1. A living and breathing league

- Replace the "Newsletter" with a newshub such as ESPN is thesedays for sportsfans
- Add auto generated storylines, maybe around players, future drafts, stars, rumours from around the league. Some could have an effect, others could just be nice stories that would be fun to read.
- Situations/Events on field, where personalities play a role and coaches have to act accordingly to solve it (for example, calm a player down after a misplay, if that's handled wrong, player could get frustrated, throw a punch and is banned for two games...something like this)
- Optional season ending/career ending situations (injuries, car accidents, shootings, drugs, jail)
- Coaching carousel, hotseats
- College Allstar Game
- I'd like to see drills, pro days on the field (could be developed further into practice)

2. Front Office Stuff

- Stadiums: Ticketprices, Upgrades, New stadiums, potential relocations
- Facilities: Hospital, Trainingfacilities could be added to improve infrastucture of the franchise
- Training camps (could be planned - where do we do it (price vs quality of the camp) )
- More staff (team medics, fitnesscoaches, scouts)
- league expansions (maybe some predefined story, of how the NFL could evolve from a national league to a world wide scale within 100 years?)
- merchandising etc.

Of course all that stuff could be optional. Not everyone likes everything, some prefer playing as a coach with playcalling and more the day to day stuff with the players, others love the gm aspect, and some just love the whole package. So the ultimate request is to have the amount of depth you'd want adjustable.

Some good suggestions here but honestly I'm against the storyline/upgrade stuff...feels too arcadey in my opinion

Yep, some like it, others not. That's why the last paragraph is in there, requesting for things to be optional, since not everyone likes the same things alike.
For me, this would add to the immersion - making the game perfect for me. I love reading ESPN during the weeks and see whats going on. For me personally that stuff surrounding sports is equally important as numbers and the game itself.

This isn't actually related to the Pro Football game but it did make me wonder about a future game concept in general that Wolverine might look into making down the road. I have seen simulators that let you play the role of General Manager of a pro sports franchise and in my opinion, the more immersive the better. As I was thinking about this though it occurred to me that I have never seen the same concept applied to the idea of an immersive college Athletic Director game. Just a thought since I am pretty certain that if it was developed it would be the only such game on the market for people who would be into that sort of concept. Even if it was just the director of a football program, you could handle things like fundraising, improving facilities, and if you really wanted to go in depth you could add multiple sports, and multiple levels of schools (Junior College, division 1, 2, and 3, etc) to work through in a career mode.