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Casual fans may think of the NFL Head Coach as the dude who runs up and down the sidelines, making funny faces and yelling at moronic referees. After all, the Head Coach is surrounded by people with more specialized jobs, constantly feeding him information through that impressive headset he’s always wearing.

EA Sports’ NFL Head Coach teaches us that there’s a lot more to this job that TV would have you believe. Things like boring conversations, strict schedules, and an inexplicable inability to use a telephone until a very specific time of day.

Devil in the Details

Let’s face it; NFL Head Coach is not a game for the football-lovin’ adrenaline junkie. You won’t play an actual game here until well past the first couple hours, and even then, you’re relegated to the sidelines, watching your weeks and months of hard work either going down in flames, or bringing you glory.

NFL Head Coach is all about sitting in your (surprisingly bare) office, clicking away at your computer, talking strategy with the many coaches under your command, negotiating contracts and trades, and basically dealing with the day to day mediocrity of this incredibly difficult job.

In short, only the hardest of hardcore armchair coaches will find any value in playing this game, the rest of us will wonder why we’d ever work this hard without collecting a paycheck.

Scheduling Conflict

Head Coach’s downfall, however, is that the schedule is far too strict. Each day is laid out very specifically for you – start the day meeting with your coaches or the GM, then head to your office to negotiate a new contract for whoever needs it, now go run practice on the field, and finally, use your “Office Hours” to take care of odds and ends, including making phone calls and restructuring the team’s play book.

The stupid part is the game decides what you can and can’t do during most of these periods. Need to make a phone call and you’re just sitting at your desk? Well, unless your schedule says “you can make phone calls now,” your sedentary onscreen self is incapable of picking up the phone sitting two feet in front of him and making that call. Got some time to kill and want to go over the play book? Again, unless your schedule permits it during that particular block of time, you’re out of luck.

The Long, Slow Burn

NFL Head Coach is so deep that you’ll really want to love it. There’s something decidedly satisfying seeing your hard work and meticulous planning pay off with a trip to the Super Bowl. But that trip is fraught with so many pitfalls – the most annoying being the rigid scheduling issues – that you’ll need superhuman patience to see it through to the end.

In short, the ground work for NFL Head Coach 2008 is solid. If the developers can iron out the weirdness for next year, we’ll be playing one fantastic game.

Article by: Greg Sewart
Video Produced by: Paul Bonanno