Ok, so I put a redshirt on this guy and he dropped his WE from 49 to 31. My question here is fairly simple. Let's assume I don't care if I have him available this season. All I care about is getting him as close as possible to maxing out at some point in his future. This involves, primarily, potentially substantial improvements in a few key ratings (PER, BH, Pass). Will those ratings ultimately wind up higher if he starts at 49 and plays about 8 minutes this season as a sophomore, 10-12 next season, and 18-20 as a senior, or if he starts at 31 and then plays maybe 10, 15, and 20 the following 3 seasons? Assume for now that he never starts, although he conceivably could at some point, especially if the RS stays on.

are we trying to reach the same goals by yr 4 under either circumstance? Or does the rs get the benefit of the extra season? If all you care about is ultimately maxing him out the 31 should work, and he'll have higher iq too.

Basically I want him to be as good as possible as a senior. I figure his IQ will be adequate either way, though that is a good point.

He has high potential in LP, Per, BH, and Pass, so he could go into a great scorer off the bench at 3 positions. But this is really meant to be a more general question. I don't think growth scales linearly with WE, but I don't know how it does scale.

I think you'll get more growth without the RS, the big impact for WE kicks in somewhere around 60, which he'll hit if you start him as a SR.

If we do just assume that there is some sort of "growth unit" that scales linearly with WE (I phrase it like that because of potential effects and obvious non-linearity between effort towards growth and growth) the I would have a hard time seeing any way for him to grow as much with the RS. If I assume his WE will scale something like this:

	w/ RS			w/o RS
Season	begin	end	avg	begin	end	avg
1	31	31	31	49	51	50
2	31	35	33	51	55	53
3	35	41	38	55	61	58
4	41	49	45
			147			161

It's 14 WE*seasons worth of growth units in favor of taking the RS off. And even if being very low in the pecking order this season means he has no growth, it doesn't matter - 3 years stuck at 49 equal the fairly reasonable growth I charted for his post-RS progression.

However, if growth is not linearly related to WE, my hunch is that it's less than linearly related. If that's the case, it would improve the position of the lower WE track, and they're close enough (within 10%) that it wouldn't necessarily take a lot to flip the scales. This is not something I ever tried to quantitatively figure out because it can't be conveniently done in a few hours when I'm feeling inspired - you need to track improvements over time and cross-reference them with potential caps to make the data even remotely meaningful.

I was going to let it go, but I decided to run another set of numbers on what I would consider to be the extreme opposite end of the spectrum; that is, the case in which the "growth unit" scales with the square root of work ethic. The results of that are:

	w/ RS			w/o RS
Season	begin	end	avg	begin	end	avg
1	31	31	5.567764	49	51	7.070832
2	31	35	5.743243	51	55	7.279462
3	35	41	6.162276	55	61	7.61464
4	41	49	6.705438
			24.17872			21.96493

So in this case leaving the RS on provides roughly 10% more growth than removing it, basically the opposite result for what we see for linear scaling.

I'm assuming that whatever the relationship between WE and growth effort, it's defined by some continuous function. I assume that primarily because I can't see any reason why anyone would have programmed it to be a non-continuous function. My guess is that the form of that function fits somewhere between a sqrt(x) relationship and linear. But again, I just don't have nearly precise enough knowledge of this to know where. And the details clearly are important on this, because the extremes basically evenly bound the breakeven point.

I think I'm leaning towards leaving the RS on. I have 2 reasons for this:

1. The square root function feels closer to me than the linear function. Again, I'm going on gut instinct here. But in the square root scenario, a guy with 50 WE grows ~25% faster than a guy with 30 WE, and about 7 times faster than a guy with 1. That jibes with my instincts as to these relationships a lot more closely than 66% faster than the 30 WE and 50 times faster than the 1. Again, I suspect that the truth is somewhere between these extremes. But the x^1/2 function (feels) closer to me than the linear function.

2. My uber-simple model neglected offseason adjustments. Since I'm primarily interested in skill rating improvements for this particular player, as mentioned above, any offseason changes with 30+ WE are liable to be generally positive. They also scale with WE, but I don't know by how much. My gut here is that going from 2 to 3 offseasons is going to favor the RS track. And since I'm estimating a maximum 10% advantage for either pathway regardless of the relationship between WE and growth, that seemingly small contribution may not be entirely insignificant.