Can one of you in the know talk a little more about players playing out of position when it is a similar position like NT/DT/DE3 or DE4/OLB?

Trying to figure out some draft or FA needs and it is hard to tell on some of those because I don't know if my great DT will be just as great playing the nose in 3-4, or at the very least really darn close to the same level. I know a guy like Powe on my roster can play NT even though he is listed as DE3....I know you mentioned positions like that can be petitioned to be changed, but would it even matter that much?

Same things for ILB/WLB/SLB/MLB

Here is what I sent in reply to a PM to another owner asking a similar question:

Rain Man and I really don't want to tell too much what is going on behind the curtain because people will start gaming the system.

The player's natural position is going to be considered what he played in a given year, even if the player had demonstrated that he could play other positions in past years. Part of the reason for that is that performance is context specific. Certain positions generate more favorable stats than other similar positions just due to responsibilities and match ups. You can also imagine the chaos if we started considering these kinds of position changes on a case-by-case situation. If we denied a request for good reason, someone would get ticked off if we had approved another seemingly similar case. So we consider the natural position to be the one the player played the most in during a given NFL season, and we consider his performance in the context of that position. If you move someone around, there will be an effect -- sometimes large and sometimes small--, and you're just going to have to trust that we've made those adjustments in a realistic and reasonable way. So our advice as always is to just play the game the way you think it should be played without worrying about how we've designed the game. When unrealistic aspects of the simulation are brought to our attention, we make modifications to make it more realistic.

Hope this sheds some light.

It's not my intent to be vague on this, but the bottom line is that you should think about it just like you would in the NFL. If you move Mike DeVito from a 3-4 DE to NT, what'll happen? Well, he'll probably get pushed around more, but could probably do it. He's better at his natural position, but he can make the shift. A really top-notch 3-4 DE like Justin Smith might be better than your run of the mill nose tackle because he's just more talented. However, he's still going to be better himself playing his natural position.

So the bottom line is that a talented guy moving to a similar position is still going to be pretty darn good, though he's always better at his natural position. On the other hand, a talented guy moving to a dissimilar position is likely going to be blasted. DeMarcus Ware is a great 3-4 OLB and would likely be a very, very good 4-3 DE or even 4-3 OLB. But if you move him to a 4-3 DT position he's probably going to be a liability against the run and perhaps even the pass since that position doesn't suit his strengths.

cdcox beat me to the answer.

Oh, and note that you don't have to petition for a formal change to use a guy at a different position. If Week 14 comes up and you have no WRs at all due to injuries and you need to use Dontari Poe at WR, go right ahead. Just recognize that he's going to have problems getting open.

No you don't. :)

Rain Man, I think we can scratch patteeu off of the list for VP of public relations.

I guess this is part of what I am struggling with. Played in a given year according to what? Is seems silly, but for some of these guys it is hard as hell to figure out what they play on a given year. Ranking will lump DTs and NTs up together, the pro football reference links for a play might say they are lde/dt or blank, or something else. I had one player that was listed as DE in his potion, but the pro footabll reference showed him as a SAM.

I get what you are saying, but I don't want to get 95% out of two players just because I thought one was considered a NT and the other a DE3 and for whatever reason they were the other way around. Is there something of a creed we can follow to say what position a player is really considered to be?

[scratch, scratch, scratch]

We'll provide that information, note that it would be helpful to provide it as early as possible for drafting and free agency.

We're in a weird catch-up year this year, but as I think about it, going forward we won't know until after the draft and free agency, either.

The calendar will be something like this.

End the previous Sandbox season in March or thereabouts.

Draft rookies in May (or after the NFL draft, whenever it is).

Sign free agents throughout the NFL season, at which point players may be moving around in terms of position.

At the end of the NFL season, we build our databases and feed it into the model, at which point we know the stated position of each player - but that's after everyone has built out their team.

Dumervil had his best year as a 3-4 OLB, but played in 2012 as a 4-3 DE. Does he still get devalued when moved to a 3-4 OLB?

Yeah. Otherwise we have to start making individual judgment calls on each player, which gets cumbersome. We recognize it's a limitation, but at the same time players tend to move to similar positions and our downgrades for moving to a similar position are mild.

How mild are we talking? What about a small 4-3 DE moving to a primarily rushing 4-3 SLB?

EDIT: Maybe let me explain more. Said DE turned SLB will be blitzing basically all the time. Let's assume he never drops into coverage. Will his pass rush skills be diminished in this setup? How badly? I just want to know if I should rethink my defense while I still have a chance to pick up pieces in the draft.

Nacho Cheese Dorito to Cool Ranch Dorito. Not Spicy Chipotle Dorito to Cool Ranch Dorito.

It's hard to answer that exactly, but we do make distinctions to the level you're talking about, and also for various elements of the switch (i.e., run stopping, pass coverage, pass rushing, etc.). Seriously, the best I can say is to use your intuition about the interchangeability of positions.

Ok. Since he won't really be covering at all, I'm guessing the overall drop will not be severe. Thanks.

And again, we're not intentionally trying to be obtuse, but we want people to think of the game more as football and less as a statistical exercise to maximize their odds. Football coaches have to make these same judgments during the course of a season - Branden Albert is injured, so do I put Stephenson in or do I move Fisher to the left and put Stephenson on the right?

I have a good example of what we're trying to avoid. Many years ago, I was in a league that played Strat-O-Matic baseball. It was a cool game, but it was baseball, which is pretty simple statistically and the game system was transparent.

Well, I had two shortstops, Cal Ripken, Jr., and a journeyman for the Twins named Al Newman. Newman was a career .226 hitter with 1 home run in eight years. Ripken was clearly the better player, but in one type of matchup (something like clutch situations against right-handed pitchers) Newman was actually better.

I did my math and figured that out, so when that situation arose, Ripken was out of there and Newman took over at shortstop. One of the guys in my league was a baseball purist and he would get furious at me when I would do that. My response was always, "I did the math."

But the bottom line is that I wasn't really playing the game in a manner suitable to baseball. I was manipulating the game system. What we don't want in this game is for someone to discover that some offensive tackle (John Tait?) got the ball once on a lateral and gained 28 yards, so you can move him to running back and he'll be Godzilla.

I'm not saying that anyone in our leagues would do that, but we all know each other and are reasonable people. Once we go commercial with the game, we'll certainly have people willing to do that, so we have to prevent it from happening, both via the game system design and via our management of the game.