Draft Day Sports CB2024 Review

[CBDragon]

Draft Day Sports CB2024 Review

I have played plenty of sports sims:
• Football Manager (FM) – from text based Championship Manager to the 3D FM, I’ve been playing this off and on for at least 25+ years. You’re not a true sports sims fan if you haven’t been “FM’d”!
• Drive the Lane (DTL) – online college basketball simulator where you compete against other real coaches. Very unique recruiting. Definitely feels old and outdated, but I’ve been involved with it on and off for close to 20 years now.
• Bowl Bound College Football – Have had fun with it over the years, but has a few major flaws. Recruiting feels a bit the same as this game.
• NCAA14 – Played it on coach mode. Had a hard time finding good sliders to make the game both realistic and fair, but I enjoyed the recruiting. I liked how you saw the recruit’s top 3 important items, and how your school graded for each of them. Just didn’t like how the school with the top points automatically landed the recruit; I like there to be some mystery/chance.

I started off the demo with the intent of playing a Blue Blood so that I could get a good feel for how the game worked and then I would later start a new save with a different team. I picked Duke as my favorite school and then I messed up. The game asked about ambition/temper/academics/integrity/discipline and I thought it was asking how much of an impact those things would have on the game in general so I picked low/average for all of them thinking it would make the game less challenging for my first play through…I then realized that those were my coaching attributes and that I was now locked out of coaching Duke or any Blue Blood! What the heck, I decided to roll with it, and I saw Idaho St on the list and picked them since I have some connections to the city (wife and in-laws are from there). So that was my bad.

Having a lot of options for philosophies is nice. I’m not sure how much they impact the game, but I always like having options.

I need to say that I really like the user interface and just how the game looks and feels. It’s modern and fresh; the text is large and easy to read. I actually find the default team logos and conference names kind of endearing although for my next playthrough I’ll definitely pick up the mod pack for the real logos/names.
The player profile pictures are a very nice touch. Coming from DTL which doesn’t have this at all, it really helps with feeling immersed in the game and actually being a coach of players. I would even say that the player profile pictures are on par or better than what FM has. The only thing that bothers me is the facial hair. It looks like it was drawn in MS Paint and doesn’t look realistic at all. Minor complaint.

There’s lots of skill ratings to see and analyze. Being new, it took me a bit to realize exactly what the “scoring” rating does. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears that is a player’s ability to look for and/or find his own shot. My Idaho St. team doesn’t have anyone with a Scoring rating above 16 so this team really looks pathetic…which is probably realistic. My best player is a senior PG with 2.5 stars. I have two promising freshman, one at SG and one at C. With my talent level so low, I initially started both of them, but as the season progressed, their star rating went down…so I took them out of the starting rotation.
One thing I notice is that all of my players are from Idaho. Yes, I’m a very low prestigious team based in Idaho. But the current ISU team IRL only has 4 players from ID. They’ve got a handful from nearby WA and CA, but also from as far away as NC and GA. This came into play later with recruiting where I felt I was pigeon-holed into only being able to recruit ID players. I get that the idea is I have a low budget and low prestige so it should be harder for me to get someone from outside my state. Harder? Sure. Damn near impossible? No. In this day and age you’re rarely going to find ANY school with even half of their roster from their own state. Just saying.

I love the Team Depth view and how I can set when players should be coming in and out of the game and what my lineup will look like at various times in the games. I have struggled getting my “star” PG 30 minutes in a single game. The depth chart shows that is his target. I found how about halfway through the season that there is a drop down for each player for “Sub at/below” and I can choose at what stamina (I think that’s what it is) level to sub them out. So I have my PG at Sub at/below 70. I’m assuming that the lower the stamina number, the more tired they are and the worse they play or are more prone to mistakes. Is that true? Is there a general consensus on what is a good stamina level to sub players out at? Is there a big drop off at 70? 65? I didn’t see a stamina rating for the players. Will some players stamina go down more slowly than others or be able to perform better at lower stamina than other players? Some help/guidance there would be nice.

There’s lots of stats which any sports sim worth its salt needs to have. Glad to see TS% and PER and various efficiency ratings. One thing I would like to see (maybe its there and I missed it) is how my various offenses are performing against the various defenses that they go up against. My main offense is shuffle, but I also play some triangle and 5 out. What are my shooting % and points per possession for each type of offense? How do I fare against man vs zone? Quite a few of my players have good ratings for attacking various zone defenses, but my eye test tells me that we struggle against the zone in games. It would be nice to have some stats to either back up what I think I’m seeing or to tell me if I have selection/memory bias and am only focusing on the times we miss. Same with defense. My 1-3-1 defense appears to be awful, but is it really?

The setting up of the schedule feels fairly realistic. Whereas in college football it seems the head coach has more direct say in scheduling out of conference opponents, my impression is that in college basketball is more of the AD doing the heavy lifting here. I like the different options given. I’m assuming that if I was a more prestigious school that I’d have the opportunity to play in a preseason tournament. I chose the option to have a balanced schedule and I was in fact given a very easy schedule. The only power conference team I was scheduled was TCU. There is the option to change the teams with other available teams. It’s a nice option, but I noticed that I couldn’t change (or figure out how) the home/away setting. My schedule started off 5 straight away games and I wanted a nice home game to start things off, but I couldn’t do it. This next item isn’t a gripe, but to take the scheduling part of the game to the next level, what I’d like to see is more finances involved in the game. I understand that this is college, not professional, but in FM I like managing my finances as much as I do the team tactics. IRL a team like Idaho St would schedule 4 or 5 power conference schools and would get a good paycheck from those games, which could then be used to pay for coach’s salaries or upgrade the facilities. Some food for thought.

Recruiting. I think I mostly need more time to get the hang of it. It feels somewhat similar to Bowl Bound. One of my complaints in that game, and so far also in this game, is that lower prestige teams simply don’t have enough recruits willing to even consider them. Only a handful of players even had me as a cool interest. I get it that Idaho St is pretty near the bottom of the list for most recruits IRL. Maybe some of it was I didn’t know what I was doing so I wasn’t contacting my recruits to find out info on them and didn’t have some of them on my call list. I did get an early commit from a 2 star 6-10 C (#696 overall). I really liked the whole press conference thing with the suspense of who he was going to pick. The first time that I got one of those, the recruit picked Idaho St. I was super excited and I thought that the recruiting was going to be easy. Then, the next two recruit press conference didn’t go my way. That’s fine and realistic. But, after that, no one was showing ANY interest in me. I went through every single recruit in the state of ID and none of them wanted anything to do with me. Did I do something wrong there? Now even the one start recruits are turning their noses up at me? At this point I started to get frustrated. I’m going to need more than one recruit to improve this team. I took drastic measures and fired one of my sorry coaches that had one stars for everything. I got the best recruiting coach available hoping that would help. Unfortunately, that also killed my budget. Halfway through the season I was left with $5 in my budget. Oops. I will chalk this up to a learning experience. I also noticed that his recruiting rating dropped from 3 stars down to 2 during the season. Interesting.

For the actual season, I started off watching the games in 2D. For the most part, I really liked this. It just helps to feel more immersed in the feeling of being a coach to be able to watch something over just having to read PBP text. Could it be improved? Definitely. There are times that a player appears to be wide open under the basket (especially when 1-3-1 zone is being played) and they will pass the ball back out to the perimeter. I’m not sure exactly what’s going on there. It’s hard to tell how wide open a player really is when they take a shot. Was it a contested shot or an open shot? As a coach, I want to be able to see if my players are taking good shots or not. The sounds are a nice touch. The swish and the bricks are good. Personally, I think the dunks should be more dramatic. Louder with a huge fan reaction. The crowd noises are very meh. I really hate that “whooo!” scream that happens about every other possession. It sounds like that annoying fan that just won’t stop screaming no matter what is happening in the game…so maybe it is realistic, haha, but I still hate it.

I could use some guidance on helping my team with shot selection. We shot 23.2 3PA per game, second in my conference, but my 3P% was just .335, 3rd worst in the conference. How do I get my guys to stop jacking up so many 3s? I’m assuming that it has a lot to do with the offense. I used 70% shuffle, 20% triangle, and 10% 5 Out with Offensive Set Usage set to 65%. I chose these mostly because that’s what my players were already familiar with. To be perfectly honest, I’m still not exactly sure what the shuffle offense is despite using it for a full season. Obviously the 5 Out is going to have a lot of 3s. I initially had my Offensive Focus at Balanced, but then changed it to Favor Inside. It still seemed like my guys chucked up a lot of bad 3s. Maybe I just have a bad team with bad IQ?

To finish off, back to the season. I started off with a nice away win at Alamo Heights. I took TCU to OT before losing by 1 point. I thought, this season might not be too bad! But, then I lost 4 games in a row to teams with an average NET of 151. In each of my games I noticed that I would do well in the first half, but then perform poorly in the second half. I tried making adjustments to double teaming the hot player on the other team, but even in my wins, I seemingly always got outscored in the second half…Partly because of my frustration of losing games, but also because I wanted to get through a season before my demo license ended, I started just simming the games once I got to conference play…and then I started winning, lol. My OOC record was 6-9. Maybe I’m being too harsh for a really bad Idaho St. team. The goal from my AD was to just win 10 games and not finish last in the conference…So I sim the conference games, and after losing the opener to Eastern Washington, we go on a 5 game winning streak. We end conference play at 13-5 and with the #2 seed in the conference tournament. Nice! But still, I wondering in the back of my head if my team is better off somehow with me simming the games vs watching them in 2D.

At this point, my 8 days for the demo is almost up, I decide to buy it so that I can just take my time with it. I’m the type of person that can get enjoyment out of an older version of a game for quite some time. I’m still playing FM21 today. It may not be perfect, but I’m enjoying it enough and I’m assuming that I’ll get the hang of it over time. I decide to play the post season games out in 2D despite my previous experience faring better just simming. As the second seed in the NWC Tournament, I immediately fall to rival Idaho…I end up making the WOL Tournament as the #8 seed and proceed to knock off the #1 seed Illinois-Chicago and then follow that up with a 20-point win over Philadelphia (Temple?). Next up is 2 seed Spokane (Gonzaga) and despite jumping out to a double-digit lead, they end up whipping me by 24. Season over. In the main tournament, #1 seed Purdue wins it all over #1 seed Kentucky.

I didn’t dive too deep into the head coaching changes. While I had surpassed the initials goals set by my AD, Duke wasn’t exactly calling yet. I did one round to see how things went and then just skipped the rest. The recruiting assistant coach that I spent big bucks on just disappeared. I didn’t get any message about him leaving for another position (I even looked in the list of coaching changes). I fired my other two assistants. My 1st was making fairly big bucks ($33K), but he was 3 stars on scouting and 1 on everything else. So far my initial impression is that recruiting is most important, then player development, and last scouting. How much do those opponent scout emails really help me? I don’t think that I ever changed anything based on who I was playing. Maybe I should. Anyway, I hired the third best recruiting coach available to me at $35K. His recruiting is 47, but he only came in at 2 stars. My second assistant has 29 player development and I paid him $25K. Maybe I overpaid? For my third assistant, I just took one of the lowest guys and assigned him to scouting. Paid him $14K. I got all of my guys on my first offers so that tells me that I should have aimed lower. My total budget is $150K and my assistant salaries are $74K. They better prove their worth!

The end of season is here. I meet with the AD and choose to ask for additional budget. Asking for facility upgrades was tempting, but I’m out of money here!! And my AD is so gracious, that he gives me an extra $7,500. LOL. That’s a 5% increase. Thanks, I guess? 3 of my players have a 50% chance of leaving. I don’t say anything to the 1 star guy. But two of my promising freshman, who had initially started, and were initially at 2 stars, but they dropped to 1.5 stars, and I dropped them to the bench (but with plenty of minute) also have a 50% chance of leaving. For one of them I make my pitch about improving coach relationship and the other about improving team relationship. Both say that they feel worse after the meeting. Is there a hint as to what I’m supposed to say here? Or is it just blindly throwing darts?

Season 2 is upon me! I’m not sure when the transfer portal happens? All 3 of my players thinking about leaving are still on my roster…but I didn’t get a chance to look at other players transferring. When does that happen? I have the same first emails from my first season (setting up budget and talking to AD about the schedule), so it appears that my first season is complete. Team morale is suddenly low. It was good all last season. What gives? The good news is that the one recruit that I was able to land, looks like the real deal. He’s 3 stars with a potential of 4. Scoring of 46 is much needed! I’m tempted to play another season with Idaho St just to see how this Derrick Hale does!

[PointGuard]

First: What a well-written and very detailed review! Well-done. Glad you havd decided to continue playing DDSCB and look forward to your posts here.

1st paragraph: You've certainly got some good experience to make comparisons and suggestions.

2nd paragraph: Yeah, to coach Duke you'll need good skill levels and rep plus Academics needs to be very high.

5th paragraph: Yeah, scoring rating indicates how much they want to shoot. But if all your players have low levels indicated for Scoring, the ones with the higher level within your roster will like lob up more shots. (Just realize, the skill levels may not be all that accurate, particularly if you have low level assistants). Re getting out-of-state players...even low-budget/low prestige programs can do so, it's just more difficult. You're likely to do best with in-state, then in-region...but if you want a guy from outside the region and are persistent, you at least have a shot (but going all-out for him will be tougher since it costs you more)...and if you can get them minimally interested and they're still available in late March and April, you can have a better chance of getting them since they're getting deperate. Also...you are more likely to be able to land a out-of-state/out-of region guy during the Transfer Portal since many aren't so locked into playing close to home. It might take a few years, but you should be able to get quite a few out-of-state players on your roster.

6th paragraph: I believe that Sub at/below is very closely related to a player's Athleticism rating. I never change what the Ai has set for Sub at/below (but I don't change their other ratings either). I seldom sim (and sim the AI will definitely sub according to Sub/at below rating. When playing out games in 2D, I tend to sub players out when their energy rating gets well into the yellow zone, but you could also probably let it go to the red zone before subbing them out and avoid any significant deterioration of their play or more likely fouls.

7th paragraph: Interesting suggestions, although I don't know how difficult it would be for Gary to implement them.

8th paragraph: No you can change home/away designation when you're modifying the schedule, but can upgrade or downgrade the difficulty level by how you select teams. If I'm just beginning to coach at a school with poor players, I might select 1-star opponents for my away games and maybe a little higher starred schools for my home games.

9th paragraph: Recruiting definitely is a learning process and one which different game players have different ways of approaching...so it becomes quite dependent upon how you want to do it. There's no one way that is best (which is something within DDSCB that I very much appreciate). For low prestige/low budget programs, I tend to focus primarily on in-state and within-region recruits, but if there's a guy I really want elsewhere I'll go after him. I think persistence is important. You definitely have to have guys on the call list if you want any chance of getting and improving their interest in your school. Calls, even repetitively calling them, is one good way to get them initially interested in your school. College visits, scouting, etc are important (to the degree your budget will allow). And Home Visits in Sept/Early Oct and in the spring are the very best ways to get them to come your way. And yeah, ratings do change as recruits get continuously evaluated.

10th paragraph: WIthin 2D, the on court visualization is merely an approximation of what's going on and where players are actually located on the court. Even though they may APPEAR open, they may not be.

12th paragraph: Yeah I feel the home team or the better team will typically do better in the 2nd half, but that also tends to happen in real life. Re success via simming as comparted to 2D...I never am certain...I play mout most of the games, but still am not certain I'm doing my team any favors by doing so...lol.

14th paragraph: Your 1st assistant likely either retired or was hired as a head coach or assistant coach at some other school. You can go to "Coaching Trees" and enter your head coach's name and will see where every assistant you've ever had is now.

15th and 16th paragraphs: For those players who are likely to transfer, I tend to pitch what I think is most important to them (do they have a low relationship with the coach? their teammate? or do they want to play more but you have a better player coming back at his position but can try moving the guy who wants to a differnent position?) At the end of the season, you'll have to advance to "End Season". After a lenghty Save, the next season will start on May 1...when you set your budget levels and advance, the players who are transferring away from you will do so (and you'll get an email about that) and then you will proceed to the Transfer Portal (and it's 8 sessions).

[Gary Gorski]

Just to piggyback on recruiting - just because a player does not have interest in you naturally doesn't mean he won't later - add him to your call list and scout him live - if you show some interest in him maybe he will show some interest in your school especially if the ones he has interest in don't come calling. If he is a recruit out of your league he's probably going to tell you to get lost but otherwise he will probably have at least a minor interest after you start to recruit him. Some recruits also will not have interest because they don't think they would be good enough for you and again once you show interest that would bring them to having an interest level in your school

[Wayne23]

I've had good luck going after recruits who initially showed no interest. I've even landed some of those.

[CBDragon]

Thanks for all of the comments and feedback.

So, when recruiting. The first week I build my watch/call list of 20 players. 8 show cool interest and the other 42 show no interest. Should I drop those other 42 and replace them? Other recruits that I haven't contacted yet are showing either none for interest or a question mark. Should I completely avoid the ones showing none for interest? Or, are you saying, that if I keep them on my call list they could eventually show cool interest?

[PointGuard]

With some persistence in making weekly calls, you can get some of them interested...and then build upon that initial level of interest.

[CentreCourt]

What is the difference between the Watch and Call Lists? I stick 50 recruits on both. If I put 50 or the Call List and a different 50 on the Watch List what are the benefits or downsides?

[CBDragon]

What is the difference between the Watch and Call Lists? I stick 50 recruits on both. If I put 50 or the Call List and a different 50 on the Watch List what are the benefits or downsides?

I'm assuming that the Watch List is simply players that you want to keep tabs on. I don't think the recruits will change their interest level just for being on your watch list. The Call List is your recruiting assistant calling everyone on that list every week. That should potentially have some sort of impact. So far I have been having the same players on both lists. But I'm a noob.

[CentreCourt]

CBDragon. I kind of thought that also, but I keep seeing Call/Watch mentioned as a pair around Recruiting, so was unsure. I think your correct.

[CBDragon]

I'm having a hard time getting recruits to visit. They all decline. Are they only allowed 5 total visits? So if a recruit has already visited 5 schools, am I too late to the table and that's why he's declining?