Prompt 2 Wrote:2. Tell us about your draft class. Is there anything that makes it special in comparison to other classes? Where did your fellow draftees land, how are they doing? Did anyone turn out to be an unexpected steal of that draft based on what you know today? Do you think anyone in your draft class will become a hall of famer? If you’re new to the league, how do you think your class will do? Where do you think people will get drafted to?
While my active player is from S35, I still have a lot more conceptual association with the giant S22 class. With those players' careers hitting their ends, I'm going to try and put that aside to focus on my recreation class.
My brief perusal of the TPE tracker shows 43 S35 players so far, with 17 having broken the fairly typical new player mark of 57 TPE. 5 of those 17 players created their accounts in 2022 with the other 12 being older recreates. All of them (along with the 26 other players) were claimed on waivers but naturally haven't show much of what the future is going to look like otherwise.
Besides the natural interest from being in the draft class, I'm especially interested in what it's going to look like since we're exactly at the 2 year anniversary of the r/nfl recruitment post of 2020 that led to the giant S22 draft class. I said in my article on the S22 draft class retention that circumstances seem well-aligned to post another recruitment post and try to pull in a bunch of new members. I have no idea if that's the plan of the recruitment team or not, but the weekend after the super bowl being right after the conclusion of the ultimus and kicking off the ISFL offseason seems like it might be able to strike while the iron is again hot. It's entirely possible that I'm too optimistic with my guesses though - the covid lockdowns of early 2020 were doubtlessly a factor in the activity of the S22 class, but it's also a factor that's hard to measure or predict. I feel that it has to be unlikely that we see another 200 players recruited for my new draft class, but I have to say that it isn't impossible given what we've seen in the past. I think that it would probably be good for league health to get an influx of new accounts who are interested enough to stick around, but I admittedly don't keep a close enough eye on the ISFL competitive balance to know if that would be a good thing or not at this point. The last giant draft class led to two different expansions and a resulting shakeup in which teams did well, but the activity check posts have been showing a downtrend in the last 2-3 months in terms of posts. I am definitely quite interested in seeing what would happen if the league could pull off another 150+ player draft class for S35, but I have to assume that it's not likely to happen.
If there isn't a giant influx of recruits, where does the S35 class end up going? Well, S34 had 70 players in total with 59 of them getting past the 57 TPE mark. Only 6 players in the class are at or over the DSFL cap so far, but another 13 are in the 200-249 TPE range. That is a really solid first round in the draft with a good second round behind it. S35 is potentially setting up to be weaker unless we pick up a lot of offseason recreates who perform well (and this is an area where entirely new players can take advantage of rookie tasks to catch up a bit with the trade deadline recreates), but I honestly don't know what the typical balance of trade deadline recreates vs. offseason recreates is. If it's usually something like 1:3 then the S35 class could end up being huge. On the other hand, if it's more like 2:1 then we're looking at maybe being the same size as the S34 class. At this point I'm leaning towards optimistic thinking that we'll be a bigger total size and subsequent impact than the S34 class, but part of that also ends up requiring an evaluation of the ISFL teams and seeing if they can draft impact players rather than backups. Doing that kind of evaluation effectively is looking months into the future, but I'm going to be optimistic and think that the S35 class has the chance to be the most impactful to the overall ISFL in a number of seasons.
Draft Steal (retired S35 CB) - Profile/Update | Wiki
Troen Egghands (retired S22 DE) - Profile | Update | Wiki