What happens if 1,000 new players join the league?
This is a completely random thought I had last night and it really intrigued me. The S22 class had about 273 players off a ~1000-upvote post, so it’s not implausible that a 5000+ upvote post could produce a 1000-player class. Perhaps, in an alternate universe, the ill-fated r/gaming push would have garnered this sort of turnout. Let’s say another r/gaming push fares better and produces a large S30 class in the offseason after the S27 season and before S28. Regardless, this is me exercising my prodigious rambling skills about a hypothetical “too much of a good thing” disaster for way too long.
In the first hour, fifty new players have joined. Someone in HO sounds the alarm bells and they begin to panic about what to do. Thankfully for them, they remember this article from a few seasons back. They also quickly realize that they will need a longer offseason to process all these new players, and announce as such, pushing back the start of the S28 games. They recruit the updaters to approve players so that the rookie mentors can focus on getting everyone set through discord.
Meanwhile HO is busy editing archetypes. Why? They need to remove 150 TPE from each of them, otherwise things will get out of hand quickly. More on that later. Instead of players starting with 50 TPE, they will effectively start with -100, or their -150 TPE base plus their 50 TPE start. Since these changes are made to the archetypes themselves, players will still be granted 50 TPE upon creation. Updaters will retroactively enforce these changes on the fifty players who have already been created.
Everybody currently in the DSFL or ISFL gets a 150 TPE boost. Congrats! They also would be required to use all 150 to replenish that lost from the base archetype change. Thus, no stats would have to change. GMs could just go through and add 150 to all the TPE numbers.
Some of these new archetypes are a little ridiculous, but that’s somewhat the point. Here’s the speed WR base:
Strength: 25
Agility: 30
Intelligence: 30
Speed: 50
Hands: 30
Endurance: 50
But with 50 starting TPE, it could easily be this:
Strength: 25
Agility: 30
Intelligence: 30
Speed: 60
Hands: 50
Endurance: 50
A bit more reasonable. Let’s not mention the QBs.
At the end of hour two, an additional two hundred players have joined, bringing the class total to a near-record 250 already. And, remarkably, about 80 of them are already inactive. My rule of thumb is that one-third of players go inactive immediately after creating, one-half of them are inactive by the DSFL draft, and two-thirds are inactive by the time they are drafted into the ISFL. I don’t know if this is still accurate and I will not do the requisite work to investigate it. But this rule of thumb suggests that an influx of 650-700 active players will come over the next few days. Ideally, those players would all receive teams quickly to improve retention. You would also expect to have about 500 players still active by the start of the season. Those are the players that have to be roughly penciled in to starting positions, and the other 150-200 can have backup slots, with the 300 players that were always inactive able to fill holes.
Unfortunately, to take 500 players and start all of them would require at least 25 new teams, taking into account players currently in the DSFL. Expanding the DSFL to 36 or so teams would work, yes, but it would require two or three straight seasons of gargantuan contractions immediately following it - 36 to 24, perhaps, then 24 to 16, then 16 to 12, and finally back down to the normal 8. Plus, a draft class with 300-350 active players entering the ISFL would also force another expansion, possibly to 20 or more teams, that would be unsustainable as the mega-class fades into inactivity. Obviously, these players must be split up between classes. But how? Players can’t just wait around for a few seasons before being drafted. It’s college time.
At the end of hour three, the class totals 400 players. A college football committee entirely of former HO members has been assembled, mainly to help decide the small details of how this entirely new league will work. Meanwhile, HO will try to work out details of simming, updating, etc for the college league. DSFL HO is busy trying to figure out how to integrate this mega-class into their league, and here’s what they decide:
Players from the recruiting class will be able to opt directly into the DSFL S30 class. If they choose to do so, they would be able to use their old archetype’s base, plus their spent 50 TPE, for fairness. It would be a 150 TPE gift, but they would not choose how to use it.
Players who do not opt into the DSFL will go into the college league, at 50 TPE. When they reach 150 TPE, or finish their fourth year in college, or upgrade any attribute more than 5 above the “old archetype” base, they will be automatically entered into the next DSFL draft. They can also declare for the DSFL draft whenever they wish.
All of these will be intended to keep the college league balanced, while enabling a steady stream into the DSFL. And in the DSFL, the active players will all enter at 150 TPE while inactive players will play four years in college, graduate, and enter the DSFL below 150 TPE. This will ensure that active players are able to succeed in the DSFL, but that inactives will still exist to round out DSFL rosters. The final requirement will prevent wildly asymmetrical builds.
By the end of hour four, 600 players have joined in the class, and the retroactive editing of players to change archetypes is well underway. All players from this class have been changed from (S30) to (R30), signifying that instead of the draft class of S30, they are in the recruiting class of S30. Upon their declaration for the DSFL draft, this will be changed to S30, or S31, or S32, or whichever the player should choose.
The college committee has cooked up a plan for the foundation of the college league. Since players who skip college and declare for the DSFL draft will get 150 TPE, they decide to have only ten teams, each with roughly twenty-five active players. This assumes a roughly fifty-fifty split between the DSFL declarees and the college declarees, perhaps found from a survey of a hundred random users. But since DSFL is an opt-in, none of the inactive players will join the S30 class! My aforementioned rule of thumb suggests that roughly 600 players would still be active at the time of the DSFL declaration. Thus, the S30 class entering the DSFL would consist of 300 players, probably 250 actives by the time of the draft. And the R30 class entering the college league would contain 700 players, with 250 actives and a whopping 450 inactives.
So how exactly does one simply start a ten-team league from scratch? There’s precedent for this. Before S3, the six-team DSFL was founded. League administrators did not struggle to find people to fill GM jobs. As is customary, they announced six DSFL GMs and allowed those GMs to select their own Co-GMs. The league is much, much larger now, and our hypothetical college committee would not have much or any trouble finding ten GMs.
In my eyes, the biggest problem is the abbreviated schedule. When the DSFL applications went out, the S2 season was still underway. The chosen DSFL GMs had an entire offseason, plus the tail end of a season, to scout and get to know a ~50-member class. For the new college GMs, even lengthening the offseason by one week barely helped, as league management has put in work over the past few seasons to shorten the offseason as much as they could. And they have the unenviable task of scouting a class with 300+ active members!
This is an impossible task. Some things have to go.
Branding: This seems like the easiest thing to cut. Sometimes the branding process can hold up team hirings, announcements, and even scouting. For a college league, we can just use real college teams. For familiarity, the college committee could look to limit it to teams that have recently been ranked for a certain number of weeks. Then GMs simply have to pick their favorite college team. It’s not ideal, but it works.
Dispersion Draft: Prior to the creation of the DSFL, NSFL teams trimmed their roster and sent the extras into the developmental league, where they entered a draft with all free agents. Here, however, this is a pretty obvious cut. Not only are all current DSFL players above the 150 TPE college limit, but the young league will already have such a massive overload of players from R30 that adding any more would be useless.
Strategy Setting/Sim Testing: Whaaaat? This seems the most outrageous. But keep in mind, all of these GMs are completely new, running off a short offseason, and have to function as rookie mentors to their teams as well as GMs since all 1000 players in the class are brand new. From another perspective, most of the teams’ strategies would be similar, for instance high run rates, since all teams are fairly low in TPE and have actives at most positions. Perhaps strat testing could be added back a few weeks into the season once things settle down, but it’s a fairly inconsequential loss at the start of the year.
Entry Draft: Double whaaat? How does this make any sense? How can you make teams without a draft? Let me explain.
The college committee decides to have two phases of player acquisition, to ease the burden of scouting. The first is a ten-round parity draft. To prevent grossly unbalanced teams, GMs will be allowed to pick among the hundred best prospects, following a snake draft. This draft is not very consequential, allocating just one third of the prospects. After the parity draft, roughly 200 active players remain unassigned.
The second is the active assignment phase. Still-undrafted players with a recent login date will be broken into position groups and randomly assigned to teams. After this, every team will have 30 active players at roughly even positional groupings and thus a full lineup.
The third is the inactive assignment phase. Every other player will have their rights randomly assigned to a team, but will not actually join that team unless the GM specifically signs them. They will not receive a rookie contract and they will not be eligible for depth chart placement. This is a little weird, I’ll admit, but there doesn’t seem like a good way to assign 400 inactive players to ten teams that are already full. Plus, it allows for added flexibility. If a sudden roster hole opens up on one team, that team’s GMs can reach into their team’s inactive pool and sign a replacement. And if an inactive member suddenly returns to the site, they already have a team waiting for them.
This isn’t an ideal method of player assignment by any means, and if future classes are large enough to let the college league survive, it would probably be changed. I would imagine a traditional draft or a recruiting-type system would be selected.
By the end of the first day, 800 players have joined the class. I imagine that, by now, the college committee has received four or five slam-dunk college GM applications, but without any of the twenty GM slots having been officially filled, they set up a scouting survey to expedite the drafting process.
Unfortunately, by this point, there is likely a backlog of several hundred unapproved players. 800 players in 12 hours is simply ridiculous, and GMs and HO have been working full time to answer questions and edit player pages to the new archetypes. Luckily for them, the recruitment post has begun to slip down the ranks on reddit, and the flow of players begins to slow. Additionally, as some members of the 1000-player class become more familiar with the league, they begin to answer each others’ questions. Things are settling down. The player backlog is decreasing.
By the end of the second day, 950 players have joined. The college committee has set up the draft declaration/DSFL opt-in thread, and over two hundred players have responded to it. Additionally, they have chosen the ten college GMs, and their co-GM searches are well underway. At this point, the college committee could probably be disbanded, but they’ll stick around to help ensure that everyone who wants to be in the DSFL is, and everyone who wants to be in college is.
With college pretty much set, it’s time to look at the other two leagues. The DSFL will welcome an S30 class that consists of 250-300 active players, and the ISFL will receive roughly 150-200 actives and 100 inactives. I firmly believe that the DSFL should rarely change in size, and that most drastic changes to the player base should be handled with ISFL expansion. But 250 is a mind-boggling number, and will be followed by multiple only slightly smaller classes. Actually, let’s go through that. Here’s what the classes should look like at the start of the first season for this mega-class:
Total new players: 1000
Total active: 500
S30: 250 active
R30 (S31-S34): 250 active, 500 inactive
It’s hard to estimate when actives will declare for the DSFL from the college league. Obviously, all inactives will join the S33 class, sending a huge wave of low-quality players into the DSFL. (On second thought, perhaps 60 TPE or so could be required for DSFL eligibility, trimming the vast majority of the inactives.) Let’s break down the distribution here.
One year in college (R30, S31): I could see many people look to try the college experience just a little bit, but proceed normally with their career.
Two years in college (R30, S32): I imagine most of the uber-competitive users would land in this class. They’d use their freshman year in college to get to the 150 TPE cap. Some people would intentionally tank their predictions to get just 1 extra TPE from 149 to 150. And then after the DSFL draft, they would begin earning as much as they could, potentially reaching 250-300 TPE before even entering the DSFL, which now caps at 400 TPE.
Three years in college (R30, S33): I don’t think many active players would choose this option. Almost everyone would have hit the 150 TPE cap by their third year, and if you’re sticking around in college without earning, you might as well finish up your eligibility.
Four years in college (R30, S34): All the inactives will be forced into this class, but probably also more actives than the three years option.
I’m a little bit lost here. My best guess is that the R30 actives would break roughly 30-30-10-30 among the S31-34 classes, but this is nothing more than speculation. And future R31, R32, etc classes could complicate the numbers even more. Current recruiting patterns suggest that R32 might be a larger class than the others. Let’s say R32 might be 150 total (90 actives), and the others 80 total (50 actives). And keep in mind R30 consists of 700 players and 300 actives.
(S30 would have 300 players, those who accepted the one-time opt-in to the DSFL.)
S31 would have 30% of R30 actives, or 90 players.
S32 would have 30% of R30 actives, plus 30% of R31 actives, or 105 players.
S33 would have 10% of R30 actives, plus 30% of R31 actives, plus 30% of R32 actives, or 63 players.
S34 would have 30% of R30 actives, all of R30 inactives, plus 10% of R31 actives, plus 30% of R32 actives, plus 30% of R33 actives, or 137 players and 400 inactives.
This is a weird distribution, but it works. Instead of having one gargantuan class followed by a series of normal classes, we have produced one smaller, but still massive class followed by a series of normal classes - and created an entirely new league with new job opportunities for GMs, simmers, updaters, and head office.
Well, about the college league head office - the college committee was intended to be a short-lived transition guide, but in the process of finding a replacement, they realize that twenty of the league’s most competent, ambitious members have just applied for GM or co-GM jobs in the college league. Therefore, they decide to stick around for another season or two.
Let’s go back to the S30 class. If I recall correctly, the 273-member S22 class expanded both leagues by two teams. The S30 class will have 300 members - and all will be active, at least at the time of their DSFL declaration. I would propose that the ISFL and DSFL should both immediately expand. ISFL expansion (to 16 teams) may lead to thin teams for one season, but it will clear out almost all of the capped veteran players in the DSFL, and the subsequent ISFL draft will vacate most of the league. The rule of thumb suggests 250 players would remain active by the DSFL draft, and fitting them on to 8 teams will be tough. The 10-team league would put most S30 rookies into starting jobs.
It’s tough to extrapolate the impact of an additional 150 active players on the ISFL in one draft, but it seems likely that another expansion would be needed, bringing the league to 18 teams, perhaps two seasons after the draft.
The league would need to answer some tough questions after this class. First, is the college league sustainable? Logic says yes, but it would need some contraction and a new player assignment system. Second, what would the new economy look like after injecting $6 billion in rookie contracts? Would new jobs (beyond the new GM and updater jobs) be created, and if so, where?
If you read this far, thanks for doing so! I’m interested to know what you would propose in this situation, where there truly does not seem like a single good option. It’s fun to think about and speculate about, but I do not envy our fictional HOs and college committee.
3091 words
This is a completely random thought I had last night and it really intrigued me. The S22 class had about 273 players off a ~1000-upvote post, so it’s not implausible that a 5000+ upvote post could produce a 1000-player class. Perhaps, in an alternate universe, the ill-fated r/gaming push would have garnered this sort of turnout. Let’s say another r/gaming push fares better and produces a large S30 class in the offseason after the S27 season and before S28. Regardless, this is me exercising my prodigious rambling skills about a hypothetical “too much of a good thing” disaster for way too long.
In the first hour, fifty new players have joined. Someone in HO sounds the alarm bells and they begin to panic about what to do. Thankfully for them, they remember this article from a few seasons back. They also quickly realize that they will need a longer offseason to process all these new players, and announce as such, pushing back the start of the S28 games. They recruit the updaters to approve players so that the rookie mentors can focus on getting everyone set through discord.
Meanwhile HO is busy editing archetypes. Why? They need to remove 150 TPE from each of them, otherwise things will get out of hand quickly. More on that later. Instead of players starting with 50 TPE, they will effectively start with -100, or their -150 TPE base plus their 50 TPE start. Since these changes are made to the archetypes themselves, players will still be granted 50 TPE upon creation. Updaters will retroactively enforce these changes on the fifty players who have already been created.
Everybody currently in the DSFL or ISFL gets a 150 TPE boost. Congrats! They also would be required to use all 150 to replenish that lost from the base archetype change. Thus, no stats would have to change. GMs could just go through and add 150 to all the TPE numbers.
Some of these new archetypes are a little ridiculous, but that’s somewhat the point. Here’s the speed WR base:
Strength: 25
Agility: 30
Intelligence: 30
Speed: 50
Hands: 30
Endurance: 50
But with 50 starting TPE, it could easily be this:
Strength: 25
Agility: 30
Intelligence: 30
Speed: 60
Hands: 50
Endurance: 50
A bit more reasonable. Let’s not mention the QBs.
At the end of hour two, an additional two hundred players have joined, bringing the class total to a near-record 250 already. And, remarkably, about 80 of them are already inactive. My rule of thumb is that one-third of players go inactive immediately after creating, one-half of them are inactive by the DSFL draft, and two-thirds are inactive by the time they are drafted into the ISFL. I don’t know if this is still accurate and I will not do the requisite work to investigate it. But this rule of thumb suggests that an influx of 650-700 active players will come over the next few days. Ideally, those players would all receive teams quickly to improve retention. You would also expect to have about 500 players still active by the start of the season. Those are the players that have to be roughly penciled in to starting positions, and the other 150-200 can have backup slots, with the 300 players that were always inactive able to fill holes.
Unfortunately, to take 500 players and start all of them would require at least 25 new teams, taking into account players currently in the DSFL. Expanding the DSFL to 36 or so teams would work, yes, but it would require two or three straight seasons of gargantuan contractions immediately following it - 36 to 24, perhaps, then 24 to 16, then 16 to 12, and finally back down to the normal 8. Plus, a draft class with 300-350 active players entering the ISFL would also force another expansion, possibly to 20 or more teams, that would be unsustainable as the mega-class fades into inactivity. Obviously, these players must be split up between classes. But how? Players can’t just wait around for a few seasons before being drafted. It’s college time.
At the end of hour three, the class totals 400 players. A college football committee entirely of former HO members has been assembled, mainly to help decide the small details of how this entirely new league will work. Meanwhile, HO will try to work out details of simming, updating, etc for the college league. DSFL HO is busy trying to figure out how to integrate this mega-class into their league, and here’s what they decide:
Players from the recruiting class will be able to opt directly into the DSFL S30 class. If they choose to do so, they would be able to use their old archetype’s base, plus their spent 50 TPE, for fairness. It would be a 150 TPE gift, but they would not choose how to use it.
Players who do not opt into the DSFL will go into the college league, at 50 TPE. When they reach 150 TPE, or finish their fourth year in college, or upgrade any attribute more than 5 above the “old archetype” base, they will be automatically entered into the next DSFL draft. They can also declare for the DSFL draft whenever they wish.
All of these will be intended to keep the college league balanced, while enabling a steady stream into the DSFL. And in the DSFL, the active players will all enter at 150 TPE while inactive players will play four years in college, graduate, and enter the DSFL below 150 TPE. This will ensure that active players are able to succeed in the DSFL, but that inactives will still exist to round out DSFL rosters. The final requirement will prevent wildly asymmetrical builds.
By the end of hour four, 600 players have joined in the class, and the retroactive editing of players to change archetypes is well underway. All players from this class have been changed from (S30) to (R30), signifying that instead of the draft class of S30, they are in the recruiting class of S30. Upon their declaration for the DSFL draft, this will be changed to S30, or S31, or S32, or whichever the player should choose.
The college committee has cooked up a plan for the foundation of the college league. Since players who skip college and declare for the DSFL draft will get 150 TPE, they decide to have only ten teams, each with roughly twenty-five active players. This assumes a roughly fifty-fifty split between the DSFL declarees and the college declarees, perhaps found from a survey of a hundred random users. But since DSFL is an opt-in, none of the inactive players will join the S30 class! My aforementioned rule of thumb suggests that roughly 600 players would still be active at the time of the DSFL declaration. Thus, the S30 class entering the DSFL would consist of 300 players, probably 250 actives by the time of the draft. And the R30 class entering the college league would contain 700 players, with 250 actives and a whopping 450 inactives.
So how exactly does one simply start a ten-team league from scratch? There’s precedent for this. Before S3, the six-team DSFL was founded. League administrators did not struggle to find people to fill GM jobs. As is customary, they announced six DSFL GMs and allowed those GMs to select their own Co-GMs. The league is much, much larger now, and our hypothetical college committee would not have much or any trouble finding ten GMs.
In my eyes, the biggest problem is the abbreviated schedule. When the DSFL applications went out, the S2 season was still underway. The chosen DSFL GMs had an entire offseason, plus the tail end of a season, to scout and get to know a ~50-member class. For the new college GMs, even lengthening the offseason by one week barely helped, as league management has put in work over the past few seasons to shorten the offseason as much as they could. And they have the unenviable task of scouting a class with 300+ active members!
This is an impossible task. Some things have to go.
Branding: This seems like the easiest thing to cut. Sometimes the branding process can hold up team hirings, announcements, and even scouting. For a college league, we can just use real college teams. For familiarity, the college committee could look to limit it to teams that have recently been ranked for a certain number of weeks. Then GMs simply have to pick their favorite college team. It’s not ideal, but it works.
Dispersion Draft: Prior to the creation of the DSFL, NSFL teams trimmed their roster and sent the extras into the developmental league, where they entered a draft with all free agents. Here, however, this is a pretty obvious cut. Not only are all current DSFL players above the 150 TPE college limit, but the young league will already have such a massive overload of players from R30 that adding any more would be useless.
Strategy Setting/Sim Testing: Whaaaat? This seems the most outrageous. But keep in mind, all of these GMs are completely new, running off a short offseason, and have to function as rookie mentors to their teams as well as GMs since all 1000 players in the class are brand new. From another perspective, most of the teams’ strategies would be similar, for instance high run rates, since all teams are fairly low in TPE and have actives at most positions. Perhaps strat testing could be added back a few weeks into the season once things settle down, but it’s a fairly inconsequential loss at the start of the year.
Entry Draft: Double whaaat? How does this make any sense? How can you make teams without a draft? Let me explain.
The college committee decides to have two phases of player acquisition, to ease the burden of scouting. The first is a ten-round parity draft. To prevent grossly unbalanced teams, GMs will be allowed to pick among the hundred best prospects, following a snake draft. This draft is not very consequential, allocating just one third of the prospects. After the parity draft, roughly 200 active players remain unassigned.
The second is the active assignment phase. Still-undrafted players with a recent login date will be broken into position groups and randomly assigned to teams. After this, every team will have 30 active players at roughly even positional groupings and thus a full lineup.
The third is the inactive assignment phase. Every other player will have their rights randomly assigned to a team, but will not actually join that team unless the GM specifically signs them. They will not receive a rookie contract and they will not be eligible for depth chart placement. This is a little weird, I’ll admit, but there doesn’t seem like a good way to assign 400 inactive players to ten teams that are already full. Plus, it allows for added flexibility. If a sudden roster hole opens up on one team, that team’s GMs can reach into their team’s inactive pool and sign a replacement. And if an inactive member suddenly returns to the site, they already have a team waiting for them.
This isn’t an ideal method of player assignment by any means, and if future classes are large enough to let the college league survive, it would probably be changed. I would imagine a traditional draft or a recruiting-type system would be selected.
By the end of the first day, 800 players have joined the class. I imagine that, by now, the college committee has received four or five slam-dunk college GM applications, but without any of the twenty GM slots having been officially filled, they set up a scouting survey to expedite the drafting process.
Unfortunately, by this point, there is likely a backlog of several hundred unapproved players. 800 players in 12 hours is simply ridiculous, and GMs and HO have been working full time to answer questions and edit player pages to the new archetypes. Luckily for them, the recruitment post has begun to slip down the ranks on reddit, and the flow of players begins to slow. Additionally, as some members of the 1000-player class become more familiar with the league, they begin to answer each others’ questions. Things are settling down. The player backlog is decreasing.
By the end of the second day, 950 players have joined. The college committee has set up the draft declaration/DSFL opt-in thread, and over two hundred players have responded to it. Additionally, they have chosen the ten college GMs, and their co-GM searches are well underway. At this point, the college committee could probably be disbanded, but they’ll stick around to help ensure that everyone who wants to be in the DSFL is, and everyone who wants to be in college is.
With college pretty much set, it’s time to look at the other two leagues. The DSFL will welcome an S30 class that consists of 250-300 active players, and the ISFL will receive roughly 150-200 actives and 100 inactives. I firmly believe that the DSFL should rarely change in size, and that most drastic changes to the player base should be handled with ISFL expansion. But 250 is a mind-boggling number, and will be followed by multiple only slightly smaller classes. Actually, let’s go through that. Here’s what the classes should look like at the start of the first season for this mega-class:
Total new players: 1000
Total active: 500
S30: 250 active
R30 (S31-S34): 250 active, 500 inactive
It’s hard to estimate when actives will declare for the DSFL from the college league. Obviously, all inactives will join the S33 class, sending a huge wave of low-quality players into the DSFL. (On second thought, perhaps 60 TPE or so could be required for DSFL eligibility, trimming the vast majority of the inactives.) Let’s break down the distribution here.
One year in college (R30, S31): I could see many people look to try the college experience just a little bit, but proceed normally with their career.
Two years in college (R30, S32): I imagine most of the uber-competitive users would land in this class. They’d use their freshman year in college to get to the 150 TPE cap. Some people would intentionally tank their predictions to get just 1 extra TPE from 149 to 150. And then after the DSFL draft, they would begin earning as much as they could, potentially reaching 250-300 TPE before even entering the DSFL, which now caps at 400 TPE.
Three years in college (R30, S33): I don’t think many active players would choose this option. Almost everyone would have hit the 150 TPE cap by their third year, and if you’re sticking around in college without earning, you might as well finish up your eligibility.
Four years in college (R30, S34): All the inactives will be forced into this class, but probably also more actives than the three years option.
I’m a little bit lost here. My best guess is that the R30 actives would break roughly 30-30-10-30 among the S31-34 classes, but this is nothing more than speculation. And future R31, R32, etc classes could complicate the numbers even more. Current recruiting patterns suggest that R32 might be a larger class than the others. Let’s say R32 might be 150 total (90 actives), and the others 80 total (50 actives). And keep in mind R30 consists of 700 players and 300 actives.
(S30 would have 300 players, those who accepted the one-time opt-in to the DSFL.)
S31 would have 30% of R30 actives, or 90 players.
S32 would have 30% of R30 actives, plus 30% of R31 actives, or 105 players.
S33 would have 10% of R30 actives, plus 30% of R31 actives, plus 30% of R32 actives, or 63 players.
S34 would have 30% of R30 actives, all of R30 inactives, plus 10% of R31 actives, plus 30% of R32 actives, plus 30% of R33 actives, or 137 players and 400 inactives.
This is a weird distribution, but it works. Instead of having one gargantuan class followed by a series of normal classes, we have produced one smaller, but still massive class followed by a series of normal classes - and created an entirely new league with new job opportunities for GMs, simmers, updaters, and head office.
Well, about the college league head office - the college committee was intended to be a short-lived transition guide, but in the process of finding a replacement, they realize that twenty of the league’s most competent, ambitious members have just applied for GM or co-GM jobs in the college league. Therefore, they decide to stick around for another season or two.
Let’s go back to the S30 class. If I recall correctly, the 273-member S22 class expanded both leagues by two teams. The S30 class will have 300 members - and all will be active, at least at the time of their DSFL declaration. I would propose that the ISFL and DSFL should both immediately expand. ISFL expansion (to 16 teams) may lead to thin teams for one season, but it will clear out almost all of the capped veteran players in the DSFL, and the subsequent ISFL draft will vacate most of the league. The rule of thumb suggests 250 players would remain active by the DSFL draft, and fitting them on to 8 teams will be tough. The 10-team league would put most S30 rookies into starting jobs.
It’s tough to extrapolate the impact of an additional 150 active players on the ISFL in one draft, but it seems likely that another expansion would be needed, bringing the league to 18 teams, perhaps two seasons after the draft.
The league would need to answer some tough questions after this class. First, is the college league sustainable? Logic says yes, but it would need some contraction and a new player assignment system. Second, what would the new economy look like after injecting $6 billion in rookie contracts? Would new jobs (beyond the new GM and updater jobs) be created, and if so, where?
If you read this far, thanks for doing so! I’m interested to know what you would propose in this situation, where there truly does not seem like a single good option. It’s fun to think about and speculate about, but I do not envy our fictional HOs and college committee.
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