Pick Your Decade
5 August 2026
Two Ways In
The 3rd and Long ratings library covers every NFL season from 1950 to 2025, and you can have the lot in one download. Plenty of people do, because if you want the '85 Bears against the 2013 Seahawks you need both of them on the same scale and in the same folder. Mix the eras, draft an all-time bracket, start in 1950 and work forwards until you run out of evenings. Having all of it there is the point.
Then there are the rest who know exactly which ten years they want.
Ask around any tabletop sports forum and the answer comes back the same. Give them 1974 and they light up. It is usually the decade they were a teenager in, the football they watched before they had opinions about it, and they have no particular interest in wading past 2011 to get to it. That is what the decade bundles are for. One era, complete, nothing else in the way.
I grew up in the 80s and fell in love with that decade. Montana, 49ers, the Bills, Esiason, Kosar, Dickerson, Payton. I came to American football sideways through a battered copy of Statis Pro and I've been hooked ever since.
The Sixties Had Two Leagues
Which brings me to the gap somebody wrote about last week.
The 3rd and Long 60s Bundle always felt incomplete, because for ten years two leagues ran side by side arguing about which one was real football, and only one of them was in the range. So the AFL is now done. All ten seasons, 1960 to 1969, rated on exactly the same scale as everything else.
First thing I did with it was replay Super Bowl III. Baltimore went 13-1 that year and gave up 144 points all season, which rates them 17 on offence and 19 on defence. Namath's Jets come out 18 and 15. Before anyone rolls anything the Colts are favourites, and when I played it, the Jets pulled off the upset.
Namath was calling an upset, and he went and got it anyway.
There is a combined set too, The Sixties, which is both leagues across the full ten years for anyone who wants the argument rather than one side of it.
Roll Your Ten Years
Every set works the same way. Ratings built off real points-for and points-against, the modifier lookup with every matchup worked out in advance, the scoring charts, a playsheet. Two d100 and a pencil. One set of rules covers every season, so whichever decade you start in, nothing else needs buying.
It is all on one page - every decade on its own, the two new sixties sets, and The Complete NFL History if you want all seventy-six seasons in one go. Take the whole library or take your ten years.
Browse the full 3rd and Long range →
And if your decade has a hole in it the way the sixties did, say so. That is exactly how the AFL got made.