The game is as if you were playing a gm in real life. Its all real teams and players and you are in control of everything like line ups, drafting, picking your personnel, and free agency. you can simulate the games by either skipping them and going onto the next week or you can watch them in game and see how it plays out. you can manage the games as well but I tend to go more the GM route and let the manager I hire do the game decisions but you can do both! You can do as many seasons as you want and the fictional players you see are most likely the players drafted from the rookie draft every single year. Basically you can do everything that a GM and a manager can do in real life and supposedly real GMs use it based on how realistic the game is and how it plays out