TLDR: If the ISFL had injuries, what might it look like? Different, and here are some thoughts on how (though overall I think we shouldn't enable them).
As I'm sure most participants in the ISFL know, there are no player injuries enabled and as a result careers are never impacted by injury unlike the NFL. In a simulation league consisting of volunteers and people looking to have fun, it makes tons of sense to have that setting - having a season or career ending injury would obviously be a factor that would lead to people suffering from those to be more likely to leave. There are a lot of ways that could be handled from the sim league angle in the unlikely event that we ever wanted to have them (allowing a second player in the DSFL, giving bonuses to people who suffer from injuries such as persistence between recreates, and way more but that would really be its own article). But, what kind of impact would we expect to see if there were injuries?
For NFL comparison, Football Outsiders has an article series analyzing games lost due to injuries (2020 version / 2019 version). Due to all the covid-related weirdness (rule changes, broncos QBs, etc) I'll look more at the 2019 numbers for comparison.
Said year had 64.3 adjusted games lost from starters (2015-2019 average of 59.74 AGL). They don't disclose the exact definition of a starter, so I'm going to assume they're counting 25 players (11 offense, 11 defense, place kicker/punter/long snapper). In a 16 game season, that's 400 starter-games, meaning that about 16% of the games expected to be played by a starter were instead missed due to injury. Or, thinking about it a different way, 64 games missed is like losing 4 of your starters for the entire season.
The ISFL starting player picture is a little different than the NFL and has a minimum of 18 human starters (11 defense, 6 offense plus 5 OL bots, 1 K/P) or 23 total spots. Losing a similar proportion of games on the lower 18 player base gives an average of roughly 46 games missed, or nearly 3 starters out for the entire season. That's a figure that naturally would create a problem for any GM trying to succeed in winning - if you're missing your best players, you're not going to look as good. In theory/on average, that should balance out across teams, but assuming the injuries are based on randomness in some way then there will be luckier and less lucky teams. Luck/randomness is hard to plan around - just ask the teams who test at a 90% win rate but then have 5 turnovers and lose. There's enough variance as it is in the sim itself that I'm not sure there are many GMs or players who are looking for more to be added, especially if it can result in losing your team's QB for the season with little or no way to combat it. Sure, there could be more player stats to reduce the chance of injury or to recover faster, but investing in those seems to be like it would purely feel bad. If you put TPE into preventing injuries and get hurt anyway, that sucks. If you put TPE in that stat and don't get injured, it's hard to notice the effect unless there's an explicit 'your player would have gotten injured but you had 75 injury prevention so you didn't' kind of message. So yeah, I can't imagine that there's a great way to have injuries in the league which would actually be interesting or fun given the impact.
But even if there was a way to deal with the randomness and players losing months of time put into a player, there's another, arguably bigger, part about the impact of NFL injuries vs. anything in the ISFL. ISFL teams don't really have backup players. The NFL game day roster consists of 48 players (basically - see this article for more details) while the largest current ISFL roster is 28 players ( and as of the TPE tracker on April 25th). Some percent of those players are used in games for rotation and special teams, but an NFL team has more depth on their roster to handle injuries than an ISFL team does. One view to re-emphasize this - no ISFL team has 2 QBs on their roster (though some have DSFL QBs). Basically every NFL team has a backup QB (and several have a 3rd on the practice squad) because of the risk of injuries. If we wanted to incorporate injuries while taking this into account, I think there are several ways that we could go about it. I'll go over a few ideas I thought of here, though there are of course more (and more creative) options the league could incorporate if we did want to go down the injuries-enabled route.
The first option is to go full NFL and cause teams to have large roster sizes. While obviously something that works for the NFL, I don't think it would be great (or at least not a small change) for the ISFL. Players want to play, not be backups. Adding another 15-20 players to every team would obviously be hard with the current number of actives in the league. There would have to be something changed with regards to the salary cap, minimum salaries, etc. And would one team be able to gather tons of players who just want to win a championship even if they're playing rotationally or as a backup? And finally, I don't personally know how well the sim would handle this. I haven't personally purchased it or played around with what it's capable of, so I don't know how well you can have a full depth chart in the engine.
The second option is allowing teams to treat their DSFL players as backups in the case of injuries. This approach would be somewhat reasonable if injuries could only happen between games, ie that even if a player is injured during the course of a game then they're able to complete it and the call-up is processed between games to give time for the GMs to decide who should be called up and what other changes to make. The other version of it would be if injuries could happen during the games - then you'd need the DSFL players to be on the game day rosters, which I imagine would make the sim setup a bit more arduous. Both versions of allowing the DSFL players to get called up would have some interesting interactions with the DSFL cap - would the DSFL players have a "DSFL build" at the 250 cap and then an "ISFL build" for any excess TPE? Or would DSFL players be able to have an out-of-band update spending their banked TPE when called up? Maybe they would play at the 250 cap until the next normal weekly update? I'd guess the last option is what happens with midseason call-ups right now, but I haven't really looked into the details.
The third obvious option is to allow players to train stats "out of position" so that they could actually be able to substitute to other positions. While writing my article on how much TPE to earn, one of the more interesting things I noticed in the sim change and archetype revamp was that the stats that aren't useful to a player are now limited to 1 rather than the previous 25. As a result, non-QBs can never have arm or accuracy over 1 and non-kickers can never have power or accuracy over 1. All other positions have some overlap - eg a blocking TE has blocking attributes that look a little similar to an OL player (though OL have no receiving attributes). If those "useless" attribute maximums were raised, then players could invest in being a bit to have stats allowing them to be backups in the other positions. However, it probably would never be worth it given that it would detract from your player's relevant attributes. The TPE required to fully build out a position ranges from 1215-1315, while the all-time TPE leader only has 1559, leaving at most about 350 TPE to invest in being a backup. If we did want to consider something along these lines, I think the best option would be to have traits of "backup QB"/"backup kicker" which cost 50-100 but put your relevant stats to be equal to a 250 TPE build player in those positions. Even with that kind of discount, I can't imagine many players would take the trait unless they're already past the max or if it was an emergency measure due to the starting QB getting injured, but maybe there would be some who would do it for strategic reasons.
A fourth option is to allow first-year (and therefore undrafted) DSFL players to be selected on waivers by an ISFL team with injuries. That is maybe one of the better options when it comes to making new players excited - "I just started and now I'm in the big leagues!" - but it comes with it a lot of weirdness. Much like the current DSFL waiver system, it could lead to a player getting selected on waivers but then getting drafted by another team, which could break up friendships and camaraderie established after getting called up. And then of course this has the chance to really distort any competition in the DSFL. Getting the highest TPE QB called up to the ISFL due to injury would almost certainly reduce the chance of that team contending for the DSFL Ultimini. The DSFL exists as a venue primarily to help the ISFL and grow/retain players rather than to be an ultra-competitive cut-throat league of its own, but I could still see some resentment from the DSFL GMs and players who were doing well prior to losing a player to call-up. In some ways it could even punish the best drafting DSFL GMs as they're more likely to lose players, but I assume that's already a dynamic in place but just on a between-seasons cadence.
The last option I'll go over seems the most lame to me - allow bots to replace injured players. This is the option that would create the least disruption to GMs in the sense that they wouldn't have to figure out calling up or TPE reassigning, but it's also the worst in that it purely makes one player feel bad without letting a called-up player move up "early".
As a related side note - one good part of injuries in the NFL is that it can let players who weren't getting playing time get more and then to show that they are better than thought. The classic example here is Drew Bledsoe getting injured and letting first Tom Brady and then Tony Romo take over for him. If Bledsoe had stayed healthy, the careers of those other two QBs would clearly have taken a different trajectory (and the AFC East may well have been happier). Getting back to the ISFL - if an injury results in an active player not being able to participate in games but another active player gets called up to take over that position (or at least the bottom slot in that position for eg CB), then it could drive more interest in the team. If the replacement is a bot, however, then the active player is made sad for no possible gain from the replacements (since bots don't have feelings... I hope).
But from a purely mechanical perspective, would bots even be a good solution? I think one of the biggest issues goes back again to the salary cap. If injuries are handled fairly easily with cash, then it feels to be almost more like an injury insurance cost requiring that GMs just save some amount of their cap to handle possible injuries. I think for the league it's better to try and get teams to have more depth rather than allowing cash to just solve the problem, but bot players are a mechanism that's already in the league and therefore maybe not wildly farfetched to consider as a possible vector.
All three of these ways to handle injuries on the team ignore parts of the bigger picture when it comes to the dynamic of players. I'm going to generalize rather than conduct a survey, but I believe most players in the ISFL want to see their player and team do well. If you don't have a team, there's little reason to be invested in your ISFL player. Compare that to the NFL, where if you're a free agent then there's a lot of incentive to be working out, keeping in contact with an agent, having interviews with teams, etc. because you're trying to get a job. That's very apparent when looking at the free agent list of ISFL players - the most recently updated free agents have all updated on March 1th, aka when the last season's regression was applied. 8 of the 280 free agents have been seen on the site since then, but it's clear that pretty much every active player is on a team. As a result, there are very few players around to replace those lost to injury other than possibly whatever depth an organization has in the DSFL. Admittedly, 30 of those 280 players do have more than 250 TPE (and therefore would be better than a DSFL player if the DSFL cap isn't removed in the case of a mid-season call up), but only 4 are over 500 TPE. This of course makes sense since more useful/higher TPE players would have been signed as inactive free agents already, but it does mean that there's just not a deep pool to draw from if the league is losing 42 starters in an average season right now.
So if the free agent pool is insufficient to handle injuries, are there other options? To be, the only logical option is to increase the ratio of active players to teams. In practice, that requires either that we recruit more active players or that we decrease the number of teams. Making the DSFL be more directly the reserves/injury replacements could ameliorate that somewhat but carries the risk of distorting the DSFL further. One possible impact - if DFSL players that a team has drafted are able to be called up in the case of injury, would change a lot of the decisions about retaining lower earning players for ISFL GMs. A 200 TPE inactive player might suddenly be important injury insurance whereas currently those players are pretty much just ignored, or at best used as ringers in the DSFL. The specialist positions of QB and K/P are where I think there would be the most impact. If a team loses one of their running backs, they could potentially run with an extra wide reciever or tight end in place of that RB, assuming they don't have a backup. For QB in particular, though, there is no fallback option (assuming one of the 'allow other players to be QB backups' options isn't picked). Right now there are 38 QBs in the league, 8 of which are free agents. 5 of those are at 50 TPE and would be auto-retired under current rules, leaving only 3 options who could possibly be used by teams who don't have a DSFL QB on their roster already (and as a side note, unsurprisingly there are no ISFL teams with two QBs on the roster). From a pure numbers perspective, having each ISFL team to have a starting and backup QB plus each DSFL team to have a starting QB would require 36 QBs. Counting those 5 inactive and 50 TPE QBs, we're technically at that number, but just barely. And besides that, what about injuries in the DSFL?
I've focused on the ISFL when it comes to considering injuries and the impact to competitive play since that's the league intended for competition (and also the one I'm in, so I'm biased). What if the DSFL had injuries too? I imagine that if you're a new player who came into the league, put a couple weeks of time into the player, and then encountered even a 3-game injury (missing ~1 week of sims), the experience would be a huge turn off from coming back. Maybe it would be a little bit more interesting to players who are more invested into realism, but I can't imagine that would make up for the the 'well this sucks' part of it for most people. For a league aiming to focus on getting new players interested and keeping them around, injuries seem like a poor option to me.
To that end, just allowing the ISFL to have injuries but the DSFL to be immune seems like one obvious option (assuming of course that we do want to have injuries). While that would be a bit of a weird dichotomy between the two leagues, there's already some precedence for something similar with how penalties are reduced in the DSFL automatically via traits to make games more competitive.
And that example I think is very relevant to this conversations - penalties were too common in the DSFL and so they got adjusted via making changes to players in the sim that can't be trained. That was noted here as being about bringing penalties down to closer to the NFL/ISFL level rather than specifically about randomness, but it still is of note when thinking about if/how to have the two leagues be different. I guess the worst case would be a DSFL player getting called up to replace an injured player and then immediately getting injured (which as a side note might be one more reason to not have an injury prevention stat)? It would be a weird/unfortunate experience for that player, but I don't think it's way different than seeing your player have a higher penalty rate in the ISFL than in the DSFL or to have worse position stats as you're competing against multiple-year veterans instead of at most 250-capped players.
Conclusions:
After going through the exercise of writing about the different options and seeing the impact expected if the league were to suffer injuries at a rate similar to the NFL, I think that having injuries with a similar distribution as the NFL is not the direction that the league wants to go. I could see that adding injuries might act as a counterbalance to prevent teams with better stats from winning as often, but in my experience the simulation's own randomness is sufficient to have upsets. I could see maybe the league being more interesting if GMs did have to build teams to account for the chance of injuries, but I don't think it would work well with the dynamic we have in the league. If we drastically change how the DSFL interacts with the ISFL, I think we could work something out to make sure that the ISFL teams are able to field a legal team, but ultimately the ISFL/DSFL don't have the giant pool of not-quite-starter level players available as free agents that the NFL has. Especially given that the league runs on a basis of user attention and activity with a goal of having fun rather than giant piles of media cash with a goal of making a living, I don't think we will ever have a giant pool of relevant players in a free agent pool. I ultimately think that having injuries disabled is best for the long-term health of the league even if it is weird in the context of an injury-plagued NFL.
As I'm sure most participants in the ISFL know, there are no player injuries enabled and as a result careers are never impacted by injury unlike the NFL. In a simulation league consisting of volunteers and people looking to have fun, it makes tons of sense to have that setting - having a season or career ending injury would obviously be a factor that would lead to people suffering from those to be more likely to leave. There are a lot of ways that could be handled from the sim league angle in the unlikely event that we ever wanted to have them (allowing a second player in the DSFL, giving bonuses to people who suffer from injuries such as persistence between recreates, and way more but that would really be its own article). But, what kind of impact would we expect to see if there were injuries?
For NFL comparison, Football Outsiders has an article series analyzing games lost due to injuries (2020 version / 2019 version). Due to all the covid-related weirdness (rule changes, broncos QBs, etc) I'll look more at the 2019 numbers for comparison.
Said year had 64.3 adjusted games lost from starters (2015-2019 average of 59.74 AGL). They don't disclose the exact definition of a starter, so I'm going to assume they're counting 25 players (11 offense, 11 defense, place kicker/punter/long snapper). In a 16 game season, that's 400 starter-games, meaning that about 16% of the games expected to be played by a starter were instead missed due to injury. Or, thinking about it a different way, 64 games missed is like losing 4 of your starters for the entire season.
The ISFL starting player picture is a little different than the NFL and has a minimum of 18 human starters (11 defense, 6 offense plus 5 OL bots, 1 K/P) or 23 total spots. Losing a similar proportion of games on the lower 18 player base gives an average of roughly 46 games missed, or nearly 3 starters out for the entire season. That's a figure that naturally would create a problem for any GM trying to succeed in winning - if you're missing your best players, you're not going to look as good. In theory/on average, that should balance out across teams, but assuming the injuries are based on randomness in some way then there will be luckier and less lucky teams. Luck/randomness is hard to plan around - just ask the teams who test at a 90% win rate but then have 5 turnovers and lose. There's enough variance as it is in the sim itself that I'm not sure there are many GMs or players who are looking for more to be added, especially if it can result in losing your team's QB for the season with little or no way to combat it. Sure, there could be more player stats to reduce the chance of injury or to recover faster, but investing in those seems to be like it would purely feel bad. If you put TPE into preventing injuries and get hurt anyway, that sucks. If you put TPE in that stat and don't get injured, it's hard to notice the effect unless there's an explicit 'your player would have gotten injured but you had 75 injury prevention so you didn't' kind of message. So yeah, I can't imagine that there's a great way to have injuries in the league which would actually be interesting or fun given the impact.
But even if there was a way to deal with the randomness and players losing months of time put into a player, there's another, arguably bigger, part about the impact of NFL injuries vs. anything in the ISFL. ISFL teams don't really have backup players. The NFL game day roster consists of 48 players (basically - see this article for more details) while the largest current ISFL roster is 28 players ( and as of the TPE tracker on April 25th). Some percent of those players are used in games for rotation and special teams, but an NFL team has more depth on their roster to handle injuries than an ISFL team does. One view to re-emphasize this - no ISFL team has 2 QBs on their roster (though some have DSFL QBs). Basically every NFL team has a backup QB (and several have a 3rd on the practice squad) because of the risk of injuries. If we wanted to incorporate injuries while taking this into account, I think there are several ways that we could go about it. I'll go over a few ideas I thought of here, though there are of course more (and more creative) options the league could incorporate if we did want to go down the injuries-enabled route.
The first option is to go full NFL and cause teams to have large roster sizes. While obviously something that works for the NFL, I don't think it would be great (or at least not a small change) for the ISFL. Players want to play, not be backups. Adding another 15-20 players to every team would obviously be hard with the current number of actives in the league. There would have to be something changed with regards to the salary cap, minimum salaries, etc. And would one team be able to gather tons of players who just want to win a championship even if they're playing rotationally or as a backup? And finally, I don't personally know how well the sim would handle this. I haven't personally purchased it or played around with what it's capable of, so I don't know how well you can have a full depth chart in the engine.
The second option is allowing teams to treat their DSFL players as backups in the case of injuries. This approach would be somewhat reasonable if injuries could only happen between games, ie that even if a player is injured during the course of a game then they're able to complete it and the call-up is processed between games to give time for the GMs to decide who should be called up and what other changes to make. The other version of it would be if injuries could happen during the games - then you'd need the DSFL players to be on the game day rosters, which I imagine would make the sim setup a bit more arduous. Both versions of allowing the DSFL players to get called up would have some interesting interactions with the DSFL cap - would the DSFL players have a "DSFL build" at the 250 cap and then an "ISFL build" for any excess TPE? Or would DSFL players be able to have an out-of-band update spending their banked TPE when called up? Maybe they would play at the 250 cap until the next normal weekly update? I'd guess the last option is what happens with midseason call-ups right now, but I haven't really looked into the details.
The third obvious option is to allow players to train stats "out of position" so that they could actually be able to substitute to other positions. While writing my article on how much TPE to earn, one of the more interesting things I noticed in the sim change and archetype revamp was that the stats that aren't useful to a player are now limited to 1 rather than the previous 25. As a result, non-QBs can never have arm or accuracy over 1 and non-kickers can never have power or accuracy over 1. All other positions have some overlap - eg a blocking TE has blocking attributes that look a little similar to an OL player (though OL have no receiving attributes). If those "useless" attribute maximums were raised, then players could invest in being a bit to have stats allowing them to be backups in the other positions. However, it probably would never be worth it given that it would detract from your player's relevant attributes. The TPE required to fully build out a position ranges from 1215-1315, while the all-time TPE leader only has 1559, leaving at most about 350 TPE to invest in being a backup. If we did want to consider something along these lines, I think the best option would be to have traits of "backup QB"/"backup kicker" which cost 50-100 but put your relevant stats to be equal to a 250 TPE build player in those positions. Even with that kind of discount, I can't imagine many players would take the trait unless they're already past the max or if it was an emergency measure due to the starting QB getting injured, but maybe there would be some who would do it for strategic reasons.
A fourth option is to allow first-year (and therefore undrafted) DSFL players to be selected on waivers by an ISFL team with injuries. That is maybe one of the better options when it comes to making new players excited - "I just started and now I'm in the big leagues!" - but it comes with it a lot of weirdness. Much like the current DSFL waiver system, it could lead to a player getting selected on waivers but then getting drafted by another team, which could break up friendships and camaraderie established after getting called up. And then of course this has the chance to really distort any competition in the DSFL. Getting the highest TPE QB called up to the ISFL due to injury would almost certainly reduce the chance of that team contending for the DSFL Ultimini. The DSFL exists as a venue primarily to help the ISFL and grow/retain players rather than to be an ultra-competitive cut-throat league of its own, but I could still see some resentment from the DSFL GMs and players who were doing well prior to losing a player to call-up. In some ways it could even punish the best drafting DSFL GMs as they're more likely to lose players, but I assume that's already a dynamic in place but just on a between-seasons cadence.
The last option I'll go over seems the most lame to me - allow bots to replace injured players. This is the option that would create the least disruption to GMs in the sense that they wouldn't have to figure out calling up or TPE reassigning, but it's also the worst in that it purely makes one player feel bad without letting a called-up player move up "early".
As a related side note - one good part of injuries in the NFL is that it can let players who weren't getting playing time get more and then to show that they are better than thought. The classic example here is Drew Bledsoe getting injured and letting first Tom Brady and then Tony Romo take over for him. If Bledsoe had stayed healthy, the careers of those other two QBs would clearly have taken a different trajectory (and the AFC East may well have been happier). Getting back to the ISFL - if an injury results in an active player not being able to participate in games but another active player gets called up to take over that position (or at least the bottom slot in that position for eg CB), then it could drive more interest in the team. If the replacement is a bot, however, then the active player is made sad for no possible gain from the replacements (since bots don't have feelings... I hope).
But from a purely mechanical perspective, would bots even be a good solution? I think one of the biggest issues goes back again to the salary cap. If injuries are handled fairly easily with cash, then it feels to be almost more like an injury insurance cost requiring that GMs just save some amount of their cap to handle possible injuries. I think for the league it's better to try and get teams to have more depth rather than allowing cash to just solve the problem, but bot players are a mechanism that's already in the league and therefore maybe not wildly farfetched to consider as a possible vector.
All three of these ways to handle injuries on the team ignore parts of the bigger picture when it comes to the dynamic of players. I'm going to generalize rather than conduct a survey, but I believe most players in the ISFL want to see their player and team do well. If you don't have a team, there's little reason to be invested in your ISFL player. Compare that to the NFL, where if you're a free agent then there's a lot of incentive to be working out, keeping in contact with an agent, having interviews with teams, etc. because you're trying to get a job. That's very apparent when looking at the free agent list of ISFL players - the most recently updated free agents have all updated on March 1th, aka when the last season's regression was applied. 8 of the 280 free agents have been seen on the site since then, but it's clear that pretty much every active player is on a team. As a result, there are very few players around to replace those lost to injury other than possibly whatever depth an organization has in the DSFL. Admittedly, 30 of those 280 players do have more than 250 TPE (and therefore would be better than a DSFL player if the DSFL cap isn't removed in the case of a mid-season call up), but only 4 are over 500 TPE. This of course makes sense since more useful/higher TPE players would have been signed as inactive free agents already, but it does mean that there's just not a deep pool to draw from if the league is losing 42 starters in an average season right now.
So if the free agent pool is insufficient to handle injuries, are there other options? To be, the only logical option is to increase the ratio of active players to teams. In practice, that requires either that we recruit more active players or that we decrease the number of teams. Making the DSFL be more directly the reserves/injury replacements could ameliorate that somewhat but carries the risk of distorting the DSFL further. One possible impact - if DFSL players that a team has drafted are able to be called up in the case of injury, would change a lot of the decisions about retaining lower earning players for ISFL GMs. A 200 TPE inactive player might suddenly be important injury insurance whereas currently those players are pretty much just ignored, or at best used as ringers in the DSFL. The specialist positions of QB and K/P are where I think there would be the most impact. If a team loses one of their running backs, they could potentially run with an extra wide reciever or tight end in place of that RB, assuming they don't have a backup. For QB in particular, though, there is no fallback option (assuming one of the 'allow other players to be QB backups' options isn't picked). Right now there are 38 QBs in the league, 8 of which are free agents. 5 of those are at 50 TPE and would be auto-retired under current rules, leaving only 3 options who could possibly be used by teams who don't have a DSFL QB on their roster already (and as a side note, unsurprisingly there are no ISFL teams with two QBs on the roster). From a pure numbers perspective, having each ISFL team to have a starting and backup QB plus each DSFL team to have a starting QB would require 36 QBs. Counting those 5 inactive and 50 TPE QBs, we're technically at that number, but just barely. And besides that, what about injuries in the DSFL?
I've focused on the ISFL when it comes to considering injuries and the impact to competitive play since that's the league intended for competition (and also the one I'm in, so I'm biased). What if the DSFL had injuries too? I imagine that if you're a new player who came into the league, put a couple weeks of time into the player, and then encountered even a 3-game injury (missing ~1 week of sims), the experience would be a huge turn off from coming back. Maybe it would be a little bit more interesting to players who are more invested into realism, but I can't imagine that would make up for the the 'well this sucks' part of it for most people. For a league aiming to focus on getting new players interested and keeping them around, injuries seem like a poor option to me.
To that end, just allowing the ISFL to have injuries but the DSFL to be immune seems like one obvious option (assuming of course that we do want to have injuries). While that would be a bit of a weird dichotomy between the two leagues, there's already some precedence for something similar with how penalties are reduced in the DSFL automatically via traits to make games more competitive.
And that example I think is very relevant to this conversations - penalties were too common in the DSFL and so they got adjusted via making changes to players in the sim that can't be trained. That was noted here as being about bringing penalties down to closer to the NFL/ISFL level rather than specifically about randomness, but it still is of note when thinking about if/how to have the two leagues be different. I guess the worst case would be a DSFL player getting called up to replace an injured player and then immediately getting injured (which as a side note might be one more reason to not have an injury prevention stat)? It would be a weird/unfortunate experience for that player, but I don't think it's way different than seeing your player have a higher penalty rate in the ISFL than in the DSFL or to have worse position stats as you're competing against multiple-year veterans instead of at most 250-capped players.
Conclusions:
After going through the exercise of writing about the different options and seeing the impact expected if the league were to suffer injuries at a rate similar to the NFL, I think that having injuries with a similar distribution as the NFL is not the direction that the league wants to go. I could see that adding injuries might act as a counterbalance to prevent teams with better stats from winning as often, but in my experience the simulation's own randomness is sufficient to have upsets. I could see maybe the league being more interesting if GMs did have to build teams to account for the chance of injuries, but I don't think it would work well with the dynamic we have in the league. If we drastically change how the DSFL interacts with the ISFL, I think we could work something out to make sure that the ISFL teams are able to field a legal team, but ultimately the ISFL/DSFL don't have the giant pool of not-quite-starter level players available as free agents that the NFL has. Especially given that the league runs on a basis of user attention and activity with a goal of having fun rather than giant piles of media cash with a goal of making a living, I don't think we will ever have a giant pool of relevant players in a free agent pool. I ultimately think that having injuries disabled is best for the long-term health of the league even if it is weird in the context of an injury-plagued NFL.
Draft Steal (retired S35 CB) - Profile/Update | Wiki
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