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*Team Performance in the Current Sim Era - Printable Version

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*Team Performance in the Current Sim Era - lemonoppy - 05-09-2024

Hello, I’ve had this article bouncing in my head for a while, and it never came together. I had all the data, I wrote some stuff, and then… It kinda sucked. But, I re-wrote it as people started talking about conference realignment, and I’m pretty happy with it!

We’ll be talking about the Current Sim Era, team records within it, and best/worst half-decades, with a bonus 4fun conference realignment.

First off, let's talk about the sim eras. We’ve got two distinct eras but the first can be split into a few more.

The First Sim Era is from S1 to S26 inclusive, and starting in S27, the league swapped over to DDPSF21 creating the Current Sim Era.

The First Sim Era is fractured because of expansion. In Season 1, we had 6 teams, Arizona, Orange County, San Jose, Baltimore, Colorado, and Yellowknife. In Season 2, the Las Vegas Legion and Philadelphia Liberty joined the league. Even though the Liberty would re-brand to the New Orleans Second Line in S6, we had to wait until S16 for Austin and Chicago to enter the picture, and then Honolulu and Sarasota in S22 and finally New York and Berlin in S25.

I find it hard to want to cross-compare against the First Sim Era and the Current Sim Era because it gets weird with expansion teams, the old sim was notoriously broken, people playing out of position was OP as well as stuff like speed being really good at 79 and getting worse if you got to 80. The current sim doesn’t have as much of that, and as it’s now 21 seasons old, I feel like we’ve got a lot of data and I’m happy just looking at this info, plus, it also has seasons that are a uniform 16 games unlike the First Sim Era.

So, let’s look at how teams have done, the best and worst half-decades of the new sim (inspired by ztarwarz’s article about an ISFL team is only half a decade away from competing)[https://forums.sim-football.com/showthread.php?tid=50265], and look at a hypothetical conference realignment.

Alright, to start, let’s look at a table of stats based on the records of teams in this new sim. Ties are counted as .5 wins, won’t come up that often. We’re going to be seeing CTC+, this is the Cape Town squad that includes the Philadelphia Liberty as they were the same team, just rebranded.

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This is already altogether too much information. Let's break it down section by section.

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This is the total regular season records of all teams in the Current Sim Era, including Regular Season Conference titles and Ultimus Bowl performances, sorted by Win %.

Obviously, we can see that there’s some stratification, Arizona is 11% clear of second place Sarasota, who’s 6% clear over the next chunk of teams of Yellowknife, Chicago, Cape Town, Austin, New York, Berlin, and Honolulu. The next set of teams is the 45-42% teams of Orange County, Baltimore, San Jose, Colorado. And then 5% down below that is New Orleans at 36.01%.

Of course this chart is pretty misleading. If you decide to go through a generational tank but don’t include the seasons where your team is benefitting from it, yeah, your record is gonna suck (unfairly!). Imagine New Orleans has a come up the type that Honolulu had, during Seasons 34-36 and Seasons 41-45. They were conference champs 6 times in those 8 seasons and won 3 Ultimus. Now, New Orleans doesn’t get the benefit of two post-tank Ultimus Runs, but even one is a +20 win differential, which makes a big difference.

And in that same vein, Honolulu is the Boom or Bust team, where they either lose a stupendous amount of games in a tank, or come out of it and win playoff games and conference champs at an absurd clip.

If we were to tier list teams in the Current Sim Era, this is my list:

Tier 1

ARI Arizona - Not much to be said here, 6 championships, best win %. Case to be made that they’ve underperformed during the Crunk/Z-Whiz era but balanced by the overperforming in this last decade.

Tier 2

HON Honolulu - Honolulu has four Ultimus. They double everyone below them. Sure their overall win % isn’t high because they tank, but being able to build out of a tank is very difficult and it got them to where they wanted to be.

SAR Sarasota - Just by win % they deserve to be here, nevermind that they’re also tied for third in Ultimus wins. Sarasota has been exemplary during the Current Sim Era, they just get overshadowed for some reason.

Tier 3

This is the “Pick Your Champion” tier. These teams are all pretty similar, and I cut it off at 50% win percentage. This is pretty arbitrary but it kinda makes sense.

YKW Yellowknife, CHI Chicago, CTC Cape Town, AUS Austin, NYS New York.

No particular order, I think you could make an argument for any which way. All of these teams range from 53.87% (Yellowknife) to 50.15% (New York). They’ve also all won at least one Ultimus, with Yellowknife and New York coming in with two.

Tier 4

BER Berlin - This is kind of the Unlucky Berlin tier. They don’t get to step up into Tier 3 because they’re a touch below 50% (2 games under) and they have gone to 4 Ultiimus Bowls but lost every time. Only Yellowknife in Tier 3 has gone to the final dance 4 times.

Tier 5

The Underperformers tier, these teams just haven’t been great consistently, although Baltimore is way on the up.

BAL Baltimore - Historically quite bad, Baltimore has had a stretch of seasons starting in S43 that puts them tops in the league.

SJS San Jose - The lack of consistent team success puts the Sabercats here. San Jose hasn’t been to an Ultimus finals in the Current Sim Era, but with their strong roster building and recent success, I wouldn’t expect them to be in Tier 5 for long.

OCO Orange County, COL Colorado - Lack of success section. Orange County and Colorado have lost their only showings in the finals. These teams are also doing a hard rebuild so I don’t think we’ll see them moving out of here very soon. Baltimore and San Jose go up a tier, probably, leaving Orange County and Colorado here by themselves.

Tier 6

NOLA New Orleans - Again, not super fair to have a team rankings where one side goes through a super hard rebuild but doesn’t get to add the wins when the rebuild blossoms, but hey, it’s the data we got. New Orleans, however, was not good even before their tank started in S41. They were 95-127 in the seasons leading up to it for a 42.79%, which puts them on par with San Jose and Colorado. Still, the length of their tank and mediocre results before it have them alone here. Any playoff success or win will propel them up a tier, and more importantly, that team is gonna have a lot of receipts to post.

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The Post-Season records of all teams sorted by Win %.

Post-season records are a bit flukey, they suffer from low sample size, for some teams and at max you can win/play in three games in a postseason. Hard to truly extrapolate here, but I think if you’re above or below 60%/40%, you can complain about some sim luckery.

There’s also an element of, what if we give the regular season conference champs a win? It’s kind of weird that if you win the first seed and then get coinflipped, your playoff record is 0-1, shouldn’t it be 1-1?


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Adjusted Playoff Performance chart!

Alright, this, I think, feels like a better set of data, more accurate to the actual postseason performance of a team. Of course numbers will rise across the board, we just injected 42 wins after all. I think, overall, this shows a comparison in the relative strength of squad that teams are able to muster in the postseason. Sometimes squads that aren’t that strong make it through, and sometimes your strong side dies in their first non-bye game.

I think that Colorado, Orange County, New Orleans, and San Jose are too small sample sizes to measure their average postseason team strength, but that is also tied to their regular season woes.

And man, when Honolulu comes out of a rebuild? They’re coming at you hard. Dominant performance in the playoffs, they’re basically a 12-4 team in the playoffs. Crazy.

Half-Decades

Alright, so that’s some stat collection on teams in the past 21 seasons, how about we look at the best and worst half decades of this time?

What I’m doing is getting a rolling set of data to see how well you performed at certain half-decades, ie. how well did Sarasota do from S29-S33? They went 53-27 for a +26 win differential and 66.25%. Remember, a 5 season sample size is 80 games, so +26 is huge.


Just so we don’t get a lot of “duplicate seasons”, I didn’t include seasons where there are overlaps. For example, S32-36 and S33-37 Honolulu won the same amount of games during that stretch, but it’s weird to add both half decades since they were essentially the same team.

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Top 5 best half-decades of the Current Sim Era (non-overlapping)

Our top (non-overlapping) half-decades of the Current Sim Era!

Not only are these the top 5 half-decades of the Current Sim Era, they are the only half-decades that breach 70% in win rate. If we include overlapping seasons, we can add a few more above 70% (Baltimore S43 and er, Arizona seasons starting with S27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40)

To be a top half-decade side, you need a 70% win rate, or 56-24 through your 5 seasons, averaging 11.2-4.8 per season. Let’s look at who’s got a shot with this season or next!

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Potential top Half-Decades (min 3 seasons)

So, we’re a bit cheating as we’ve got overlapping seasons, but there’s 2-ish teams that can come out of this season and the following with Top Half-Decades! Both this current Arizona and Baltimore squads can clinch 70% win rates and cement themselves as some of the best teams in ISFL history by going 13-3, and of course some playoff wins/Ultimus win would be nice as well.

The overlapping season has Arizona able to make a 70% win rate by averaging 11-5 over this season and next, alongside their already very lucky 5-1 playoff record and a pair of Ultimus wins, I think going 22-8 over this season and next cements them as a an all time top squad if they hit 70% win rate.

Of course we can also do the inverse.

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Worst half-decades of the current sim era

These are the worst three half-decades in the Current Sim Era. There’s a whole host of other teams and multiple half-decades that are in the 35-38% range, and we also have S40-44 SJS at 33.75% (27-53), but they all felt not really that close to these three seasons.

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Potential worst half-decades of the current sim era

For potentially the worst half-decades, we don’t have anyone finishing this season or next that could get to the level of S27-31 Baltimore or S41-45 New Orleans, but they can get to the S34-38 Colorado Yeti. If Honolulu goes 5-27 in their next two seasons, or Colorado 3-29, they will tie S34-38 Colorado, and can potentially drop worse. I don’t think either of these happen, but it’s a faint possibility.


Conference Realignment

So, me re-writing this article happened when some people talked about conference realignment, and what if it possibly happened, and what does it look like?

Well, firstly, I don’t think it’ll ever happen or should happen. Teams go through ebbs and flows, and the conferences have periods where you’ll be good for a bit (around 5ish seasons), then bad-ish, and the permutation of that is always in flux so it’s kinda fun.

But, if we were to rearrange the conferences to make them “balanced”, how would you do it?

I had a big thing written about average regular season conference winners, but the fact is, only Arizona and Honolulu win their conferences more than other teams, they've won 11 and 7 respectively, and in the NSFC, teams max out at 4ish. In fact, them in the same conference is kind of a balancing mechanism of the two against each other. But, if we were to draft new conferences, I would start them opposite each other.

Lemon Conference - ARI Arizona
Lime Conference - HON Honolulu

With our top two teams gone, I think we should figure out the rest just pulling from the Tier List I made up above (this is very not accurate but mostly for fun).

I think you split up two sets of teams: New Orleans + San Jose and Colorado + Orange County.

I flipped a coin and our conferences now look like:

Lemon - ARI Arizona, COL Colorado, OCO Orange County
Lime - HON Honolulu, NOLA New Orleans, SJS San Jose

To balance out the historical performance of these teams compared to the current performance, I’m putting Baltimore in Lemon and Berlin in Lime.

Lemon - ARI Arizona, COL Colorado, OCO Orange County, BAL Baltimore
Lime - HON Honolulu, NOLA New Orleans, SJS San Jose, BER Berlin

Teams left: Sarasota, Yellowknife, Chicago, Cape Town, Austin, New York

Sarasota and Yellowknife go to Lemon, Lime gets to add Cape Town and Chicago.

Lemon - ARI Arizona, COL Colorado, OCO Orange County, BAL Baltimore,  SAR Sarasota,  YKW Yellowknife

Lime - HON Honolulu, NOLA New Orleans, SJS San Jose, BER Berlin,  CTC Cape Town,  CHI Chicago

Now to split up Austin and New York, I’m going to put New York in Lime, it just feels right somehow?

And our conference realignment looks like:


Lemon - ARI Arizona, COL Colorado, OCO Orange County, BAL Baltimore,  SAR Sarasota,  YKW Yellowknife,  AUS Austin

Lime - HON Honolulu, NOLA New Orleans, SJS San Jose, BER Berlin,  CTC Cape Town,  CHI Chicago,  NYS New York


I don't know how substantially different these conferences play out, I don't think anyone is really happy about it or sad about it, it's just different for the sake of it.


Bonus! Golden Teams!

With this data, we can also see a fun thing which I’m calling “Golden Teams”. These are the teams that got it done the hard way, winning all three games to get themselves the trophy.
A third of our seasons have Golden teams, and in chronological order they are:

S28 YKW Yellowknife
S29 NYS New York
S31 HON Honolulu
S32 NYS New York
S33 BAL Baltimore
S45 AUS Austin
S47 ARI Arizona

Big props to all of these squads who defied the playoff odds!

RE: Team Performance in the Current Sim Era - Brad Woof - 05-09-2024

Doghouse vindicated

RE: Team Performance in the Current Sim Era - Pvtpenne - 05-09-2024

(05-09-2024, 01:22 PM)lemonoppy Wrote: I don't know how substantially different these conferences play out, I don't think anyone is really happy about it or sad about it, it's just different for the sake of it.

False, I'm happy about it

RE: Team Performance in the Current Sim Era - Pat - 05-09-2024

Oh god. As a long-time CTC/PHI player and GM, why must CHI continue to be in the same division? It doesn't matter how good or bad either team is, Chicago has always been PHI/CTC's kryptonite.

RE: Team Performance in the Current Sim Era - lemonoppy - 05-09-2024

(05-09-2024, 01:46 PM)Pat Wrote: Oh god. As a long-time CTC/PHI player and GM, why must CHI continue to be in the same division? It doesn't matter how good or bad either team is, Chicago has always been PHI/CTC's kryptonite.

This was on purpose after this comment:
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RE: Team Performance in the Current Sim Era - Pat - 05-09-2024

(05-09-2024, 01:48 PM)lemonoppy Wrote:
(05-09-2024, 01:46 PM)Pat Wrote: Oh god. As a long-time CTC/PHI player and GM, why must CHI continue to be in the same division? It doesn't matter how good or bad either team is, Chicago has always been PHI/CTC's kryptonite.

This was on purpose after this comment:
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Haha. See! All my homies hate playing against Chicago.

RE: Team Performance in the Current Sim Era - Ulaire - 05-09-2024

How dare you break up AZ NOLA rivalry

RE: Team Performance in the Current Sim Era - zaynzk - 05-09-2024

I cannot believe @Lime is beefing with @Lemon

RE: Team Performance in the Current Sim Era - UptownCord - 05-09-2024

New York Silverbacks most golden team.

Golden Banana confirmed?

RE: Team Performance in the Current Sim Era - UptownCord - 05-09-2024

Orange County Otters? More like Old Sim Otters