In short, very favorable. Expanding the play selection to require the full set of 40 offensive plays and the full set of 30 defensive plays presents a new and interesting challenge to game planning. I have been switching out about 5 or 6 offensive plays for different plays prior to each game depending upon the defensive strengths of the next opponent. So far, my team has run a total of 62 different offensive plays. I hope to find time to do similarly with defensive plays during the second half of the season.
Here are the play diversity totals for my team through 8 games:
Offense: 31, 28, 30, 30, 31, 31, 30, 32
(The most used play was called 25 times, an average of 3.1 times per game.)
Defense: 26, 23, 26, 23, 22, 24, 25, 22
(The most used play was called 37 times, 4.6 times per game. This seems a tad high per game but is skewed by the fact that the play most used was a Goal Line defense selected by my game "rules" to react to a Goal Line offense play call. The next most used play was called 25 times, an average of 3.1 times per game.)
One anecdotal observation. Time of possession in any individual game may affect, at least to some degree, whether a team can achieve the desired play diversity. If one team dominates time of possession by 40 minutes to 20 minutes as does happen occasionally, the team dominating time of possession may run as many as 20 to 25 more plays than the opposition. In this scenario, the team with the greater time of possession will likely have little problem reaching play diversity on offense but may not always reach play diversity on defense. The play diversity scenario for the team on the short end of time of possession would be the opposite.
