I know this sounds radical. This is meant for fun discussion, and although I'm completely serious, I don't expect this will be on WIS radar anytime soon. Here's my case.

Problems:
1. Many empty conferences, lessens the value of success.
2. From WIS standpoint, continuing to offer incentives for 3 separate divisions in every world makes less sense.
3. People like pull downs, but don't like the "red light", especially having to wait until the final 24 hours for D3 teams recruiting from the D1 projected pool.
4. Already wide discrepancy between the championship caliber D3 teams and bottom-feeders (true long before 3.0).
5. Locality has become an even bigger determinant of success, especially for battles.

My plan:
1. Eliminate distinctions and barriers between the two divisions in each world. One massive, 55 conference division, playing each other, recruiting with the same restrictions (D1 projected players become available to sign immediately at the start of the 2nd period).
2. One postseason pool. Champions from top 25 conferences by RPI get automatic berths into the NT. Every conference tourney champion gets a post season berth, but many of them will be PIT, especially from sim-dominated conferences.

Benefits:
1. More competitiveness, for recruits, and for NT berths
2. Restores incentive to play in competitive conferences
3. Combining the divisions would eliminate the need for extra-long "red light" on D3s looking to catch D1 players
4. A better representation of real life (because D3s don't offer scholarships, hence "recruiting" is a lot different from how it works here)
5. No more free parking. Getting free seasons via dominating empty worlds, or plum locales, will be a thing of the past. Incentivizes moving up.

All in fun, folks.

And to add, I think the "problem" of locality advantage would be mitigated a bit, there would be fewer holes on the recruiting map, like south Florida, and all the Rockies for current D3 teams.

So i think the inscentive structure needs to be changed around... I feel like as it stands, if you land at a powerhouse school in D1, the baseline prestige lets you maintain at least a S16 level of play, which means you are at worst staying even in the $$$ department.
I think this change would make D2&3 a lot harder to earn reward credits than D1. So much more human competition and no baseline prestige to make up for it.

I think point 4 is a bit of an odd argument. 1-D3 schools still recruit, they just cant offer scholarships. 2-if you want it to be reflective of reality, then combining D2 and D3 lands you even farther away from the goal.

I think having a variety of conferences is nice. gives you the option to play in a ghost town if you want to experiment, or in a packed conference if you want stiff competition

I think the idea of having everyone able to start at a low D1 school is still the best. This fills out D1 much more, and creates more recruiting battles and spreads the power around a little more I believe...

Posted by crabman26 on 2/22/2017 1:41:00 PM (view original):
I think the idea of having everyone able to start at a low D1 school is still the best. This fills out D1 much more, and creates more recruiting battles and spreads the power around a little more I believe...

Agreed.

Lack of ability to move up UNLESS firings are more frequent or tenure is limited.

And both of those are bad ideas.

Posted by cubcub113 on 2/22/2017 1:55:00 PM (view original):

Posted by crabman26 on 2/22/2017 1:41:00 PM (view original):
I think the idea of having everyone able to start at a low D1 school is still the best. This fills out D1 much more, and creates more recruiting battles and spreads the power around a little more I believe...

Agreed.

double agreed

Posted by benrudy on 2/22/2017 1:18:00 PM (view original):
So i think the inscentive structure needs to be changed around... I feel like as it stands, if you land at a powerhouse school in D1, the baseline prestige lets you maintain at least a S16 level of play, which means you are at worst staying even in the $$$ department.
I think this change would make D2&3 a lot harder to earn reward credits than D1. So much more human competition and no baseline prestige to make up for it.

I think point 4 is a bit of an odd argument. 1-D3 schools still recruit, they just cant offer scholarships. 2-if you want it to be reflective of reality, then combining D2 and D3 lands you even farther away from the goal.

I think having a variety of conferences is nice. gives you the option to play in a ghost town if you want to experiment, or in a packed conference if you want stiff competition

I agree incentives should be adjusted. That's a totally separate conversation. That can be done with or without this proposal. I would expect credits to be harder to earn at D2, at least in terms of quantity of competition. I like the idea of having a lower division where everyone starts, but I think incentives should be structured to encourage people to move up to the highest level of competition. I have no doubt there would still be "ghost town" conferences, for those who want to play that way. That's the main point of merging the two divisions, and not just eliminating D3. The other part of that is letting people stay with their teams, keeping their records and accomplishments in a living world, and not relegated to some archive.

In the real world, there are 2 divisions recruiting with scholarships. I could go along with eliminating D3 altogether, but I imagine that would have more people more upset, because it would just erase dynasties people built, and I'm not interested in doing that. There are already a number of teams in the wrong division (UM-Morris, my alma mater, has never been D2, for example), realism at that level isn't all that important anyway. I'm more interested in realistic mechanics than if a given school is in the right division or conference.

Shoe - I'm with you that thats a separate conversation - I was just throwing it out there. Also, I think that each division has its unique attributes - D3 has its own challenges that make it a different game than either D2 or D1 - and that doesnt mean that one division is harder or easier than the other.

And on the scholarship thing - i still dont see your point... D3 schools still field teams and recruit players in real life...

Posted by benrudy on 2/22/2017 4:43:00 PM (view original):
Shoe - I'm with you that thats a separate conversation - I was just throwing it out there. Also, I think that each division has its unique attributes - D3 has its own challenges that make it a different game than either D2 or D1 - and that doesnt mean that one division is harder or easier than the other.

And on the scholarship thing - i still dont see your point... D3 schools still field teams and recruit players in real life...

Sure. There are lots of schools that aren't NCAA affiliated at all, and they field basketball teams. Should they be included here as a D4? My point was that regarding realism, I care more about the mechanics than if all the teams, divisions or conferences are right. If HD was like real life in that D3 could not offer scholarships, we likely wouldn't have the issue of D3 players being able to beat anyone from higher divisions out. And maybe that's a legitimate suggestion, but in a shared-universe setting, I don't think it would make sense to have them operate under a different system.

The big thing here is that people seem to be very concerned about a wide gap between championship level D3 teams and the teams available to entry level coaches in the same division, due to geography, and the fact that with some savvy and experience, D3 coaches can put together teams that look a lot like D1 mid-majors.

My argument is, since that gap has always existed, and likely always will, as long as coaches can park in lower levels, why not kill 3 or 4 birds with one stone? One massive conference would encourage participation in better conferences, and still let new players "hide" in empty conferences for as long as they need to; it would offer its own form of "relegation" as conferences compete with each other to get those NT berths; recruiting would be more active, and there would be no second "red light" for D3 schools; geographic advantages would be mitigated, and those D3 superteams would be competing with more appropriate levels of talent for championships.

I think it is so good for HD to have some out-of-the-box thinking like this, spawning discussion and maybe even encouraging some critical thinking from guys who don't often do that. Well done, shoe3. That said, here are a couple of questions ...

"4. Already wide discrepancy between the championship caliber D3 teams and bottom-feeders (true long before 3.0)."
Yes, indeed, the lower D3 schools, some of them with newbie coaches, have a real mountain to climb, a mountain as high as all D3. So how is it that giving them a much, much higher mountain to climb, a mountain as high as all D3 plus all D2, would be better????

"2. Restores incentive to play in competitive conferences" Why would that be?

If you understand the need to get rid of Seble's red light, why just get rid of half of it?

"geographic advantages would be mitigated" Geography is geography. Tulsa is where Tulsa is, and Chicago is where Chicago is. How would that change? I think it is one of the strengths of HD that there are areas where recruits and teams are densely packed, and areas where they are dispersed, and everything in between.

Posted by bathtubhippo on 2/22/2017 3:05:00 PM (view original):

Posted by cubcub113 on 2/22/2017 1:55:00 PM (view original):

Posted by crabman26 on 2/22/2017 1:41:00 PM (view original):
I think the idea of having everyone able to start at a low D1 school is still the best. This fills out D1 much more, and creates more recruiting battles and spreads the power around a little more I believe...

Agreed.

double agreed

Disagree. Disagree hard. D1 should be something to aspire to, and should be difficult to compete in. I'm not eligible for a D1 team in any world yet, nor should I be.

Posted by CoachSpud on 2/22/2017 5:11:00 PM (view original):
I think it is so good for HD to have some out-of-the-box thinking like this, spawning discussion and maybe even encouraging some critical thinking from guys who don't often do that. Well done, shoe3. That said, here re a couple of questions ...

"4. Already wide discrepancy between the championship caliber D3 teams and bottom-feeders (true long before 3.0)."
Yes, indeed, the lower D3 schools, some of them with newbie coaches, have a real mountain to climb, a mountain as high as all D3. So how is it that giving them a much, much higher mountain to climb, a mountain as high as all D3 plus all D2, would be better????

"2. Restores incentive to play in competitive conferences" Why would that be?

If you understand the need to get rid of Seble's red light, why just get rid of half of it?

"geographic advantages would be mitigated" Geography is geography. Tulsa is where Tulsa is, and Chicago is where Chicago is. How would that change? I think it is one of the strengths of HD that there are areas where recruits and teams are densely packed, and areas where they are dispersed, and everything in between.

Regarding the first question, I'm not saying my proposal makes the hill smaller. Simply that it's not all that much bigger. In Phelan, for example, D3 PBAU starts the season with a higher OVR than all of D2. And whether or not it turns out to be the best team in D3 at the end of the year is not a slam dunk.

The incentive to play in competitive conferences is in the idea that from this hypothetical massive 55-conference division, only the top 25 conferences by RPI would get automatic berths. Increased competition for those 64 spots will encourage experienced coaches to schedule tough, and/or get into top level conference, because just dominating a sim conference would not guarantee an NT berth (in my proposal). Does this make it easier for new coaches? Not in and of itself. And I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I'm just trying to show it doesn't make their lives harder.

On the red light, I think there is good, sound gameplay principle behind it, so I'm not interested in getting rid of it.

On geography, the advantage is mitigated, because now PBAU would be competing with W Florida, and all the other current D2 teams for the championships. Big fish in a big pond, instead of a fishbowl.

Put another way, PBAU mostly competes with a few other D2 teams for a local pool of just-under-high-D1 quality recruits. And with the recruits it gets, it gets to play games against D3 teams. Sure, the geography stays what it is. But who you have to beat to get the incentives changes.

1. "Regarding the first question, I'm not saying my proposal makes the hill smaller. Simply that it's not all that much bigger. In Phelan, for example, D3 PBAU starts the season with a higher OVR than all of D2."
C'mon, one school in one world isn't the measure of the mountain. Under your proposal the entirety of D2 is added to the mountain that a low D3 team would have to overcome. That is huge. You're starting to sound like a lot of the gremlins on the forums, using a single outlier to try to prove an argument.

2. "The incentive to play in competitive conferences ... encourage experienced coaches to schedule tough ..." Yeah ... maybe so. But for a lot of guys the attraction of full conferences seemed to stop with the post-season payout.

3. "On the red light ..." In short, I think a coach's results should essentially reflect the skill with which he plays the game. As regards recruiting, I call that "organic," the coach's ability as an adept recruiter determines the success of his efforts. The red light is directly contrary to that. A skilled D2 or d3 coach is stymied by Seble's arbitrary, capricious red light.

4. Again, one team isn't the way to support an argument.

Good conversation, thanks!