APBA Football Club Podcast Network

Pre-eminent football historian Ken Crippen speaks with us about the most important players and eras in American football, as well as the mission of his Football Learning Academy. The FLA offers online classes, videos and a blog that illuminates football history and the impact the game on society. "Giving back to retired players in need" is the FLA's mission, and football fans can help by signing u...

Queens native turned Florida resident Joe Moffa is replaying the 1981 NFL season — and his beloved Giants are 0-8! Will he persevere and roll through? How does he stay motivated? What player usage rules is he using? Can anyone beat the Chargers? Get the inside scoop on this exciting replay and dedicated replayer. Chime in with your own '81 season replay experiences, no matter what game you us...

Remember the guy who caused the fumble that Minnesota Viking Jim Marshall ran the wrong way against the 49ers in 1964? Michael Jackson sure does. That player would be Bill Butler, one of the many veteran NFL players Jackson has interviewed for his NFL history podcast and blog The Game Before the Money. His book of those interviews is The Game Before the Money: Voices of the Men Who Built the NFL,&...

If you've always wanted to attend an APBA convention or tourney (or any board game event) but weren't sure about committing, this interview could change your mind.   Two weeks before the annual APBA convention in Alpharetta, Georgia, three APBA Hall of Famers weighed in on the bonds built through board gaming. One — Pete Simonelli, APBA Hall of Fame 2005 — goes back to the first-ever APB...

The history of the NFL was shaped in no small part by the legendary players and plays of the 1970s. Pro football historian Joe Zagorski, author of "The NFL in the 1970s: Pro Football's Most Important Decade, " reminisces with us about some of the highlights of that pivotal decade and his published and upcoming books about icons like Willie Lanier, Larry Little and others. For tabletop sports simme...

Geek out on tabletop sports games with me and S.T. Patrick — founder of Sports Sim Magazine, one of the designers of the deeply researched wrestling sim The Squared Circle and creator of STP Radio*. Our conversation runs the gamut from topics including: • Whether this is the golden age of sports gaming, and the wealth of sports sim games available today • The lineup of the March 2022 issue of SSM...

John Turney and Nick Webster made headlines this summer with the release of their sack-crediting statistics for the 1960 to 1981 NFL seasons. Their exhaustive research — including countless hours of viewing of priceless NFL game film — yielded many surprising results and long-overdue credit for iconic NFL stars like Deacon Jones, Jack Younglood, Alan Page, Al "Bubba" Baker and the Steel Curta...

The 1976 Buccaneers might have had one of the more memorably bad seasons in professional sports, but we tabletop sports simulation gamers are positively in love with that team. You can count on one thing when a new tabletop cards-and-dice gridiron game emerges: Folks will want cards for the 1976 season and the 1976 Buccaneers.    But while those games give a glimpse into what that season...

Board game boxing fans are no stranger to the work of the brothers Jim and Tom Trunzo, who 42 years ago launched their TItle Bout championship boxing through Avalon Hill. Jim Trunzo discusses some of the game's many ups and downs through the decades — including the current economics and realities of board game conception, manufacturing, distribution and marketing. Through it all, his passion for k...

With his custom APBA Football sets and longtime card performance collaboration with APBA Hall of Famer Greg Barath, Mark Zarb has cemented his reputation as one of the zen masters of the game. Buckle in for this in-depth look at all phases of the game, from QB sack numbers and scramble refinements to calculating those 9-7 teams, acceptable variances among offensive and defensive squads, era-to-era...

Australia's Phil Molloy a structural engineer, is an elite member of the APBA Football community who has shared numerous innovations to refine the game for at least the past 10 years. I first interviewed him in April 2013 for our APBA ICONS series and in late 2014 pitched my 2007 Patriots against his 1993 Niners in the global Skype tournament assembled by the National Card Football League. Phil ta...

On Sept. 10, 2001, I was on what turned out to be a very brief first visit to Montreal. Many of us certainly remember watching the Giants and Broncos Monday Night Football game, in which Ed McCaffrey suffered a season-ending broken leg in the third quarter after catching six passes for 94 yards and a touchdown. At the time, APBA was still in a period of financial uncertainty, reflected in numerous...

John Storer runs one of those low-key sports gaming blogs that belies its wealth of valuable information. His broad range of gaming experience includes numerous Cincinnati Bengals relays with the "Big 3" of tabletop gridiron games (APBA, Strat-O-Matic and Statis Pro, although one might include Paydirt in a "Big 4" — and yes, John owns the Sports Illustrated game with the Steelers-Dolphins cov...

The Ohio-based, nationwide National Card Football League — and its sister venture the American Card Football League — share details of their methods for drafting, playing,  stat-keeping and more in the inaugural episode of GamePlan with the APBA Football Club.    The NCFL, founded as a face-to-face league in Columbus, Ohio, in 1981, is now believed to be the longest-runnin...

Eric Simon's family has had a long relationship with horse racing, which makes his obsession with the out-of-print APBA Saddle Racing game mosrt understandable. So diligently does he assess the statistical and timing accuracy of horses and jockeys that he put his calculations to the test by rating 800 horses at a time. He has created horses, free of charge, for the 2018 racing season and 2020 Bree...

Veteran game designer Brien Martin rhapsodizes about his wealth of playing experience across all tabletop sports. Fans of recently released Fast Drive Football have no doubt noted Brien's World Football League replay with his homebrewed cards. He's also thinking creating a fictitious "living league" for the game.    Of his many credits, one of Brien's crowning achievements is partnering...

Chris Doelle and Michael Wright, friends and football teammates since junior high school in Texas, turned their love of the game into Friday Night Legends, a team-based representation of high school football across the country and the decades. Launched on Kickstarter in November 2017, FNL is an outgrowth of the pair's Lone Star Gridiron website, dedicated exclusively to curating Texas high school...

Minnesota grade school teacher Beau Lofgren is a relative newcomer to APBA at age 40 (he turns 41 on Sunday, Aug. 8). He's recovering after helping save a child from drowning on a recent field trip and was kind enough to share some thoughts on his progress in this Aug. 5 interview.  His wife’s uncle got Beau on the APBA track with the 1987 master baseball game. Lofgren, a teacher of third- an...

Ron Emch has built a Hall of Fame-level resume of APBA gaming. From recording dozens of golf tutorial videos to creating the Glass City baseball tournament in Toledo, Ron is building the kind of APBA legacy that puts him in the company of the pantheon of greats. Here, he guides you on how to optimize your experience with the game of APBA golf and details his favorite courses, players and rounds, O...

In the past week, Al Wilson's Fast Drive Football tabletop board game has electrified the gridiron gaming community. Playing in about 15 to 20 minutes per game, FDF is more word-based than numbers driven — with team cards using descriptive words like "prolific" (1969 Vikings offense), "inept," "meek" and "undisciplined" (1976 Buccaneers).    Derived from Plaay's mechanics, FDF simul...

Teacher Dale Shreiner discusses the origins of his Lancaster, Pa., APBA tournament. Of course, Lancaster is the original home of APBA Games, launched in 1951 by J. Richard Seitz. Shreiner, 40, is a relative newcomer to APBA, who began playing APBA baseball in earnest in 2016 after being introduced to the game by a former workplace manager. Starting his tournament a year later, Shreiner has learned...

Gilles Thibault and Hall of Famer Greg Wells had been on quite a replay tear when we reconnected. While the rest of the world turned to Zoom for work, more gamers turned to Zoom — as did Thibault and Wells, who pulled off a string of impressive replays. Gilles details the results of their 1972, 1976, 1980 and GTOP (Greatest Teams of the Past). Yep, another video filled with vintage APBA cards...

Flash Games creator Jason Graham goes into great depth about his game designs, the method and intent behind the probability-based system for his pro football game, and his must-read list of books that provide real insights into the game of football and the realities of comparing athletes across eras. Jason is very "open source" about his game design and goes out of his way not only to explain how...

We first reached out to Ray Dunlap in 2012 — a "gray area" period in APBA history when the company HQ had moved to Alpharetta, Ga., from Lancaster, Pa., and the annual convention was a fan-held event. As the fates would have it, Ray was living in Atlanta when the company moved. Ray, co-creator of the Suncoast Football League in Tampa in 1979, has been playing APBA since 1966 (great year), wrote fo...

Howie Mooney is a man of many talents and a "fired up" APBA Fan. His Instagram bio puts it succinctly: "A dad. A guy. A goalie. One of 2 hosts of The Sports Lunatics sports history podcasts. Also a contributing writer to the firedupnetwork.ca website." One winter day in school in the early 1970s, his teacher brought in an APBA baseball game, and Mooney was hooked. We discuss everything from his wo...