Seasons can be designed in one of five league sizes divided into one or two conferences with up to three divisions each. Seasons culminate with divisional championships, postseason playoffs, and a final Super Bowl-style showdown.
Almost every detail of a team's franchise can be customized by the owner: team name, nickname, head coach, jersey colors, stadium type (domed or outdoor), and nearest city. The last two options also have a direct influence on weather conditions, temperature, humidity, and precipitation, which in turn affect field conditions and player performance.
Rosters and player management featured 47-man teams, complete with injured reserve, free agent pools, drafting, training camp, and trading. Players are rated from 0 to 99 in eight performance classifications. The game did not include a player editor however the gaming community had several shareware applications and utilities available for download that allowed players to edit the players themselves, or download unofficial, user-created rosters. In career leagues, potential and actual ratings could be affected by such factors as training, injuries, and aging. This added a depth of realism not seen before.
The game recorded more than 300 statistical categories that could be displayed onscreen or printed. Detailed box scores were available during and after games, as well as match-ups from the previous week. League leader stats compare all teams and players in the league in a wide range of categories.
The game also featured a playbook editor. More than 200 stock plays were included with the game and were divided among standard offensive and defensive formations. Utilizing a point-and-click drawing interface, you can easily alter any of these pre designed plays or create your own.
The on-field/arcade play featured three skill levels that offered full or partial control of the action and coaching duties. The game supported keyboard, mouse, and dual joysticks. Your view of the action could be changed to one of nine fixed camera positions. These views, as well as a free-floating camera, also contribute to the game's extraordinary instant-replay system. Using standard VCR-style controls, you can easily view, edit, and save pivotal plays as a highlight film.
The second version of the game. Front Page Sports: Football Pro was the first PC football game that allowed gamers to join an online league to compete. Each week during a simulated season, league members would send their team files to a designated commissioner to simulate the games. The commissioner would run the simulation and then return updated files to owners (typically via a web page) for the next week of play. Team owners could trade players with each other, make roster moves, and function as if they were real general managers.
The third version of the game. The `95 version was available in both diskette and CD-ROM, however there was a difference in the two versions. The diskette version includes 3,000 stock plays while the CD-ROM version comes with 10,000. There was also a diskette upgrade over the 1993 version of the game, as well as the full version.
New and updated features included:
The fourth version of the game. This version was the first to feature a new high-resolution graphics engine.
Despite the dramatic upgrade to game graphics, the '96 version for many marked the start of the downfall of the franchise. The '96 version crashed to the desktop and required a patch during the first release following its release. Many users had issues with the play editor which required a higher level of free RAM than many systems had at the time. The simulation engine started to get bogged down and took much longer to simulate games than prior years. Simulating a week of games for many players now took a couple of hours to complete and the game did not allow you to simulate multiple weeks. Many have attributed the slowness due to the fact that Football Pro '96 actually simulated the physics of football requiring thousands of calculations to determine the outcome of games. The draft pool seemed to generate only a very large pool of average players (maknig #1 draft pick similar to say the #30 draft pick).
Despite those issues and with the upgrades to physics and graphics, many see the '96 version as the last solid release from Dynamix for the franchise.