How to go 17-0 in All 22 Football

Most players who chase the perfect season lose a game in week 14 and blame the simulator. The simulator is not random noise on top of a good team — it is a fixed difficulty curve that climbs from week 1 to week 17, with your own overall rating used as the anchor for how strong the opponents are. Nothing you do removes that curve. What you control is whether your board sits above it at every one of the 22 jobs, and whether the picks you spent chasing stars left a hole somewhere that a good opponent can punish.

The schedule is the opponent, so the floor is the strategy

The season simulator builds each week's opponent from your own team rating: opponent strength equals your rating plus 1.6 points for every week past the midpoint, with a little game-day variance on top, clamped between 34 and 99. That single formula explains the whole challenge. Weeks 1 to 8 are played below your own rating, the midpoint is a coin flip, and weeks 13 to 17 come at you 8 to 14 points above your rating. A stronger board does not dodge those weeks — it simply faces a stronger opponent in them.

Because the anchor is your own rating, extra grade above the floor changes very little and a hole below the floor changes everything. Measured over 200,000 simulated seasons, a board that clears the floor at all 22 jobs wins 86 to 92 percent of its early games and still has to win late games at 46 percent down to 15 percent. The strongest board in the pool, twelve points better overall, only pushes those late numbers to 62 percent down to 26 percent. That is the real difficulty: not one hard game, but five coin flips in a row at the end of the calendar.

Clear a grade floor at all 22 jobs before chasing any ceiling

The clearest experiment in the whole game is to build five boards of declining quality and run each of them through 40,000 seasons. Each board is built the same way: for every one of the 22 slots, take the best available body, the second-best, the fourth-best, the eighth-best, then the twentieth-best, never reusing a name. The overall grade spread is 11 points, the mean wins spread is less than 3, and the chance of a perfect season collapses from 1 in 465 to effectively zero.

Two lessons sit in that table. First, the difference between a contender and a lottery ticket is small in grade terms: you do not need Avalugg, you need every slot to be a real starter. Second, the perfect season is rare even for the best board the pool allows — so the goal is not to build a board that cannot lose. The goal is to build a board whose weakest slot is a 55-grade kicker rather than a 40-grade right tackle, because that is the difference between losing in week 15 and losing in week 6.

One number is worth memorising before the floor table: on the floor-clearing board, the two weakest jobs were the kicker at 55 and a center at 59. That is the shape of a board that wins 10 or 11 games and occasionally runs the table.

The grade floor per unit

A floor is not a wish — it is the lowest grade you can carry in a slot and still field a unit that the schedule treats as a real starter. The numbers below are the floors a board that clears the bar actually hit, next to the ceiling the pool allows at the same jobs. Note how few jobs can even reach a star grade: the ceiling matters far less than the floor.

The floor is a floor, not a target. A board that clears it at all 22 jobs sits around 60-62 overall and wins 10 to 12 games, with the perfect season showing up roughly once in 20,000 runs of that specific board. Anything above the floor is a bonus you should only chase once every slot is filled with a real starter.

Balance the two lines before you spend a single pick on skill

Seven jobs on the board want a body of 120 kg or more: the five offensive line slots and the two defensive tackles. Only 147 of 1,025 bodies make that weight, 46 make 300 kg, and 20 clear 460 kg. Worse, it is not two separate shopping trips: 11 bodies grade 60+ at some line job, 13 grade 60+ at some interior job, and 7 of them are on both lists — Avalugg, Aggron, Snorlax, Iron Hands, Metagross, Hippowdon and Great Tusk. Draft one of those seven into a line slot and you have removed an interior defender from the pool at the same time.

• The first pick: Avalugg grades 74 at left tackle, 73 at defensive tackle and 72 at center — the single best body in the dex for any heavy job, at 2.0 m and 505 kg.
• The second and third: Aggron (71 at DT1, 66 at LT) and Snorlax (67 at DT1, 65 at LT) are the only other bodies above 65 in both pools.
• The floor options: Iron Hands (65 at center), Metagross (64 at center), Hippowdon (64 at LT), Great Tusk (65 at DT2), Glastrier (64 at DT2), Stonjourner (62 at DT1), Melmetal (62 at DT1), Rhyperior and Cobalion and Ting-Lu (60 at DT1).
• The trap: taking all five line jobs and both tackles in six rounds looks efficient and is not. Because the two pools overlap, a run on either one drains the other, and the third-best center in the pool is a 64 while the fifth is already a 61.

The practical sequencing rule: two heavy jobs in your first three picks, the rest of the line done by round six, one interior defender in the same window, and the second defensive tackle after you have secured a quarterback and one edge. That gives you ten of the twenty-two slots spent on bodies that weigh more than most of the pool, which is the only way to keep both lines above the floor.

Budget your premium picks: two per role, maximum

Here is the number that changes how most people draft: across all 1,025 bodies, only 25 grade 65 or better at any of the 22 jobs. Not 250 — 25. And they are not spread evenly. Seven are receivers, three are linebackers, three are interior linemen, three are defensive backs, two are linemen, two are edge rushers, two are quarterbacks, two are running backs, one is a tight end, and none are kickers. A 22-slot board therefore cannot be a team of stars. It can hold at most a couple of premium bodies in any one role group, and everything else has to be a well-chosen floor pick.

That is not theory. Take four boards whose only difference is where the top picks went — every premium slot loaded with the best available body for its job, and every remaining slot filled with the eighth-best available body — and run each through 40,000 simulated seasons. Loading all five line jobs with the best available linemen produces a 61.9 board and 11.2 mean wins. Loading five skill jobs the same way produces a 61.5 board and 11.0 wins. Putting the eight best picks across eight different units produces a 63.2 board, 11.6 mean wins, and four times as many perfect seasons as the stacked boards.

Notice that the best board in the pool obeys the rule by accident: two receivers (Zeraora at 72 and Kilowattrel at 67), two line bodies (Avalugg at 74 and Snorlax at 65), two interior defenders (Aggron at 71 and Great Tusk at 65), and a single premium body in each of the other ten slots. Nobody plans that out of nowhere — it is what the scarcity of 25 premium bodies forces on you. Spend two premium picks on offense, two on defense, and treat a third in the same group as a warning sign that you are about to leave a hole.

Always fill the kicker slot — it is the cheapest job on the board

The kicker is the cheapest job on the board and the easiest one to forget, which is exactly why it decides runs. The formula reads hp at 35 percent, defense at 30 percent, sp. defense at 20 percent and speed at 15 percent on a body between 0.3 m and 1.0 m and 3-45 kg. The market is tiny: Marshadow is the ceiling at 62, Shuckle follows at 61, Toxapex at 58, and by the tenth-best kicker you are already down to a 54. Zero bodies clear 65. So the slot costs one late pick, and it is still one of the 22 grades that average into your team rating — a warm body at 40 there is a real loss, not a rounding error.

There is no returner slot on the 22, and that is deliberate: returns in a real lineup are handled by the same bodies that already carry the fastest jobs. WR1, WR2, CB1 and CB2 all grade speed at 45-50 percent, so your return game in All 22 Football is the speed you drafted at receiver and corner. So there are two things to get right: take a small, high-HP, high-defense body for the kicker in the last two rounds, and do not bury your two fastest bodies in a slot that does not read speed. A 143-speed Zeraora in the WR1 slot is your kick returner, your punt returner and your best receiving grade all at once.

• Kicker ceiling: Marshadow, 0.7 m and 22.2 kg with 90 sp. defense — a size-term score of 89, the best fit in the pool.
• One-point fallback: Shuckle at 61, so you never need to spend a pick before round 20 to secure the slot.
• Floor to avoid: the twentieth-best kicker grades 53. Below that you are carrying a slot that actively drags the team rating.

What a realistic 17-0 board actually looks like

The strongest 22-name board the pool allows grades 66.4 overall — 66.5 on offense, 66.3 on defense — with no slot below 62 and nine slots at 65 or better. It carries exactly two premium receivers, two premium line bodies and single premium bodies everywhere else, which is the two-per-role budget applied literally. The line reads 74, 65, 64, 64, 64; the interior reads 71 and 65; the linebackers read 68, 70 and 65; the secondary reads 64, 63, 66 and 65; the kicker is a 62.

A realistic 17-0 board does not look like that from your first attempt, though. The measured profile of a board that runs the table is much more modest: overall 60 to 63, weakest slot no lower than 55, no unit averaging under 58, and at least one elite body (65+) in the two or three roles where the pool is thinnest — right edge, center, middle linebacker. If your board has an elite receiver and a 48 at right tackle, it is not a 17-0 board. It is a 9-8 board with a famous name on it.

Before you build it, read the <a href="/positions/">full position reference</a> so you know which stats each slot actually reads — the fastest way to waste a run is to draft a famous body into a job its height and weight band rejects.

The build order, step by step

Five ways a 17-0 board dies

• One edge rusher and a warm body. Exactly one body clears 65 at right edge and only ten clear 60 at left edge. Filling one edge properly and the other with a stray is the most common death.
• A center below the floor. Only six bodies clear 60 at center. It is the thinnest line job in the pool, and the fourth-best center is already a 61.
• Three premium picks in one role. Spreading eight premium picks across eight units beats piling them into one or two: 11.6 mean wins against 11.0-11.2, and four times the perfect seasons.
• Famous names in the wrong band. Melmetal is 2.5 m and 800 kg: a 62 at defensive tackle, a 26 at cornerback. Height and weight are 28 percent of every grade.
• A kicker in the forties. The slot is cheap, but zero bodies clear 65 there, so leaving it to a random leftover costs more than most players expect.

Build the board and run the 17

Everything in this blueprint is testable in one sitting. Fill the 22 slots, watch offense and defense settle, and read your weakest slot before you simulate — that number is the one that decides your season. Then take the finished board to the <a href="/17-0-challenge/">17-0 challenge</a> and run the schedule, or trim the roster to the original 151 with the <a href="/gen-1/">Gen 1 format</a> if you want the same rules against a much thinner pool.

How to go 17-0: FAQ