Prompt 8 Wrote:Choose a team or player to write about that isn’t your own. What did they do well in the last season? Have they shown any drastic improvements from previous years? What could they do better?
Mark Goodhead definitely had the best year of a young career. Goodhead has shown some amazing growth in the interception and solid growth in passes defensed while still keeping up a decent number of tackles and reducing missed tackles. 7 interceptions isn't far behind the modern-sim record of 9, and to get there in a third year of the player's time at the cornerback position is remarkable. Goodhead does have a bit of an advantage over other third-year CBs due to spending 3 years in the DSFL as a TE before getting called up and swapping to CB. Most players would have a better early career arc if they were allowed to enter the league with over 600 TPE, after all. Given the early starting point, I don't think the team or player can reasonably expect to continue the rate of improvement we've seen in Goodhead's on the field performance so far. And, as a top-10% TPE earner from the S31 class, I don't think there's a high chance of any spike in performance resulting from TPE gain. If anything, I'd say Goodhead's potentially going to be seeing diminishing returns due to getting near the peak of the CB position already. The biggest wildcard to me is that Goodhead still has 3 traits to pick up. Role model (fewer penalties) probably won't show up strongly, especially because if I looked over the right things then Goodhead actually had no penalty yards in S35. Athlete includes "much faster while blitzing," which seems unlikely to be important for Goodhead's coverage corner position, and "slightly faster when catching" which doesn't clearly indicate if that works for PDs/ints or not. More promisingly, though, is competitor and its "more likely to defend passes" text. With 36 in S35 there might not be much room to grow, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on. "Can make more tackles without slowing down" can be relevant too, but given that Goodhead's already at 100 speed, I'm not sure how much of an impact that will be (especially if more PDs means fewer tackles due to fewer receivers needing to be tackled).
Prompt 13 Wrote:Expansion Expansion Expansion! Tell us why you think the league should expand / not expand or include any ideas (in words) for team branding ideas you have or team locations.
I see two reasonable reasons to expand but one strong reason to not expand.
First expand: The ISFL schedule with its 2 7-team leagues is set up to have every team play each team in its conference 2 times and then playing 4 of the 7 cross-conference teams. This can lead to relative advantages for the teams getting to play a weaker cross-conference slate of teams. Expanding by 2 teams, moving to 2 conferences with 2 4-team divisions, and tweaking the schedule would, I think, allow for more schedule parity. We couldn't do it quite as well as the 32 team NFL schedule version, but I think it would increase the parity.
Second expand: More teams would allow more lower-TPE players to be in the ISFL, which I think is more visible/impactful than playing in the DSFL. The DFSL is great as a tool to introduce players, but the roster unpredictability and disruption makes it feel (to me at least) to be less effective in getting people to be committed and trying to improve their player/team. If I remember correctly, only 3-4 S34 rookies were in the ISFL in their first year, though it looks like S35 has 17 of its 93 players in the ISFL now (I'm assuming that the June 16th date is before callups, but I'm not fully sure). So anyway, assuming the goal is to get more active players in the ISFL sooner, then I think expansion would help with that goal.
Don't expand: The number of active players (as measured by the 5 week running average of the number of posts in the activity check thread) has been pretty much flat for the last 6+ months. If we expand without being able to increase the number of active players, more teams are going to need to play lower TPE/inactive players in the ISFL. Using the rough average of 265 actives, moving from 14 to 16 teams changes the average number of actives per team from 18.9 to 16.5 (ignoring the DSFL entirely). A team needs 5 OL and 18 other players to fill all the positions, so the current average of just over that might actually be very much correct after factoring in the DSFL and that some humans play OL too. To me, this is a bigger argument against expansion than the other two collectively are for it.
Draft Steal (retired S35 CB) - Profile/Update | Wiki
Troen Egghands (retired S22 DE) - Profile | Update | Wiki