The six all 22 football mistakes that keep boards under 55

A board does not fail because the player picked bad Pokémon. It fails because twenty-two jobs compete for the same limited supply of bodies, and one wrong priority in the first five picks quietly ruins four slots you have not filled yet. The mistakes below are ranked by how much they cost, with the numbers measured against the original 151 and the full 1,025-body pool.

1. Building a top-heavy roster

The first mistake is spending the pool's scarce bodies on the jobs that are fun to fill. In Gen 1 there is one body above 400 kg, two above 300 kg and thirteen above 120 kg — and seven starting jobs with a minimum weight of 110-150 kg. Snorlax is the entire nose-tackle market at 460 kg. If you put him at left tackle because it feels like a premium job, the interior falls to a 51 and the trade costs two points you never get back; if you put him anywhere outside the seven heavy jobs, you lose the only defensive tackle grade above 54.

The fix is a scarcity pass before a quality pass. Count the jobs with hard physical requirements first — five offensive line slots, two defensive tackle slots — and see how many bodies in your pool satisfy them. Fill those seven slots with the heaviest qualified bodies you own, then spend what is left on speed and skill. A board built in that order rarely needs to be rebuilt; a board built in the other order almost always does.

2. Ignoring the interior

The interior is 32% of the board: four tackle and guard jobs, one center, two defensive tackles. It is also the least glamorous third of the pool, which is why it is the part players leave until the end and then fill with whatever has a big number on the card. Two traps live here. The first is thinking that bigger is always better: the line bands top out at 2.4 m, so Onix — 8.8 m, 210 kg — grades only 43 as an edge rusher and 40 at left tackle, because length past the top of a band scores exactly the same as no length at all. The second is forgetting that the same list of heavy bodies has to cover seven slots, so a 300 kg Golem cannot be your emergency third option everywhere.

The fix is to treat weight bands as a budget. Write down the band each interior slot wants, then sort your pool by weight and check off seven bodies. In the Gen 1 format, that list is Snorlax, Golem, Dragonite, Machamp, Cloyster, Arcanine and one of Exeggutor, Rhydon or Dewgong — and four of those names also happen to be your best linebacker and edge options, which is exactly how the squeeze starts.

3. No speed specialist where the job reads speed first

There is no returner slot on the board. The 22 jobs are eleven on offense and eleven on defense, and the return game has no separate berth, which means the speed that covers kicks and punts in the sport has to live in the receiver and secondary jobs you already own. A board built entirely from heavy bodies has nowhere to put it. Six jobs grade speed as their first or second weight — both receiver slots, both corner slots, free safety and strong safety — and running back adds a seventh. Gen 1 has 24 bodies at 100+ speed and 12 at 110+, and the first two or three of them decide how those seven slots grade.

The cost is measurable: remove every body with 100 or more speed from the Gen 1 pool and the best possible board drops from 58.0 overall to 56.6. That sounds small until you notice it is a larger penalty than losing Snorlax entirely. The fix is simple — reserve at least three slots for 100+ speed bodies and never spend the last one on a defender who is only fast enough to be average.

4. Drafting by fame

Famous bodies are not good bodies, and the grader has no memory. Pikachu is the most recognisable Pokémon in the pool and his best grade in Gen 1 is 32, at wide receiver; at defensive tackle he grades 18. Mewtwo, the strongest body in the generation on paper, grades 60 at quarterback — three points behind Charizard — because the position wants sp. attack and speed rather than raw attack. Eevee, Mew and Charizard's own teammates all sit in the same trap: a body's reputation is a statement about how it plays elsewhere, not about how it fits a job with a height band and a weight band.

To see how expensive name value is, take the 22 most famous Gen 1 bodies, put them in a pool and build the best board that pool allows. It grades 53.6 overall — 4.4 points below a board from the full 151, and nearly five points below the ceiling. The fix is mechanical: before every pick, look at the band and the first two stat weights for the slot, and pick for those. If a famous name happens to fit, you get the name for free.

5. One-type stacking

Typing is only 10% of a grade, which makes it easy to ignore — until a whole board shares one type. A favoured primary type adds 22 points to the typing component and a penalised primary costs 26, so the swing between a perfect type fit and a bad one is 48 points of typing, or 5.8 grade points in a single slot. Across 22 slots that is more than a full point of overall grade in either direction, before you have filled a single skill position.

The stacking version of this is worse. A Gen 1 board locked to water types has 32 candidates and tops out at 46.4 overall, an 11.5-point collapse, because the deep water pool is full of bodies that are the wrong shape for the interior. Even a mixed pool punishes patterns: a fairy primary is penalised at 12 of the 22 jobs and an electric primary at six, while electric is favoured at both receiver slots and both corners, which is why an electric body that grades 58 at corner grades 25 at either tackle. The fix is to check the favoured and penalised lists for each slot before committing a body, and to keep a second type available for any job where the whole shortlist shares one.

6. Leaving a slot empty, or filling it with a body that cannot play

Two related failures with the same symptom. An empty slot makes the simulation refuse to run at all: the season needs all 22 jobs filled, and the message is blunt about it. Worse, an empty slot does not drag your displayed grade down, because the unit average skips unfilled slots — delete the second defensive tackle from a maximum-grade Gen 1 board and the overall grade reads 58.6 instead of 58.0 while the board is unplayable. Filling that slot with the wrong body has the mirror problem: a 20-something grade in a starting job is nearly invisible in an average over eleven defenders, but it is a real hole on every simulated snap.

The fix is to fill all 22 slots before you judge anything, then work on your worst slot instead of your best one. Improving a 63 to a 65 raises the board by 0.1 overall; raising a 47 to a 55 raises it by 0.4 and usually costs nothing but a body you were not using.

Symptom, cause, fix

What each mistake costs

Read the table from the bottom up: the cheap mistakes are the loudest. The one-type board is the most expensive error in the game and it is also the easiest to spot, while the fame board and the empty slot are the two that players talk about least.

The ten-minute audit