A deep front-office football sim for people who think the best part of the sport happens in the war room and on the cap sheet. You've got the whole job. None of the joystick. You're the general manager. You build the roster, hire the staff, set the scheme, work the phones, and answer to the owner. The games sim themselves, and you live with the results. You'll never throw a pass. You'll decide who's throwing them for the next ten years, and whether he's still got the job in November. One franchise, thirty-one AI GMs, season after season. Draft, trade, sign, cut, extend, and tag your way to a contender. Set the depth chart and the scheme; the sim does the rest, honestly. No twitch, no memorized playbook. Every move is a decision, not a reflex. The draft is a bloodsport. Three days a year the whole league's future sits on the board, and your scouts don't agree with each other. Build your big board, run the war room live, and watch the picks come off knowing the kid you love might be a star or a bust — and you won't know which for three seasons. Trade up when your guy's sliding. Trade down when the value's wrong. Don't blink. A live, paced draft room with offers flying and the clock bleeding. Scouting intel you have to earn. Better information is a real edge. Steals and busts are real. The board lies; the tape tells the truth later. Get graded on every class — immediately, and again after the careers are spent. Every dollar tells the truth. The cap is the one opponent that never gets hurt. Signing bonuses, void years, dead money, the cornerstone tag. Every contract is a bet on the future, and the books always come due. Restructure a deal to free up cash today and you've mortgaged 2028. Tag your star to keep him one more year, or let him walk to a division rival and help beat you twice a season. Pro-football contracts: base, bonus, guarantees, void years, restructures. The cornerstone tag, dead money, and a cap that grows every offseason. Re-sign your own, raid free agency in waves, or build through the draft. Every roster move is yours to make — and yours to live with. Your players have a pulse. Your roster is forty-some men with egos, grudges, and bad weeks. Lowball your cornerstone and he holds out into Week 1, or suits up and gives you a quiet 80%. Bench a proud veteran for a rookie and the locker room takes a side. Gamble on a raw prospect and you're either developing a star or babysitting a four-year bust. Work ethic, ego, temperament — all hidden until it costs you, and by then he's either winning you games or losing you the room. Hidden work ethic, ego, and temperament that surface on game day. Holdouts, trade demands, and locker-room chemistry with real teeth. Multi-year development: breakouts, plateaus, busts, and late bloomers. Scouting is the only way to know who you've really got. The owner is always watching. Hit the mandate, keep up with expectations and win to buy yourself room. Miss it and the seat gets warm fast. Two losing seasons and the owner annoyance is palpable. Three, and you're cleaning out your desk — though a struggling franchise across the league might call with a second chance. Owner trust, season mandates, and a hot seat that's real. Get fired, then choose: take a rebuild job, or retire on your legacy. A GM career that spans teams, not just one save file. Thirty-one GMs who fight back. The AI doesn't see the board any better than you do. It scouts, guesses, over-rates its own guys, and misreads yours — so a sharp eye is a weapon. It also remembers. Lowball the same GM repeatedly and he may stop taking your calls. Catch a desperate one on the hot seat and he'll hand you a star for pennies. Rival GMs with distinct styles, blind spots, and grudges. Imperfect information. Nobody owns the true ratings, not even the AI. A living trade market: offers, feelers, and bidding wars all season. Build something that outlives you. Anybody can win once. The dynasty is the draft pick you nailed in year two paying off in year eight, the homegrown star you watched go from raw to the Hall, the core you kept together while everyone said sell. Win enough, the right way, and your franchise hangs in the rafters for good. Decades-long saves. Develop and keep a core for the long haul. A Hall of Fame, league awards, and a permanent Legacy score. Homegrown greatness counts for more than rentals. Your league. Your teams. Your logos. Gridiron Grit ships with a clean, fully fictional 32-team league. Want it to look like the one in your head? Custom League Packs are a folder drop away. Swap every team's name, city, colors, and logo — even the player-name pools. The community makes the rest. Reskin all 32 teams: names, cities, colors, logos, name pools. Plain-folder mods. No tools, no rebuild. Share one as a zip. Built to be Workshop-friendly from day one. What it is, and what it isn't. This is a desk-and-decisions game. You won't scramble for the first down yourself — if that's what you're after, you want a different one. But if you want to be the reason that seventh-round kid was even on the roster, the GM who saw the cap crunch coming two years out, the one they build the statue for — pull up a chair. A deep front-office sim. No on-field play-calling. A fictional league by default, yours to reskin. Built to be learned: an in-game wiki and hover-anything tooltips, so the depth never buries you.
