I'd be interested to hear from people on this, particularly the rationale from those in the disagree camp, since this plan would directly mirror real life.

That's a really interesting question. I wonder how low on the projection report the "worst" conf champs tend to be in an average season. In other words, how often would you be giving a team that's (for example) 120 or below on the proj report a PIT invite? My guess would be this only really happens in all-Sim conferences, but I'm not sure.

I'll use my own SHSU team as an example. In year 2 for me there (with some generous help from Zbrent) we're in line to win the regular season conference championship. There are only 4 total human coaches, with 3 of them being in my division. My current standing on the projection report is 126. And I don't think that would be all that dissimilar to most other majority sim low-major D1 conferences.

IOW, most low-major conference champs would fall somewhere between 80 and 140 on the projection report, I would think.

ugh. i voted somewhat agree, then started looking through the current standings in Wooden to see what this would entail. It puts a bunch of SIMs in and some truly terrible, don't-deserve-it teams... I'd rather see an 11-win team from a good conference than the RPI-185 dude who won the weak half of a weak conference (and has a better conference record than the winner of the "strong" half). These worlds just are not full enough. 

and Wooden is one of the more competitive d3s. It must be truly disastrous-looking in the worse worlds.

Posted by wronoj on 5/20/2014 2:40:00 PM (view original):
ugh. i voted somewhat agree, then started looking through the current standings in Wooden to see what this would entail. It puts a bunch of SIMs in and some truly terrible, don't-deserve-it teams... I'd rather see an 11-win team from a good conference than the RPI-185 dude who won the weak half of a weak conference (and has a better conference record than the winner of the "strong" half). These worlds just are not full enough. 

and Wooden is one of the more competitive d3s. It must be truly disastrous-looking in the worse worlds.

That's an interesting point--and one I hadn't really considered. It would be particularly apropos in my SHSU situation, since the one guy in the other division only has to play 3 humans per conference season, while those of us in the half-full division have to play 5 conference games against human-coached teams.

i voted don't care but im regretting that, i should have voted against. the thing is, in theory, i love the idea! if worlds were even remotely close to full, i'd be a strongly agree. but with so many barren conferences, the 1 or 2 humans who opt to join those conferences already get major benefits - the CT championship and the NT bid that comes with it becomes a fairly easy mark. adding an auto PIT bid to these barren conferences will really screw things up, it seems to me.

if HD mirrored real life in that the conferences all had coaches - i would love the change - but i think just saying "its realistic" is just one point, but very far from a smoking gun, or proof something is a good idea. the deviations in HD and RL are just too big. i wouldn't support this in a full world because its realistic, but because i'd feel it was equitable. i know everyone has a different stance on realism, but i think the most defensible (i've wandered far over the years, but have been steady on this for at least a few now) is to make the simulation of the game itself as realistic as possible, as realistic as the developers can manage. there aren't major obstacles, other than the difficulty of simulating, standing in the way. on the other hand, the surrounding logic, the "game engine" as i call it - we all know it can't remotely mirror reality. try making jobs realistic, try making recruiting realistic - its just not possible. it doesn't mean its not worth trying, but to me, the game engine has a clear priority of fun over realism, while the core simulation has a very strong need to be realistic. i think sometimes, the lack of realism is an argument against realism in another area - for example - depth can't be reduced to realistic proportions, with so much known about incoming recruits. if incoming recruits randomly deviated greatly from expectations, like in real life, only needing 7-8 players would be fine. but right now, the two unrealistic pieces sort of counter act. thats about the only time i'll ever argue against realism in the sim engine. on the game engine side, however, anything suggested is so far from realistic, i don't see the point in prioritizing that over what is enjoyable. ok, ill get off my soap box now :)

Yeah, after reading the counter-arguments here, I would likely move to a more middle-of-the-road position than I originally took.

If it brings in more Sims at the expense of human-coached teams, I'm strongly against it.

If it allows a weaker human-led team to take the spot of a human team that was closer to qualifying for the national tournament, I'm strongly against it.

The proposal, as I see it, really only protects people who are the only or almost-only human in a league full of Sims from suffering disaster due to one bad RNG night in the conference tournament. 1. If we want to talk realism, this is about as real as it gets -- teams have bad nights, Cinderella shows at the ball, the postseason gets wild. Heartbreak is part of the equation. Why do we want to protect against that by "guaranteeing" something?  2. Careful scheduling of non-conference games provides the same protection you're trying for here, so the "insurance" against missing the post-season altogether is already in the coach's hands (aside from that first season if the human tags in for SimAi and was handed a randomly generated schedule). It might require a little more thought than some give the process right now, but that's an element of the game coaches could learn and if you're in a position where 12-16 of your games every year are known to be league games against SIms, then you'd better be giving some thought to those 10 non-con slots for the good of your team.

Basically, I just don't see the "why" for wanting to do this.

Obviously the lure of recruiting cash and instant 'success' of tagging along to established conferences will always get coaches to join. Why shouldn't there be incentive for coaches to take over and / or join sim dominated conferences? You also want to incentivize the mid-majors and give them the opportunity to advance in the postseason, for cash and prestige, no matter how small the bumps.

keep in mind, IFFFF one were mirroring real life one would have just one regular season conf champ - HD has one for each division.  Would need to pick the one with the better record

if one did that, I think the negative arguments above outweigh the positive

Posted by fd343ny on 5/20/2014 9:09:00 PM (view original):
keep in mind, IFFFF one were mirroring real life one would have just one regular season conf champ - HD has one for each division.  Would need to pick the one with the better record

if one did that, I think the negative arguments above outweigh the positive

Yeah, I agree. I hadn't really thought through all the potential SIGNIFICANT downside to doing PIT autobids.

A possible middle ground change could be to let Conference Winners, Human Coached Teams get an automatic bid. This way, there is still some reward for paying customers...and who knows, maybe this will get a few more people to join barren conferences and maybe get a few less SIMS teams overall. This would not be a difficult programming change, I simple 'If Then' change. Thoughts?