I've got a total of 115 seasons in GD over four worlds. I've reached a pretty solid level of understanding of the game (I think), but I might be hitting a wall right now.

I'm 7-13 overall in national semifinal games and 1-6 in national championship games. It's starting to feel like I always run up against someone who out-gameplans me.

In one world or another, I've run every type of offense and every type of defense (never more than two per team), so I think that I just need to experiment more with recruiting and roster management to make a leap.

Venting over. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

It took me more than a year and half to make a final, which I lost to Hoovcats. It took me almost 2 to win one (I'm not counting my early seasons on Heisman back when WIS was young). It took a lot of screwing around and talking to people before I finally figured out something that works. It's about more than your playbooks. It's about more than just your players. To get what you want you have to factor your players into your playbook in deep ways, resting strong players when you don't need them, having your best players do the heavy lifting.

Experiment with secondary formations within your primary formation type for use on certain downs and distances.

I've experienced the same sort of thing.

Progress is going to be slower and more incremental when you reach top 5/top 10 and are battling more experienced coaches for elite recruits and in playoff games. It becomes harder to elevate your team from the pack of other contenders that have coaches that have a good system in place, have lots of experience, and generally know what they are doing. At that point any little edge you can exploit or inefficency that you can correct becomes more important because there is less margin for error in the big battles and the big games.

Knowledge is also hard to come by in the game because coaches tend to hold the insights that they have discovered thru experience close to the vest to preserve their competitive advantages.

All that said sometimes unfortunately it just comes down to the fact that some schools also probably have different ceilings (or at least advantages/ disadvantages) at the national championship levels because of a recruiting locations. If there are other contenders with better access to top recruits, then the process becomes even harder.

There are multiple ways of winning in this game and I have never found a single winning strategy that I could call best. But there are for sure good strategies and bad, you just have to choose one and try it out to see if it works for you. There are winning strategies that are easy to implement and that are tried and proven, and there are others that are very difficult to implement but can be totally baffling to the opposition because it is seldom, or even never seen.

I spend a lot of time thinking up new strategies, then I take those strategies to D II and try them out. How hard is it to recruit the players that I need to execute my strategy? How hard is it to maximize my practice time to get my key players ready? How long does it take to build a team and get it deep into the playoffs using the new strategy?

These are the type things that I'm asking myself concerning my strategy, but there are other questions that you should ask yourself.

How does my recruiting compare to the top coaches at my division in the world I'm playing in? If I'm not in the top 10 then how can I improve?

How well do my players develop compared to the top teams, if I recruit well but my player's attributes fall behind over their career then how can that be improved?

You should sit down and list all of the things that you control in the game and think of ways to find out if your settings are the best they possibly can be for your chosen strategy. This generally means testing, most of the top coaches have spent a lot of time and money testing their settings under various situations looking for an edge. The cool thing about it is that there is no one right answer for everyone or every strategy, there are a lot of settings that will improve any team, but many of them are team and strategy specific. It is the coaches job to figure out what those settings need to be for his/her team to reach peak performance.

My advice to anyone playing this game is to decide on a strategy and see if you can get deep into the playoffs with a top 10 roster, if you can do it with a top 15 roster then you are probably onto something good. If not then according to how far back you are make some appropriate sized tweaks and see if your team gets better or worse. Once you are deep in the playoffs and in striking range it will either be a matter of recruiting better, developing players better, or doing tiny tweaks to your strategy.

In my experience it is hard to win a championship, even with a really good strategy, if you are not at least in the top 15 rated roster by the GUESS report. It is very rare outside of the top 10. If you have the top roster and you still can't win a championship, then you need to tweak your strategy.

And if you can win an NC in your first season with a new team that had been AI coached for past 15 seasons then you deserve to be made CEO of Wis