"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..."

I tried to apply a "lesson learned" from one injury to another injury, and got burned.

First injury: I was tracking the "season change" tab regularly on my team's pop out page, and noticed that a player who had recovered enough to play was not improving like he had been before the injury. Noticed that he was below 100% on the health bar, rested him until he was at 100%, and then he resumed the pre-injury rate of ratings increase.

That was on my D2 team in Rupp last season, so when a guy on my D3 team in Allen this season had a minor injury I wanted to rest him so that I can get max ratings improvement (dumpster fire rebuild at my alma mater Ozarks, so I'd prefer the tradeoff of long-term development over helping lose by a couple less points this season).

I had promised the guy a start, but assumed the <100% health would affect the promise.

Nope.

Got to the 6th game without him in the starting lineup (sat 3 games, and came of the bench 3 games bc his dur is poor and he's taking forever to recover), and he hit me with the broken promise email plus took a 29-pt WE hit.

So...
1. Just wanted to share so others can maybe learn from my mistake rather than "the hard way."
2. I'd like to hear "injury management" thoughts from our vets.
3. Do you think the way injured players' promises are handled should change, and how so?

Yeh, once they get up to that 60% health rating, they're going to expect you to fulfill your promises. Below 60%, they don't expect to play, and ratings can drop as they don't practice.

I usually nurse them along for a couple games once 60 is reached. Playing minutes, maybe not the full promised, but definitely logging time on the depth chart.

Once over 80% (they usually improve the health rating by about 6% per game) I usually play close to the full promised minutes. However, distro may still be lower than it was when 100% healthy.

That's helpful input, thanks oldwarrior!

So... I just realized that I technically failed to start Caudell one more time after the "broken promise" message was *sent."

But I did not read the message until after the next game (it was sent at 11pm eastern on the 28th, and I didn't read it until after checking the game result the morning of the 29th). But I have started him in all three games since reading the message the morning of the 29th.

And... just got a freaking second "broken promise" message from him with another WE rating penalty!