Progressive league teams also get the shaft in this regard to a certain degree. Most progs don't get too many teams very far above the 80 mill line and, when they do, you invariably eventually lose to some theme league team with a 120 mill payroll.

Why is it unfair to group an 80 mil open league team that got a great group of AAA players with a 100 mil team with no AAA players?

They use the actual value of your AAA players when assigning a TOC.  So if you got a couple 1.5 mil position players and a 3 mil SP, you only need to cobble together another 4 mil in value from your other 5 players to push you over 90 mil.

Will you use those AAA guys?  Probably not, but the value is still there, just like the 25th guy on your roster that got 12 PA all season long.

Yeah, when my single-season prog teams in TOC's face off against Joss, Summers, Hojo, Bip, Carter, Coleman, Dilone, etc., I always think, "Gosh, it's not fair to the owner who put so much thought into putting together this awesome OL team that he now has to face some of the most above-average players from 1915."

the last 2 TOC's i've been in have been all progressive teams (mine included) with 2 or 3 open league teams thrown in, of course all of the open league teams have been carrying Joss and have gone on to win the whole thing & they're facing each other in the final series.

The TOC should be an all progressive or an all open league TOC, not a combined.

FIX IT WIS management!!!

Of all the things WIS can/should do to improve the game, this would be way down the bottom of the list of priorities.  There are many more important issues to be addressed than making it easier for prog teams to compete in TOCs.

And I totally disagree that OL teams should be put in their own brackets...as it is, many if not most 100M TOCs are won by open league teams.  They don't need any other advantage.