Of course, one game does not a review make. In order to more fully test the AI, I immediately went into a second contest, this time matching the run-happy Philadelphia Eagles against the Boys on a snowy, cold night in Veterans Stadium. To lapse into Star Trek terminology for a moment, this game was in every way the bearded Spock of its predecessor. Where the Giants hit me with a punishing running attack, and never fully gave up using Ron Dayne on the ground no matter how tough I was on one or two series, the Eagles went to the air from the second play of their first possession. And stayed there. By the end of the game, Duante Culpepper had thrown something like 43 passes and Duce Staley had carried the ball just seven times. This attack was really effective in the first quarter, and I quickly found myself down 21-0. I played the remainder of the game in the Nickel and Dime, though, and they never scored again. I won the game rather handily, 35-21.

My experiences since that point, which include another half-dozen or so exhibition games and three full seasons, are exactly the same. One contest will be fantastic, a real throwback to the Brent Musberger–Phyllis George days. The next will be atrocious, like being committed to a small room with Terry Bradshaw and Jim Brown from the opening whistle to the final gun. It's impossible to tell what you're going to get before any given game, too, since teams will call dramatically different plays in separate meetings. The well-balanced Giants of my exhibition game, for example, threw almost constantly the next time I encountered them.

Other aspects of the AI are also up and down. Play-calling in certain situations is odd, to say the least. All of this is filtered through the "pass all the time" logic, of course, but it still stands out to see your computer-controlled opponent chuck one 17 yards downfield on 3rd and 1. While the computer will use a lot of time when it's ahead in the latter stages of a game, it often won't use time-outs to stop you from wasting those precious seconds when it's behind. The PC coach typically allows an extra 30 seconds or so to burn away after the two-minute warning.

All of this is made even more of a shame as the woefully incomplete Franchise mode magnifies the importance of what happens between the lines. Part of it even seems broken, as in three seasons of play I was never once offered a trade by a computer-controlled team. Also missing in action are the statistics of retired players that get dumped as soon as the player hangs up his cleats, restrictions on free agent movement, and franchise player designation, important when it comes to money management. At least the designers have finally introduced the options to dump all players into a common draft pool, and to create a custom league this time out. Unfortunately, the former was saddled with a draft clock that can't be paused and the latter with a bug that throws all teams in a custom league into a single division.