February 1980
FEBRUARY 1980
(I fear I may have made the Super Bowl teams too strong. I probably should have consulted the 80-81 set as a reference point and smoothed some of the edges, but I was anxious to get going, so I Rumsfelded it, going with the teams I had, not the teams I'd like to have. I hasten to add that this is user error, not a flaw with Plaay's team creation process.)
Number 1 Song: "Do That To Me One More Time" by Captain and Tennille.
Number 1 Movie: "Cruising," an Al Pacino film about a serial killer targeting gay men that I admit never having heard of until this very day.
Number 1 Book: (Nonfiction) "The Brethren," by Bob Woodward (Fiction) "Princess Daisy," by Judith Krantz
Number 1 Album: "The Wall," Pink Floyd
The US Department of Energy announced plans for gas rationing.
"Operation Abscam," a sting operation run by the FBI, caught a number of Congresspeople accepting bribes from people purporting to be Arab sheikhs
Ronald Reagan will win the New Hampshire primary on February 26, propelling him to the Republican nomination and eventually the Presidency.
Singer Conor Oberst was born.
Driver Ricky Knotts was killed in a crash while attempting to qualify for the 1980 Daytona 500.
Driver Buddy Baker, the actual Daytona winner in 1980, still holds the record for the fastest average time, 177 mph, which was achieved in 1980.
(This replay runs into what I call the "Mitch Hedberg Problem." The late Mr. Hedberg once observed that "every picture is of you when you were younger." Similarly, every replay is a replay of past events, or at the very least, a replay that relies on past events to generate its events in the present. (Even, say, a preplay of the 2025 playoffs using current season stats is extrapolating the very recent past into the immediate future.) The question is, how many of these past events do you use to generate the truest picture of the athlete on this day and time? Generating a Dale Earnhardt driver card based on his career stats to date in February 1980 would provide a terribly small snapshot of his 676 career starts, and wouldn't be a fair guide to his abilities. But basing a card on his career, while a better statistical sample, gives him credit for experiences and lessons that 1980 Earnhardt hasn't had yet. I have decided, when possible, I will use career stats, for example from Plaay's "1980s Stars" set, to maximize the statistical baseline I am working from. I admit that not doing it for every driver in the race does give these more established drivers an advantage, but I feel like that is closer to their true talent level than restricting them to what they have achieved as of February 1980. There is no right answer here- I readily confess that the counterargument makes just as much sense. But this is where I am falling.) (In my defense, I would note that the drivers good enough to earn a place on the 1980s Stars set- the set includes every driver who won a race in the 1980s- were, to put it plainly, better- and thus it is fair to give them a leg up, so to speak, on the more ordinary drivers of the 1980 season. I will include every driver who competed in the actual race, as well as some who tried to qualify and did not, and I will use Plaay’s 1980s Daytona card.)
ACTUAL RESULT: 1. Buddy Baker 2. Bobby Allison 3. Neil Bonnett 4. Dale Earnhardt 5. Benny Parsons
REPLAY RESULT:
WALTRIP WALLOPS DAYTONA FIELD
Wild, weird finish brings Tennessean his first Daytona win
After an almost sedate beginning, led by veteran Cecil Gordon for more than half the race, the last fifty miles degraded into a crash filled and smoky mess. Gordon’s blistering lap in qualifying earned him the pole, and over the first half of the race, the field seemed content to allow him to keep it. Cars driven by Neil Bonnett and Bruce Hill suffered mechanical failures and had to withdraw, and there was a four car wreck near the middle of the race, but Gordon still led as the afternoon drew on, and it was beginning to look like a wire to wire triumph.
With 12 laps to go, all hell broke loose. A five car wreck decimated the front ranks, and several other cars had to pit to repair minor damage from debris. Then, with the field finally clear and the green flag flying, Waltrip emerged from the chaos, and was able to withstand a hard push from Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt until he crossed the line under the checkered flag to pull down the win.
1. Darrell Waltrip 2. Richard Petty 3. Dale Earnhardt 4. Sterling Martin 5. Richard Childress
(Making driver cards turned out to be both harder and easier than I expected. I used stats as much as I could, but there was a fair amount of guesswork involved. As it turned out, a healthy majority of the cards I needed were already in the 1980s Stars set. The gameplay is complicated, but it gets easier the longer you do it.)
(Next month, we move on to the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship, the Louisville Cardinals and Dr. Dunkenstein, Darrell Griffith, against the UCLA Bruins and high scoring forward Kiki Vandeweghe, using Plaay's Highlight Maker Hoops Prime Time. HMHPT is quickly becoming one of my very favorite games and game engines, as it is cleverly designed and heaps of fun to play. Only a couple of adjustments are called for thats f I can see. The game is built around the pro quarter of 12 minutes, with short intervals to allow (and sometimes require) rest, and colleges, of course, play 20 minute halves. Once I do the math to figure out how many FACs per half are required, it should be, I hope, relatively simple to divide the resulting FACs into four minute segments, and use the existing framework to incentivize/require player rest. The card creation formulae do require league averages, and for some reason, college basketball stats (at least, the ones I can find) will only list conference averages, not averages for D1 as a whole. (When you look up "1971" on Baseball Reference, you can find league averages for 1971 NL, 1971 AL, all of 1971, or even the averages for all of baseball from 1871-2024.) So as a consequence, the teams will be created using a conference baseline of the two teams' conferences (the PAC 10 and the MCAC) combined to make a "league average" of sorts. It isn't perfect, but it's the best I can do. Lastly, I will use Plaay's "Experience" rating to give a tiny boost to Juniors and Seniors, and a tiny decrement to Freshmen and Sophomores, which I think is basically fair.)