness and how well the players with 80 competitiveness done compared to those who went above that threshold.
There were four higher tpe players who didn’t bother with competitiveness too much though it didn’t seem to hurt their numbers. This allowed some of them to pick up traits, so I’ll add a column in to show what traits they had.
None of the traits helped with forcing fumbles, but they did help with getting to players and identifying them which we see in their tackle per games stats being high. An interesting comparison is between the players with 58 and 57 competitiveness. The player with 58 has very good numbers in fumbles per sack and fumbles per tackle whilst nearly all of their stats are lower than the player with 57. The only stat they are higher in is competitiveness, and it’s by one point. I tend to think that this is just sim luck, as the 57 player has more tackles per game and more sacks per game. I’m sure given time the higher tpe player would end up with better numbers. These players show that if you have solid stats everywhere else you don’t need that much competitiveness. They are putting up similar numbers to players who invested a lot into it. The 57 player is about the same tpe as the mean player from the 81 group and the 57 player is doing better in all stat categories.
We can see that competitiveness doesn’t have that positive an impact by looking at the players who have 80 and the ones above them. Pretty much all of them have multiple traits as these are mainly high tpe players. The only lower tpe player who went all in with competitiveness is the 573 one. They have 16 tackles and 4 sacks. They have yet to force a fumble though and I’d say they are a good example of why you should invest in other attributes before going into competitiveness. They might only be used in a rotational manner for their team, and so they could be lacking opportunity, if they forced a fumble on their next sack, then they would be round about the mean so it’s not the end of the world. Just a warning that competitiveness isn’t a shortcut to more fumbles.
Tackles per game Fumbles per tackle Sacks per game Fumble per sack
This is where it gets pretty weird. The player with 90 is the highest tpe defensive end in the game, and they have great numbers in each of the categories. Well above average which should be expected. However, when you get down into the next load of people the numbers for fumbles seem to take a massive dip. Both the 85 players have yet to force a fumble despite having healthy tackles per game and sacks per game. The player with 84 is around about the average, and then the person with 82 competitiveness once again has hardly any forced fumbles despite putting up more than 1 sack per game and almost 3 tackles per game. The 3 players with 81 only had 2 fumbles between the lot of them despite also putting up above-average numbers for tackles and sacks. Then when you get to 80 competitiveness, we get really solid numbers from all the players with a pretty high fumble per sack number. That is boosted massively by one player who has a fumble for all their sacks. If we take out that person, the rest of the players still get 0.22 fumbles per sack which are average. It looks like there isn’t really any benefit from going above 80 competitiveness for Defensive Ends. They end up actually doing worse. The problem with these numbers is that it’s a very small sample size for what can be a very rare thing in a fumble. We shouldn’t take them too seriously unless we had a lot more games with a lot more players but it’s always worth doing some exploratory number crunching.
I think I have shown through this quick look that competitiveness should be seen as a nice modifier bonus for stats you already have, rather than a stat to invest in before others. Defensive Ends seem to get on fine without it if they have high numbers in other attributes and to be honest I’m not sure you would notice much difference if you didn’t bother with it in this position much like those brave souls who went for 51 and 57 respectively.
I think the best way to investigate competitiveness is to look at those players with around 500-800 tpe where they have to make sacrifices elsewhere to invest in competitiveness. It’s difficult to say with high tpe players if the stats they get are due to the high competitiveness or due to the high tpe everywhere else. So far, I haven’t found a very convincing argument for investing in it heavily, until you already have other base stats. I am going to look at it as a bonus multiplier that can boost my other stats and give me a slight edge over those opponents who can’t afford to invest in it yet.
I really like competitiveness as a stat as I like to imagine players who are scrappy underdogs that make up for it by being really competitive or those who just glide by on their natural athletic gifts. It’s an intangible stat which makes it kind of interesting but also makes it very difficult to quantify what it does. I’m not sure how the calculation works in the sim. I’m guessing it either does a straight check to see who has the highest competitiveness then gives them advantage on an RNG roll, or it could look at the difference between players and use a ratio to determine whether they make a forced fumble. I think if it was a ratio you could end up getting a lot of value for having a really high competitiveness stat. The issue with that then is it could be game-breaking if it was overpowered, or only certain positions could reach crazy high competitiveness. I’m not sure the best way to go forward but right now it seems a bit underwhelming of a stat. I do like it as a concept and the role-playing aspect so I would like to see it become more desirable as a stat you can get to once you have high attributes everywhere else. I think giving it too much power on its own would’ve been a mistake and so I get why the sim team have powered it the way they have. My idea of using it as a modifier could create players that are just too good though.
Another important point is that no offensive player has over 80 competitiveness. I’m guessing this is so it doesn’t become impossible to force a fumble on some players. I think defensive players should think twice before going above 81 competitiveness as it could just be wasted tpe. If the sim does use a ratio type system where the amount of tpe you have more than the opposing player has an impact, then it could be very valuable to go above that 81. However, looking at the stats for defensive ends that doesn’t seem to be the case as those players seemed to dip in forced fumbles.
I would like to look into more offensive players and see how competitiveness works with drops for wide receivers and tight ends, and if it stops running backs from fumbling the ball. I think that would be really hard to do with the current index though, as a lot of these stats are only on the player’s personal page. I would have to go into each individual profile and manually take all the stats from there. It’s not impossible but it would be much quicker if all these things where tracked somewhere like how all the receiving and defensive stats are tracked.
Overall, I’m really enjoying the new sim, and all the new stats and traits. It gives me something to work toward having traits, and those requirements feel like breakpoints and little goals to achieve and maybe guide your build a bit. The traits are also going to keep me involved more in the offseason as I want to make sure I have tpe to spend on them. I plan to use all my tpe in season on stats and then save up during the offseason for traits. Though maybe I’ll hold off investing in competitiveness for now.
Words = 2525
![[Image: ZSzYLsx.png]](https://i.imgur.com/ZSzYLsx.png)
