The New NFL Game Simulator Is Live, Run Any Matchup or Project Any Fantasy Lineup

Two audiences, one engine. Fantasy players who want projections built on the actual matchup their starter is walking into. Replay fans who want to find out what happens when the 2019 Chiefs take the field against the 2013 Seahawks. Both jobs done.

Here is what is inside.

The reason it works

Open any other historical NFL simulator. Plug in the 2014 Broncos. The engine does not know whether Peyton Manning is behind centre or Brock Osweiler, and you get the same offensive number either way. That is because most historical simulators run on team-level averages. A whole season smeared into one dial.

This one is built differently. Every player on every roster has his own ratings every year going back to 2013. Pass blocking, route running, coverage, run stopping, every position group on both sides of the ball. When the engine runs a snap, it reads the actual quarterback throwing the actual route concept against the actual cornerback.

That is what makes a fantasy projection worth running. It is what makes the 2019 feel like the 2019 Chiefs and not a slider labelled NE. More seasons are coming and the 2013 floor will roll back. For now you have over a decade of full-fidelity rosters: every player, every team, every year.

For fantasy players

Friday night, lineup half-set, the flex spot is a coin flip between Saquon Barkley and Bijan Robinson. The standard projections both say fourteen points. Not much to go on.

Try this. Open the Sim Hub. Pick Saquon’s actual matchup this week. Set the games counter to ten. Hit Simulate Game.

The engine runs that real matchup ten times against the real defence Saquon is facing. You get his average rushing yards, his average catches, his average touchdowns, and his average fantasy points across ten runs. Real numbers, against the actual front seven he is going to see on Sunday. Repeat for Bijan. Compare the lines. Set the lineup.

This works because of the section above. The engine knows your back is facing a top-five run defence this week and a bottom-five the next. It knows your receiver is drawing shadow coverage from an All-Pro corner this week and a rookie nickel next week. Season averages flatten that distinction. The Sim Hub does not.

Every box score, every leaderboard, every team detail page in the hub carries a fantasy points column. Pick your format from the dropdown: Standard, Half-PPR, Full PPR, ESPN, Yahoo, Sleeper, NFL.com, CBS Sports, DraftKings DFS, FanDuel DFS. The column re-scores live so you can read the same projection through your league’s exact rules.

DFS players: run the slate, find who pops as a leverage play before lock, find who busts before you fade them.

For replay fans

2007 Brady against 2013 Sherman. 2018 Mahomes against the current Ravens. The current Eagles against the Super Bowl LII Eagles. Any year back to 2013 against any other year back to 2013. Pick the matchup.

Three ways to watch it play out.

Simulate Game is the fast version. Click, the engine runs the matchup, the full box score lands in seconds. Final score, quarter-by-quarter, leaders, drive chart, every play logged in the play-by-play.

Game Day is the live broadcast. Cockpit scoreboard at the top with both helmets, the score, the clock, the down and distance, a possession glow on whoever has the ball. A field strip showing the line of scrimmage and the first-down marker. A play card that updates every snap with the featured player, the play type, and the yardage. The drive chart fills in as the game goes. Run it at 4x for a three-minute game, or slow it down and watch the whole thing.

Coach Game hands you the play sheet. More on that next.

When the game ends, the drive bars on the result page tell the story at a glance. Orange for a touchdown drive. Red for a turnover. Yellow for a penalty. Plain for a punt. Three seconds and you know how the game went.

Coach Game: call every play

If you have ever yelled at a head coach through your television, this is the mode for you. You get the play sheet. You call every offensive snap. You pick the defensive shell. You decide whether to go for it on 4th and 2 or send the punt team out. You spend the timeouts. The engine handles the CPU on the other sideline and animates every play.

The picker reads like a real playbook. Formation pills across the top: Shotgun, Shotgun Heavy, I-Form, I-Form Heavy, Pistol, Singleback, Trips, Empty, Goal Line. Underneath are the cards for that formation. Each card shows the play name, the chalkboard diagram with routes, and the featured target or ball carrier called out with a headshot.

Tap a receiver on a pass card to lock him in as your primary target. Tap a running back on a run card to lock the ball carrier. Otherwise the engine picks the read for you based on the coverage that develops.

Stuck for a call? Hit Ask the OC. The recommender reads the down, the distance, the field position, the score, the clock, the front you are seeing, and the last couple of plays you ran. Then it suggests a play that fits. It stays in your active formation when it can but flips to Empty or Trips when the matchup calls for it. Ask the DC does the same on defence.

On 4th down a separate card grid takes over: Punt, Field Goal, Go For It, Fake Punt, Fake FG. Each card draws the actual play that fires, so you can see what a Fake FG looks like before you commit.

When a play wraps up you get the result on the narrative card. If a flag drops, you get an Accept or Decline card pair with the engine’s suggested call highlighted and the consequence of each option spelled out. You make the call.

Run a full season

One game is the warm-up. Hit the Full Season tab and run 272 regular-season games plus 13 playoff games in a single click. Under a minute, start to finish.

The standings sort themselves by conference and division. Playoff seeding falls out the back. The Super Bowl bracket builds itself.

Five tabs of results. Standings with seeding in the right column. Scores in a week-by-week grid. Playoffs as a clickable bracket. Leaders for pass yards, rush yards, receiving yards, sacks, picks, and fantasy points. Team Detail drilldowns where you click any team and drop into the roster with every player’s full season line.

A randomness slider on the setup form lets you choose how chalky or how chaotic the season runs. At 1 the better team almost always wins. At 100 every game is a coin flip. Default is 50.

Coach the season week by week

This is the mode that ties everything together. Pick Week-by-Week on the setup form and the engine builds the schedule but does not sim anything yet.

You see Week 1 sitting there, unplayed. Click Sim Week to fly through the standard games. Click Coach on any individual matchup and drop into Coach Game with that pairing loaded up.

Coach your team’s Sundays and sim the rest of the league. Coach the rivalry weeks and the playoff games and skip the rest. Up to you. When a coached game wraps, the result folds back into the standings and you advance to next Sunday. It is the closest thing to running a real NFL season we have shipped.

Build your own teams

The hub does not stop at the 32 real franchises. Signed-in users can build a 53-man roster from the league-wide player pool over at the Custom Team Builder.

Three ways to start. Blank slate. Grab any existing NFL team and swap players in. Or clone one of your own custom teams and tweak. The player pool runs the full league for any year between 2013 and today, searchable by name, position, and overall grade.

Five custom teams per account. Once saved they show up in the Sim Hub team pickers right next to the real franchises, ready to run against anyone.

My League

A league is a copy of the 32-team NFL where you swap any slot for one of your custom rosters. Swap one team, swap five, swap all 32. Then run a full season with the new league at /League.

Five leagues per account, each with its own swap setup. Run a "what if every team had a 2015 roster" league alongside your "my custom 32" league without either getting in the other’s way.

Saved sims

Single-game results and full-season results can both be saved to your account. Hit the save button on any result page, name it, find it at /Simulation/MySaved. Ten saved single games, five saved seasons, re-openable whenever you want.

Where to start

Here for fantasy? Pick your starter’s matchup at /Simulation, set the count to ten, hit Simulate Game. Read the average FPTS line, then set your lineup.

Here for replays? Pick two teams from any two years back to 2013 and click Game Day. Watch what happens.

Want the deepest version? Same matchup, click Coach Game, and call every snap yourself.

The help page has the full feature catalog. Anything broken, anything missing, anything you want next, send a note from the contact link at the bottom of the page.

Now go pick a team.