In Head Coach you aren’t controlling the players, you’re calling the plays. But it’s not as simple as sitting back and calling a deep post on 3rd and 12. Your players may know certain plays better than others (which you can focus on during the week’s practice schedule) so running a specific play that your players aren’t comfortable with has the added risk of backfiring as players run the wrong routes, cover the wrong zone, etc. It’s this level of detail that football fanatics will love and the more casual fan might find a tad overwhelming. This isn’t a “pop in and play” type of game; you need to invest in the long haul to get the most out of it.

There is something wildly gratifying about calling the perfect play at the perfect time and seeing it work in real time with sharp graphics. It beats reading the result of a text game and it beats manually controlling Peyton Manning and throwing bombs all day to Marvin Harrison. For strategy minded football fans, this is as neat as it gets. It’s equally fun to call the perfect play and sit and watch your quarterback scan the field and miss an open receiver and instead throw into double coverage. It’s so compelling that you might find yourself yelling at the TV – “Throw it to Braylon! He’s open!!” only to see Derek Anderson force a pass to Winslow who was blanketed by defenders.

The on the field gameplay is at times incredibly entertaining but it also comes with its share of glitches and gaffes that can’t be ignored. Field goals are best “super simmed” because kickers really struggle. You can adjust the in-game sliders but no matter what you do this never feels quite right. In the NFL unless a kick is blocked or kicked into a serious wind you should never see a 40 yard field goal end up short and this happens with frustrating regularity. Again, super simming fixes this but then you miss out on the drama of actually watching the field goal attempt.

Perhaps the biggest gameplay issue is the two-minute offense logic. As a coach, you can’t call offensive or defensive audibles (only passing hot routes). So when you are running a two minute offense the AI keeps calling the same play for you over and over again and you can’t change it unless you call a timeout or something else happens to stop play. This can be a very serious problem if you call a running play in order to pick upon a first down and then the AI goes into the hurry up and you’re sitting there running the same off tackle play; if you don’t have any time outs left you’re pretty much hosed. There’s also a few stat glitches and the simulated stats are a tad on the high side—passing yards and receptions are simply too inflated, but these are minor quibbles compared to the two minute offense and injury bug. There’s also too many fumbles for my taste and they seem to come in bunches.

Off the field the game is as deep as any graphics based simulation ever made. You can create plays from scratch (with an important caveat which I’ll get to in a bit), work the cap, sign free agents, gameplan for the upcoming game by focusing on learning certain plays or stopping the other team’s stud halfback, intensely scout players for the draft, work draft day trades, find players that fit into your specific system, and so on.

The draft in particular deserves special mention and the team that works on Madden should take a crash course in how to do it from the Head Coach team. The draft logic is superb. You’ll see teams draft for need, draft for depth, work draft day trades which actually make sense, and hang up on you if you try to overly screw them. The draft is an entertaining as sports sims get. In fact the game allows you to start your career at the start of the real 2008 draft (with all of the real rookies) or at the start of 2008 training camp. I highly advise starting with the draft. It’s too much fun to wait for the 2008 season to end.