01-04-2021, 12:08 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-04-2021, 12:09 PM by Cincyfan96.)
4) Sim gonna sim, indeed! Out in Berlin, that saying has been heard loud and clear this year, as the simulation flipped us the bird for the first third of Season 26. Looking at the 0-5 start, it'd be easy to think Berlin just wasn't ready to start the season this year. Maybe we didn't have the players, the strategies, or the mindset in place for winning football? Maybe we needed better equipment, harder training regimens, or have our inexperienced, young head coach give up play calling duties (looking at you, Zac Taylor), but something here was clearly wrong! The truth is, while Berlin was by no means the best roster in the league, the sim simmed us HARD. In sim testing after the games with the files used for those games, Berlin was favored in each of its first 5 games (Remember, 5 losses), and sometimes it wasn't even close. The odds of being blown out by New York, Philly, and Sarasota were between 2-8% each, and our odds of winning against Yellow Knife stands out at a whopping 78%. The joke began at this point in the Berlin locker room that we might want to start testing our win percentages DOWN to 25% or so since that team clearly was being favored in our matchups...
A season where many had picked Berlin to be a surprise breakout team due to (ironically) extremely high sim test rates in the preseason where Berlin inexplicably tested far better than their expected results for several big name simulation experts quickly turned into conversation around potential tanking and looking ahead to the next season before the year was even a third of the way completed. This became particularly obvious during PT #2 - You Sit On A Throne of Lies. Practically every other article revolved around Berlin's surprisingly horrific start to the season, as we were on route to surrendering a record number of points allowed and yards allowed, and had nothing pretty much nothing going for us.
Thankfully, this was the end of the ridiculously bad luck in Berlin this season. Sure, there were tough plays here and there that saw us lose some close games, but that's par for the course in any league, live or simulation. To go from 0-5 to 6-9 this season, with a chance to end 7-9 this week if we can pull off one more win, is a huge improvement that shows the Fire Salamanders were not out of their league, despite an 0-5 record to start the season. A 7-9 final record would be a 7-4 finish to the season, on pace with the majority of playoff teams over that stretch, making one wonder what kind of damage this team could have done had it not been for a truly horrific start to the season.
Looking at the overall odds of Berlin beginning the year 0-5, when taking the cumulative odds of losing each matchup, the chances of an 0-5 start came out to roughly 0.5% That means that only one time in TWO HUNDRED would such a lousy start happen. The odds of 3-2, 4-1, even 5-0 were FAR higher than 0-5, leaving one to again think about what the conversation around Berlin would look like had this initial hole not been dug. Also, adding insult to injury, the way in which we lost these games was even less likely. As I mentioned earlier, being blown out in three of our games only happened once or twice every one hundred times in a few of these games, so by my rough estimations the odds of us losing all four games AND being blown out in two of those games was somewhere in the range of 0.0002%. It is this writer's estimation that that qualifies as being SCREWED OVER by the sim! That 0-5 start transformed a season that could very realistically have ended with playoff football into one that was over before it hardly even began.
While there are many reasons to be excited about the new simulation - new archetypes, skills, and far more opportunity to create a unique build and character experience - I think in Berlin we're just looking forward to a fresh start with a sim that (hopefully) doesn't hate us quite so much! There has been some lamenting for sure as we consider ourselves to be in a prime position to take on the league in the seasons to come, and the new simulation has the potential to put a wrench in the predictability of that progress, but the prospect of a fresh start without the baggage that this simulation has held for the winning prospects in Berlin is more than worth it to me. Everyone will be scrambling to learn this new sim, but at least it has not proven to despise us (yet). Here's hoping for many seasons of success in Berlin as we learn and master the new sim - hopefully it will pick on someone else for a change!
A season where many had picked Berlin to be a surprise breakout team due to (ironically) extremely high sim test rates in the preseason where Berlin inexplicably tested far better than their expected results for several big name simulation experts quickly turned into conversation around potential tanking and looking ahead to the next season before the year was even a third of the way completed. This became particularly obvious during PT #2 - You Sit On A Throne of Lies. Practically every other article revolved around Berlin's surprisingly horrific start to the season, as we were on route to surrendering a record number of points allowed and yards allowed, and had nothing pretty much nothing going for us.
Thankfully, this was the end of the ridiculously bad luck in Berlin this season. Sure, there were tough plays here and there that saw us lose some close games, but that's par for the course in any league, live or simulation. To go from 0-5 to 6-9 this season, with a chance to end 7-9 this week if we can pull off one more win, is a huge improvement that shows the Fire Salamanders were not out of their league, despite an 0-5 record to start the season. A 7-9 final record would be a 7-4 finish to the season, on pace with the majority of playoff teams over that stretch, making one wonder what kind of damage this team could have done had it not been for a truly horrific start to the season.
Looking at the overall odds of Berlin beginning the year 0-5, when taking the cumulative odds of losing each matchup, the chances of an 0-5 start came out to roughly 0.5% That means that only one time in TWO HUNDRED would such a lousy start happen. The odds of 3-2, 4-1, even 5-0 were FAR higher than 0-5, leaving one to again think about what the conversation around Berlin would look like had this initial hole not been dug. Also, adding insult to injury, the way in which we lost these games was even less likely. As I mentioned earlier, being blown out in three of our games only happened once or twice every one hundred times in a few of these games, so by my rough estimations the odds of us losing all four games AND being blown out in two of those games was somewhere in the range of 0.0002%. It is this writer's estimation that that qualifies as being SCREWED OVER by the sim! That 0-5 start transformed a season that could very realistically have ended with playoff football into one that was over before it hardly even began.
While there are many reasons to be excited about the new simulation - new archetypes, skills, and far more opportunity to create a unique build and character experience - I think in Berlin we're just looking forward to a fresh start with a sim that (hopefully) doesn't hate us quite so much! There has been some lamenting for sure as we consider ourselves to be in a prime position to take on the league in the seasons to come, and the new simulation has the potential to put a wrench in the predictability of that progress, but the prospect of a fresh start without the baggage that this simulation has held for the winning prospects in Berlin is more than worth it to me. Everyone will be scrambling to learn this new sim, but at least it has not proven to despise us (yet). Here's hoping for many seasons of success in Berlin as we learn and master the new sim - hopefully it will pick on someone else for a change!
![[Image: Fq9564iX0AAzNOH?format=png&name=small]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fq9564iX0AAzNOH?format=png&name=small)
![[Image: IgoYKoh.gif]](https://i.imgur.com/IgoYKoh.gif)
