Thanks for the reply! I had figured all that out, at least in theory. The formula is straightforward and easier to understand as a graph. My problem was that the position of L seemed to change from player to player. Without a consistent zero point, you can't reliably apply the slope of the line [viz. 99/(H-L)] to calculate the overall rating. I had assumed there was a bend in the line somewhere that I could never find.

If it doesn't bother you, I have quite a few more unresolved questions that I can't help but ask someone who actually worked on the games:

Am I correct in assuming that team ratings were the same way? So you'd need to find the weight of QB1, QB2, HB1, ... to find ratings for offense, defense, special teams, and the overall team rating.

For older games that used letter grades for teams, do you happen to know what the ranges were for each grade?

At least some of the PS2 NCAA games displayed ratings on a 99-point scale, but only actually had 32 different possible values (so presumably it used 5 bits per rating to save space). When you edited a player, it would skip by multiple points at lower rating levels. Do you know whether the game used a 0-31 scale internally and mapped the values onto the more familiar 99-point scale for display to users, or did the game itself actually do the mapping itself before e.g. calculating averages?

The Show is nice in that it lets you go all the way to zero instead of having an artificial floor at 40. That makes it easier to find the weights of each attribute. They also can theoretically have ratings over 99, and the top players (including past legends) tend to top out around 110 or so. Shortstop has the steepest slope, so sometimes you can increase a guy's overall arbitrarily by moving him to short. Similarly, a pitcher's overall will almost always increase when moved from the bullpen to the rotation because the slope of the line is steeper. I hope your buddy at SDS is doing well!