5. It's time to air my dirty laundry, but sort of hide it deep within the Offseason Task so only the most dedicated users will find it. Maybe it will go unnoticed completely, but this seems a good as time as any to get something off my chest and cash in for some sweet TPE. Back in March of 2020, the famous S22 draft was about to happen, and I was working furiously to make some trades happen to change the community perspective of the team. At the time, I went by the username steelsound and was the the GM for the Chicago Butchers. We were a pretty dumpster fire team, and were running the team as GM's with basically no prior sim or GM experience. The sim engine was pretty favorable to batch simming at the time, so I would spend nights often running 20-30 thousand simulations trying to tweak the team to see if we could get out of out bottom-dwelling existence. By my calculation, there was no way this team was competing for anything other than the 1st overall pick for the entirety of my player's career from the moment I got there, and the team wasn't inspiring a lot of people to want to play there, so something had to change. I thought that if Chicago could pull into a 5-7 win position, putting them solidly in the middle of the conference, players that might otherwise not want to join the Butchers could see themselves being the piece needed to push the team into contention. I was willing to sacrifice a few seasons to do it as well, since our QB at the time was well over 1000 TPE but entering their first season of regression, and our DSFL draftee was a suboptimal earner, reducing his chances of leading the team to the top of the conference. My player was set to start regression in S22, and our star RB and co-GM kept floating the idea in our GM chat about testing FA waters, despite me only having come on recently. With the prospect the team was going to hit another rebuild, I made some drastic trades that I would later hubristically defend in the hopes that the S21 season finish would be enough to swing a bit of league perspective before we lost 3 of our top players to regression/FA and once again were bottom of the conference. I had in the back of my mind as well that around S25 or S26 I would create as QB for the team, which would offset our starter's regression and enable a smoother transition through the rebuild phase. Another intent was to stagger the QB cycles between ourselves and other teams in the league; something I had noticed was a lot of the QB's around the league were going to be replaced near the same time, and teams would be fighting each other for prospects in thin draft class years. If we could stagger ourselves and cement a high earner at the position, we could employ a "zig where others zag" draft approach for seasons to come and take advantage of teams being forced to draft for need at the most important position, while we were set for good. The nail in the coffin was thinking the S22 draft class was large enough that a 1st round pick was inconsequential, more so than the impact in the short term winning would have on our league perspective, while also thinking picks 2-8 could have the same impact as that 1st rounder (looking back at the scouting file I made there are 90 players with 100-200 TPE). I sold out for a few measly percentage points in the winrate column, and the whole thing came crumbling down. The community destroyed the trade and the war room lost all confidence in me. Shortly after, I retired my player and quit the league. In hindsight, it was pretty childish, but my ego wouldn't let go the hours I had committed to testing in the face of community criticism. A couple years later, I am back, hoping to reforge a better reputation for myself, now that I've had time to reflect on where I went wrong and how I could have done better.
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