Route Board

You get five third downs against the same real NFL defence, at varying distances. Convert three of them and you win the series. The scoreboard is you against them — there is no grade out of a hundred.

Before each snap you are told three things: how many safeties are deep, whether the corners are pressed or playing off, and whether anyone is showing pressure. That narrows what the defence is in without naming it.

• Pressure showing — there is almost no time. Quick routes only; anything that develops slowly is a sack.
• Corners playing off — the underneath is open. Routes that turn back to the ball find the soft spots.
• Two deep safeties — the deep ball is taken away. Work in front of them.
• Corners pressed, one safety — it is man coverage. Breaking routes create separation, and a deep shot is live.

Tap a receiver, then tap a route. Repeat until every receiver has one, then run the play. Everything works by tap, click and keyboard — there is no dragging anywhere in this game.

Spacing matters. Two receivers finishing in the same part of the field share one defender instead of occupying two, and both of them end up covered.

The quarterback throws to whoever is most open. Your job is to make someone open against what the defence is actually in — not to pick a target after the fact.

Openness is built from the route’s suitability against that coverage family, whether it breaks before the pressure arrives, where the coverage is strong, how well the routes are spaced, and the two teams’ measured passing ratings. A badly covered throw is occasionally intercepted rather than merely incomplete, which is what makes forcing a deep route into a two-high shell a real risk.

Everyone gets the same five snaps and the same defence on a given day, and the same assignment resolves the same way for everyone. Your first Daily series is final. Unlimited generates a fresh series to the same quality bar whenever you want one.

The routes and coverages here are original abstractions. They are not any team’s playbook, and the resolution model is not a claim to simulate a real passing play — it is a consistent geometric and timing model that rewards the things that genuinely beat a given coverage.

Team ratings come from publicly published play-by-play data; the sources are listed on the data sources page.