Coaching

Your coaching staff is a head coach (HC), an offensive coordinator (OC) and a defensive coordinator (DC). They call the game plan, develop your roster and sharpen your scouting eye. This page covers how the staff budget works.

Budget

Your staff is paid from a staff budget. The budget is separate from the player salary cap.

1. Open your team and select Coaching.
2. Hire a coach from the market. The coach signs a multi-year deal. The deal draws against your staff budget.
3. You cannot hire into a role that is already filled. Fire or replace the current coach first.

Sharper coaches read talent better than the rest of the league. That is your edge on draft day. In the offseason, line up your staff before you start to focus your scouts. See Scouting and the draft.

Firing a coach

Firing frees the role. It does not give you cap relief.

• A fired coach keeps drawing the full salary as dead staff budget until the original contract would have ended. The dialog shows the amount before you confirm.
• The role opens right away. An open role shows a Hire interim button, which signs a cheap stopgap coach that fits even with no staff budget left. You can also hire a replacement from the market.
• The dead money stays on the books either way. The budget itself never shrinks.

Fire a coach to change who holds the job, not to save money.

The hot seat

Each coach has a hot seat number from 0 to 100. It tracks the pressure on the coach. Three things feed it: results against expectations, the locker room, and how long the coach has held the job. Above 80, a coach is in real danger of being fired.

Coach profiles

Select a coach's name anywhere in the game to open the coach profile. It has these parts:

• Hot seat: a gauge with a percent and a band. Secure is under 60%. Heating up is 60% to 80%. Furnace is 80% and above.
• Ratings: the ratings that matter for the role, such as Leadership, Game mgmt and Talent eval for a head coach, and Offense or Defense and Development for a coordinator. A table shows how they moved by season.
• Tenure history: each job, with the team, the role, the From and To seasons, and how it Ended.
• What the heat costs: shows only when the coach is not Secure. At Heating up, chemistry events fire 50% more often, the team plays 3% below rating, free agents knock 5% off offers from your team, and AI teams ask for 5% more value on trades you start. At Furnace, those numbers become twice as often, 6%, 10% and 10%.
• Coaching tree: who the coach worked under.

Coaching moves

Open News, then Coaching moves, to see the season's coaching carousel across the league. The Departures pane lists each coach who left a job: the role, the team, the tenure and the reason. A tag shows Fired or Expired. An expired deal is not a firing. The Hires pane lists who took a job, where, in what role and in what season. Select a name to open the coach profile.