The Pain and Misery of Simulated Stats

It’s fair to say many of us on Operation Sports are a little ill — a little degenerate if you will. We give our time and effort to sports games, and that’s usually on top of already obsessing about the real sports that fuel those video games. It can be a perpetually sickening cycle where there is dissatisfaction with our real teams and our fake franchises. And for some, there’s no place where that frustration can bubble up more than with simulated stats.

It’s silly if you stop for a moment to think about it. We’re not involved in these simulated games. We’re not in control. They’re not real stats. And yet, they matter to us. They can make us crazy. They have a power over us because we’re striving for realism. We’re striving to mimic the same sport that can make us just as frustrated when we’re watching it in real life.

But in part simulated stats are so frustrating because they’re rarely good. Is it really that hard to give us stats in Madden that are close to those in the NFL? Is it that hard to make the stats in NBA 2K similar to those we see in the real NBA? It must be because it’s so very rare that we get a video game that can give us something close to the real sport’s actual numbers.

The worst part is that it’s never really the same thing. The same issue can crop up year over year, but it’s never the same exact issue in every sports game. For example, in College Football 25 one of the big issues this year is a lack of plays being called. Rushing stats are also low, but it’s really pace at the core of the problem. In Madden, pace is not the core issue, it’s likely more about playbooks and QBs being too good (this is a longer-term issue specific to just Madden). Two games in the same engine, yet the problems are different.

In NBA 2K, you can change how many minutes your games are and how long simulated games are, which is great and should be standard in all sports games, but what ends up happening there a lot of the time is the stats are too good. For example, last year if you did MyCareer but then simulated some games, your player would break records almost without fail. And I mean like shatter records. In “normal” games, players would just have way-too-impressive percentages that threw things off.

This year, I haven’t dug too much into simulated stats in NBA 2K25 (15% off at Green Man Gaming) as I generally wait until the real NBA season begins to get into my franchise, but I’m sure something is in there waiting to poke at me.

In MLB The Show, it’s that the simulated engine is just outdated. It’s trying to mimic stats from an MLB era 10-15 years ago. Hell, there’s a whole cottage industry on OS — whether it’s slider makers or roster projects like Franchise to Fidelity — that exist in part to try and breakthrough and create stats that are closer to those from the real MLB.

Even if I’m not mentioning your sports game of choice here, I feel confident saying something is buried in every sports game (that’s not a Football Manager or OOTP), even if I don’t know what it is right now.

This is our collective nightmare as sicko fans.

I don’t know about you, but I tend to have more fun the less I know in certain sports games. I’m a huge MLB fan. Whether it’s the simulated stats or the ease with which the Oakland Athletics can go out and get Juan Soto in the offseason, it’s all less than ideal for my satisfaction with The Show’s franchise mode. However, if I picked up Pro Yakyu Spirits, I bet I’d have a way more chill time.

Wait, I know I would have a way more chill time because I’ve played Pro Yakyu before and realized how much more relaxing it was to just be playing a baseball game with no expectations of how it ties into the real league. The same goes for playing Super Mega Baseball. Less is more is a very real concept in the world of sports gaming.

And it’s never more true than with simulated stats because we have the least control over them. I can control all 30 or 32 teams in a lot of these sports games and handle their business in free agency or whatever if I need to. It’s time-consuming and you don’t want to do it, but you can. I can get all frustrated about how gross my College Football Playoff bracket looks, but I can also force wins for most games if I really want to cultivate what I think it should look like.

With simulated stats, it’s just so frustrating because we’re never fully in control. And when you see one little ol’ stat out of line that you just can’t get to make sense, well…

If you don’t have this issue or hangup, then enjoy it. It is so much nicer to just be able to turn on a game and play it with no expectations tied to the real sport.

But I will say to those out there who say “anything can happen in the real sport, so why does this bother you?” Well, friend, it’s because there’s a difference between a game and a season. There’s a difference between one 55/55 Ohtani season and 10-15 Ohtanis pulling off a superhuman statistical feat. There’s a difference between one Quinn Ewers throwing for 9 touchdowns against you one game, and an army of Ewers lighting up opponents every single week.

Statistical anomalies are what we’re after. They are what we’re open to seeing — at least most of us freaks are open to such things. However, granularity usually doesn’t exist in these worlds. Bad trends are what we end up with when it comes to simulated stats, and we cannot abide by bad trends in our sports video games.

Be that as it may, it’s our burden to bear. So to all my fellow simulated stat junkies out there, you need to know, it’s not your fault — we’re just broken.

Until next time y’all. And, as always, thanks for reading.