Gameplay & Settings

Three principles decide every ruling in this book:

• Realism over exploits — if it would never happen on a Saturday, it does not belong here.
• Balance over spam — if nobody can stop it and you would call it forty times, that is the thing to stop calling.
• Skill over animation — win with reads, personnel and preparation, not with a mechanic the game cannot answer.

What follows are guidelines, not a penal code. They exist to make good football the easy path, and to give a commissioner something to reason from when a situation nobody wrote down turns up. Where a guideline and a principle collide, the principle wins.

Run a built-in playbook. Your playbook is the one your coordinator runs, and you declare it on My Hub — offense follows your hired Offensive Coordinator, defense follows your hired Defensive Coordinator. You start on the book your program came with.

Changing either one is an offseason move that begins with hiring the coordinator. See the Coaching Carousel in Recruiting & Off-season.

The archive is the league's film room. It settles the disputes, it feeds the highlights, and every evidence-based guideline in this book leans on it — a league where nobody can rewatch anything cannot be run honestly. The Pre-Game Card carries the operational detail.

What this rule adds: CPU games get one attempt. No restarts, no reloads, no re-rolling a bad opening drive. An unbroken archive is the only thing that makes that checkable, which is why CPU games get broadcast too.

• Finish what you start. Do not quit — user or CPU. A game you walked out of is worth nothing to anybody, and it shows on film.
• Talk your talk in the game. Chirping is part of college football. Keep it inside the game and keep it human.

No rulebook can name every way to play a game badly, and this one does not try. Playing in bad faith is a violation on its own — abusing a mechanic nobody thought to write down, manufacturing a result you did not earn, gaming the schedule, or reading a guideline's silence as permission. "It wasn't in the rulebook" is not a defense. The three principles above are the rulebook.

How it gets handled:

1. Report it with the clip. Bring the timestamp through your league's complaint process, not the group chat. Evidence is what gets you taken seriously, and it is what protects you when someone files on you.
2. The commissioner reviews the film. Both sides get heard.
3. The ruling is case by case — weighed on severity, on intent, and on what that coach has done before. A first mistake and a pattern are not the same thing, and a ruling should not pretend they are.

A commissioner can correct a result, put a note on a coach's record, pull commits, or remove a coach from the league. Those are the teeth. They exist so the rest of this book can stay short.