I only found 1 decent thread about stamina from 2012, so here's my questions:

I usually set my starters and maybe a key 6th man to getting tired as long as they have 70+ stamina.  Am I hurting myself am I better to just set everyone to fairly fresh, especially if I have a deep team.

Opinions?

How much better than your backups are your starters is the key question.

I'd say generally the only difference between starters and backups is that my backups are underclassmen and haven't developed or increased IQ enough to start.

So I'd say starters are above average sometimes great.  While my backups are below average due to be underclassmen.

If you're pressing and have good depth, it's best in my opinion to set everyone to fairly fresh, unless perhaps you have a star or two who could stand being set on getting tired. If you have crappy depth and pretty solid starters, then it might be the best route to have them set on getting tired. There's a bunch of scenarios and no one really knows for sure what is absolutely optimal in each, but play around with it, see what feels best for your team. I usually will let fatigue settings play out for at least six games or so before I reassess. 

Point is if you have an unusually large gap between your starters and backups you may well set those starters to getting tired because they will be significantly better even when tired. But if they are much closer in talent then it's likely better to just move to the fresh backups and play both fresh.

Another thing to think about is that all the extra time that someone plays at "getting tired" is in a degraded status as compared to 'fairly fresh'.

I personally almost always set my starters to 'fairly fresh', and my backups to 'getting tired', unless I have something really non-standard going on (like, I have only 5 or 6 players that are good at all, etc).

You might ask, why getting tired for backups.  Well, when the starters are ready to come back in, they do .. regardless of the setting of the backups.  If a starter comes out and is ready to return, if the backup is at Fresh, he still comes out for the starter.

So, the backups generally will not get tired anyway .. unless someone fouls out or something like that.  In that case, I would likely have one of the backups play longer than someone not on the depth chart come in out of position.

What Hughes was saying is part of what I was saying: only set your starters to getting tired if you think your starter tired is better than your backup fresh by a significant amount.

Very interesting technique hughes. I had never thought of that, but I think there's some validity to it. I think it would become increasingly applicable the more intricate your depth chart is set up.