The game engine is currently not designed for balance. Slowdown is almost always a better decision, in terms of start of game choice apart from normal. Going uptempo affects your team much more than your opponent - it will increase your own turnovers and decrease your offense's FG efficiency, as well as hurt its stamina, so if you're going to make that choice, you have to have more than just depth and stamina advantages. Uptempo is a whole team philosophy, otherwise it's a mistake. You need excellent speed, ball handling, defense (to mitigate the foul trouble from the increased fatigue) AND stamina to run uptempo against decent teams. The only press teams that it will work to uptempo to trigger the famed fatigue cascade are *weak* press teams, they are probably not worth worrying about in the first place. IOW, normal would have been fine. Now all that said, you can build a team to go uptempo. I do that with my FB/P teams, and it's a lot of fun. They're meant to be at their best running uptempo. But that's a very different type of team, it's not a choice any team can just make and hope to get away with.