Posted this earlier, but wanted to create my own thread to give it a little bit more visibility.

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How about this? Similar to how the draft used to work in Madden games, you can pick players during the "prepare for amateur draft phase," and your scouts pay extra attention to them prior to draft and throughout their entire careers. For every $1m you spend on advanced scouting you can pick 2 amateurs to scout. Say you spend $10 on advanced so you pick 20 guys you like. Could be your top 20 players or maybe you have a different strategy in mind. Make a link to a page that shows all 20 of those players after the draft. Say you drafted 2 of them and 18 others are on different teams. At varying points of the season you get correspondence telling you scouts have learned more info about the players. Maybe this happens twice per season. You go to this page and the players projected ratings have changed to more accurately reflect their true projectctions. Next season you scout 20 more players now you have 40 players on this page. By the time a player is in his 4th season you've scouted him long enough that the projections you see are actually his REAL projections no matter what your advanced budget is. The advantage of advanced budget is you'll see a lot more players.

Why would you be spending $$ to scout a handful of players on other teams?  Yet you have virtually no scouting information on your own players?

I don't get what this suggestion accomplishes.

They are players you want to draft, so theoretically they are players you might want to trade for or acquire later. But they well could be guys you do draft. For example, if you pick 23rd, 44th, and 49th, its realistic you probably wont get anybody in your top 5 ranked players. If you have $5 mil in advanced you might select your 6th to 16th players and its possible you could well draft 3 out of 10. For the other 7 on other teams, maybe it helps you decide whether to veto or accept a trade involving them... or obviously you might want to try and trade for them yourself... or not trade for them because the projections aren't what you thought.

I think this idea is best if combined with some of the other ideas I've seen or heard but I personally like it even if its on its own.