Posted by Benis on 7/27/2017 8:18:00 AM (view original):
Posted by johnsensing on 7/27/2017 8:01:00 AM (view original):
Posted by Benis on 7/26/2017 6:13:00 PM (view original):
But stop me if you heard this one - Recruit Generation has been arguably THE biggest problem with HD for many years.
100% agree. In my view, had they fixed recruit gen at the outset, the 3.0 rollout would not have even been necessary.
Yeah I have no clue why it wasn't just included with everything else they were doing with 3.0. I heard that they weren't sure how to change the code or something like that??
And despite what has been said, something did change in respect to number of recruits generated at each level. During beta I compared the recruit populations to what we currently had in the 2.0 worlds and it was significantly different. I posted the results on the beta boards but those are long gone now.
There is this post that did a similar comparison post-beta:
https://www.whatifsports.com/forums/Posts.aspx?topicID=496314
If my recollection is correct, it was claimed that the total number of recruits generated did not change, just the categorization of recruits into DI, DII and DIII. The result, though, was that significantly fewer players were categorized as DI in 3.0.
Aside from the various longstanding complaints re recruit generation spanning back into 2.0, just reclassifying recruits should not be that big of a deal. However, due to unintended consequences of how 3.0 recruiting interacts with the recruit gen system, I think it is having further negative effects on the game.
The impact on JuCos has been discussed before, but what I am currently interested in is whether the walk-on issue is further exacerbating recruit gen issues in a rather vicious cycle. As a result of the ability for DII and DIII teams to recruit higher level DI players, there are fewer higher level DI players available for high baseline prestige DI teams. It appears as if the programming logic either prohibits targeting too low of a recruit and/or expends all of its resources going after only higher level DI recruits against DI human teams such that the result is that such teams are taking on an absurd amount of walkons. There was supposed to be programming logic to prevent this from happening, but it is not working.
in additon to that, based on the design of the new system, more human coaches see it as advantageous to take on walkons than in 2.0. The net result is that there are many, many more walkons on DI teams than there were before.
My theory is that the recruit generation system does not factor in walkons when determining how many players to generate, which means that many fewer DI players (and players overall - it isn't as if DII or DIII players are being generated in lieu of this) are being generated per opening.
Personally, I would not necessarily see this as a bad thing in and of itself as it just changes the game a bit to force more battles for the lower amount of talent. However, combined with the poor SIM AI recruiting logic, the net effect is that there are not enough DI recruits to fill all of the DI rosters, which means that DI sims are being stocked full of walkons. While I think it is unlikely we would see any sort of change, my thinking is that it is much more likely that altering the recruit gen code to count walkons is a much easier fix than monkeying around with Sim AI AI.
However, it's just a theory that I don't know is true or not.The numbers in the worlds above would general seem to support my theory... except for Naismith, which is a rather shocking outlier. Any idea why Naismith would. R so different? Are there significantly more or less human DI owners in Naismith?