*ISFL Coaching Trees S47

[lemonoppy]

My feeling on Coaching Trees is that they’re pretty arbitrary. People put coaches and players under a “head coach” root in whatever they want to fit a narrative that’d be fun. In the ISFL, coaching trees are even more nebulous and hard to define, especially without experience and time in that War Room, it’s pretty impossible to figure out how much a GM’s influence stays throughout GM changes.

I’m sure that some GMs are more influential than others on the team philosophy, for example, in Arizona, we’re all Crunk-pilled and have been since Crunk and Z-Whiz took over at the start of the New Sim Era in S27. Does that translate to someone like Sylphreni and iStegosauruz on Colorado through a line going through SchwarzNarr -> Tesla -> SwankyPants31 -> Ephenssta -> steg?

However, it really is a fun exercise and I thought it’d be pretty simple (it mostly is) but it got way more convoluted than I thought.

I think I’ve got an accurate forest of GM Trees, and we’ve got a bunch to go through, some easy, some not. Let’s go through the GM Trees of the ISFL and see if we can’t find some fun things to talk about!

A GM Tree is a line from a GM to another. Trees are created when a new pair of GMs join together to lead a team, and a branch is created when one of those GMs steps down and another one joins. The new GM will be added to the Tree of the GM that stays.

It’ll be easy, we’ll go through the easy ones before getting to the hard ones.

S2-7 Baltimore and Chicago Maintenance

So we can see this is a simple tree with 5 GMs. Hendrix and Noppadet start the tree as they step in to GM Baltimore in S2. Noppadet steps down and ItsJustBarry replaces them in S3, and since Hendrix remained, Barry is part of the Hendrix tree. Barry and Hendrix GM Baltimore until the end of S7.

Now, it gets a touch more complicated since Valor joins Barry as GM in S19 of the… Chicago Butchers!

Since these two are taking over a team that has the GM positions vacated by Jiggly and Toasty (lasting just the single S18 season), and because Valor hasn’t been a GM elsewhere, Valor is partnered with Barry, not not a branch. Barry steps down and steelsound steps in for S20.

These two stop GMing as Jiggly and MrStennett take over in S21 and the tree ends.

The No Branchers

Some of our GM trees don’t actually extend past the original two GMs who took over the job.

We’ve got 4 pairs of GMs that just lived and died together:

Pat and Cody from S26-S34 on CTC
Incitehysteria and Noble from S1-S2 on Colorado (kind of because hysteria steps down and Noble GMs alone for one more season before calling it quits)
Nunncoepi and iseedoug take on Baltimore from S14-S17
Broken and evryday are one season GMs during Baltimore S1.

We’re also introducing a wrinkle, see those stars on nunncoepi and iseedoug? That means that they won an Ultimus as GMs!

The Modern Crash

I’m really liking these easy ones because I know that there are a pair of super complicated ones to come.

This is the “Modern Cape Town Crash” tree, the one after they rebranded, I believe. Negs and Luciddreams take over from the Pat and Cody duo from above, and move the team to Cape Town.

Lucid steps down after S40 and since S41, it’s been the negs and lcc duo. We can see that they’ve won an Ultimus and also that the squares are now coloured.

Coloured squares will be more prevalent as we get closer to modern ISFL and they denote that the GM has a DSFL connection, having GM’d for a DSFL team previously. Negs and LCC are Norfolk alumni, while Lucid is a London alumnus.

And if we can figure out GMs’ DSFL connections, you know we’re going to do some charting on DSFL team -> ISFL success, and have a calculator where you can select a team and see who’s the best GM to come out of there.

New Era Otters

I don’t have all of these titled since I don’t actually know all that much about old-head ISFL history, but I’m trying my best!

Here we’ve got the Orange County Otters as they move into the New Sim Era. Bassoon and Mori take charge as we change DDPSF editions and this tree goes from S27-36. This is also the first time I’ve got a “Tree Winrate”, this win rate will appear on GMs who have three or more branches coming after them. The win rate is the sum of the total wins and losses of their branches.

Tree win rate is a bit flawed, it’ll include some of the seasons that they were involved in (since they were co-GMing) and double count some seasons, but it’s kind of the best we have without me actually doing a TON more work to cut out seasons based on preceding seasons. It’s an “accurate-ish” indicator of how well that this tree has done.

And following the double step-down of ThunderTitan and bowl0, we’ve got Slate and Beck taking over, with Cord taking over for Slate starting in S43 (my draft class!).

Frost good lmap

Another easy tree, we’ve got the S22 to the current S47 Sarasota Sailfish!

Frostbite and Raindelay get to take an expansion team to Sarasota, and they do pretty well for themselves! Frost wins a couple championships in his 9 championships before retiring and we have the very long reigning abh89 (S31-now) with Fronk. The abh/Fronk connection has a double as after hiring Fronk and Fronk retiring, Fronk is back as Sarasota leadership.

NOLA REBUILD

NOLA makes the playoffs and we’ve got the GM tree of the rebuild!

Mobi and Jaywe88 take over for a team that goes through some turbulent waters, but we’ve got some top users in there who have taken the team to a playoff berth! Hopefully AZ wins tonight. This better not age badly, I’m not going back to edit it.

The Bad Hawk Years

Baltimore runs into a bad stretch from S18-S27 as Duilio and Scorp take over for the 0 branch nunncoepi and iseedoug. This squad never really heads anywhere and as the new sim change happens, we get a full change over by frick_nasty and Hallmonitor.

The Molarpistol

Okay, so the preceding trees were pretty easy. Simple and fun, but the problem is, the rest of the league has had… a ton of change over and connected GMing. This is probably what a real NFL GM tree looks like more.

Lets start with the glow up of the Hawks, and the frick_nasty/Hallmonitor duo.

This Halllmonitor tree is a bit complicated, and we’re just gonna look at half of it before we combine it with the other half. This stat stuff is pretty misleading as we see the HallMonitor tree at .516 compared to the .328 of Duilio, but as you can see, the percentage gets higher and higher as we get further away from Hallmonitor. The win rate of this tree is all based off of the start of the dude_man era in S39, where Baltimore starts to win games rather than be a basement team.

The other half of this tree is connected through SwankyPants who’s connected to the Colorado tree, but also through the other half of the Hallmonitor duo, frick_nasty. But it doesn’t end there, because frick_nasty is also connected to…. Early OCO, the entire Berlin Tree, early 20s NOLA, and also the current NYS leadership.

In S25, Sylphreni and thevoiceless creator took over for… frick_nasty and woelkers. Woelkers is hidden right now because otherwise we’d have way too much info on the screen.

We can see that Sylphreni line following down as we get to Swanky and Ephenssta, who hired Steg, the current COL GM. We should have Jenni there as well, as she’s taking over for ElectricTree. This looks simple enough, but this is only S25-current COL, let’s walk over to the left and unhide the frick_nasty and Woelkers section.

So, imagine the last chart, but connected to this chart through Hallmonitor, and then imagine that we also have a ton more boxes through the Juosu and speculadora ones being unhidden, it'd be chaos! We'll swap between views as we go, because otherwise it gets to be a bit much.

This is the basically the other half of the COL leadership, and as a bonus, since Woelkers and Bwestfield started the NYS expansion team, it includes them too!

Molarpistols is the progenitor of the largest tree, in fact, only 44/181 GMs are not connected to Molar in some way or another. Imagine that last tree like I said, and that this is only a quarter of the super directly related to Molar GMs, there are like 60 who are connected tangentially!

The main Molarpistols off-shoots are the Speculadora/Juosu/bwestfield trees, and we’ve already looked at westfield, so how about Juosu and Spec next?

This is the Jousu tree! Very manageable once you take out the other two branches. Through this tree we can see a pretty dismal win percentage, this tree is essentially the NOLA pre-rebuild tree, and while they didn’t do very well, NOLA looks to be in much better hands now.

Ah, Speculadora, one of the candidates for GOAT GM and the only serious non-AZ contender.

Spec won 5 Ultimus as GM, a time of OCO dominance in the early seasons of the league. Like westfield having the NYS expansion team under his GM Tree, Spec has the Berlin tree kind of related through Laser, a direct Spec branch having co-GM’d with Dewalt, who founded the Fire Salamanders.

It’s also through Laser->Jeffie that we can connect the Molar tree to the other tree, with Jeffie having worked with Tuba on Yellowknife.

On the left side of the tree we also have a connection to the early Chicago Butchers. This section is mostly standalone, centered by Jiggly but also having a connection to Spec with a pair of GMs who GM’d with Spec.

The Ugly Monster Tree

This tree kinda sucks from a perspective that it’s big, unwieldy, and that early league people were just kinda bonkers with how they swapped teams and stuff. It’s hard to pinpoint specific nuclei for this tree, unlike how we could reference things around Molarpistols previously.



This is the entire tree, just a mess of people GMing and then leaving to GM for another team. Imagine I connected the Molar tree through Jeffie and TubaDeus.

I’m going to try and break down the mess through looking at how we got each of the current ISFL teams.

Alright, Arizona up!

This is the current GM tree of the Arizona Outlaws. The tree spans Baltimore S8-S12, when slm and manicmav GM before unicorn jumps in for manicmav during S13. In S21, Unicorn takes over for the pair of SwagSloth and Moosecop and is joined by Drizzy as a single season GM.

Drizzy lasts a single season, as does Isidore in the following, and then XQCFamous makes it through 2 seasons GMing before Z-Whiz is hired. Z-Whiz takes over from here, with Unicorn leaving the GM spot right after hiring Whiz, and the Crunk/Z-Whiz duo is born. From here it’s a straight shot, a few GMs as each GM does about 8-10 seasons of service, until we’re at a point where it’s me, lemonoppy, and Zeagle as the AZ GMs.

SLM themselves has a positive win record at 56-41, but the each of Unicorn/Isidore/XQCFamous have negative winrates, changed with the Z-Whiz hiring.

We’ve got the Chicago leadership here, connected through the Bayley/slm/Oles trio. This stuff gets super confusing as we see people connected so often in the early seasons.

Oles, GMing for the Philly Liberty (CTC) since S2-S7, found himself leading the Chicago Butchers expansion with Muford. Chicago went through… a very rough patch and changes, before Bayley and Muford teamed up in S22 to lead the team through a much more stable of a GM structure. Bayley and CC have led a pretty consistent leadership and currently we are at the Painted/FirstFray section of Chicago history.

Time for Austin! Austin history is less crazy, with Adam S and JKortesi starting the expansion team, and connected to the huge mess through the Adam S and Bayley connection. Adam S also has connections to the early Arizona teams through DeathOnReddit, teams that did not do very well at all.

The Austin leadership is a pretty straight shot from Kortesi the media grader king downwards to the pair of PugWalrus and Mooty that we love so much. Austin has been a pretty consistent team the whole time, and it’s nice to have a simple-ish tree here.

San Jose is an easy one, ckroyal had been the GM since the S1 founding until very recently, S45 being his last season. CK has had a few co-GMs since then, with Muford popping in during the early seasons connecting him to the main GM tree trunk.

This is the main messy tree after being simplified a bit, it’s still pretty bad but maybe easier to parse.

Starting with Yellowknife, we’ve got a pretty easy through line between the current Tuba/homercrates led squad up til flyeaglesfly, but from there it gets complicated.

Shadyshoelace and flyeaglesfly both led the team after tacking overy from daybe and Whitecornerback, that’s the bottom right blob. Nuck and HFFO are the two who started the team, but they’re so far away from the current squad because flyeaglesfly is actually a product of the Oles tree, having joined Oles in S17, the 2nd Butchers season.

The HFFO tree actually is centered more on the NOLA/Las Vegas Legion squad because HFFO took the expansion team job in S2 there. The HFFO line dies out relatively soon, at the end of S5, just 4 seasons later. Bovovovo is the one who continues the LVL for a bit before we end up with a few separate trees trying to finally bring the team to success.

We can also see the Honolulu GM Tree on the right hand side of the picture, with Raven and ADwyer starting the expansion team in S22, ADwyer retires after two seasons and Gucci is the main head of the current Honolulu iteration.

Up in the top-centre, we’ve got BWIII, 37thchamber, and Vander Jones giving it a go for Philly, but their run was ended after 8 seasons and a fresh squad took over (Fordhammer and slm which turned into Hallmonitor and goodvsevil1275 the season after).

All in all, I’m really surprised at the amount of turnover and just mess there was in the early seasons of the sim. So many core people just took turns swapping teams and falling in and out with each other. If you look at the team GM trees now, they’re pretty isolated from each other, with a clear line of succession and better planning of the future happening.

DSFL to ISFL

Of course, we can also do a fun look at how each DSFL team produces ISFL GMs! This isn’t an exact thing, sometimes ISFL GMs go back to DSFL GMing before heading back on up and such. But we don’t care so much about that since we’re all about driving content.

This table shows the total wins, losses, and win percentage for all GMs based on where they’re affiliated with. For example, LtHudz is affiliated with Minnesota since he GM’d there before Honolulu, but for me, who wasn't a DSFL GM even though I played for Minnesota, I am an Independent.
I think most of it is noise, and the win percentages really bear that out, but what’s fun to see is that London has a monster 55% win rate and has had 0 Ultimus wins, but Portland with its 2nd place 53% win rate has 9 Ultimuses, training only Minnesota who has 12 but also three times as many seasons GM’d by alumni.

Minnesota GMs are, however, most likely to win GMotY, kinda fitting that they win an award but not the championship itself, based on my time in the DSFL ;-;

Anyway, if you want to see where you rank on your alumni’s board, you can go to this sheet and start punching in some team names!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...sp=sharing

[goodvsevil1275]

im just happy to be included. this looks like it took some serious work to put together and is super interesting. thanks for sharing

[br0_0ker]

holy crap dude

[Chicken Lips]

MIN goated

[lordcoolcats]

This is worthy of a Booyah.

[zaynzk]

Mildly surprising no London GM has ever won an Ultimus

[Thor]

Man takes my suggested idea, butchers it up, calls it arbitrary asks a bunch of people to help with data collection and doesn't even give a shoutout :sadge:

[lemonoppy]

Man takes my suggested idea, butchers it up, calls it arbitrary asks a bunch of people to help with data collection and doesn't even give a shoutout :sadge:

There's no proof of this

[Assistant to the POR GM]

@Baron1898 just give him the award

[UptownCord]

Mildly surprising no London GM has ever won an Ultimus

I mean they've only managed to win the Ultimini twice. They should probably focus on that first.