Madden 16 Expansion Team Guide

[yankees028]

Mixed it up a little in a new one. Went rams relocating them and also brought back good all Mike Martz to add some story line. Followed most of the players on list. Mixed up a few going with drew staton at qb. Also made sure all my defensive line is 6'5+ over 300 monsters. Going to just dump exp and build up a stout line

[xcvbg]

Every year when the game drops a group of us get together to put a expansion roster together. This year 2 of us have the game early and spent the last day and half getting it together.

[HisRoyalFreshness]

Would anyone be interested in uploading a roster to MaddenShare? I'm highly interested to see what it looks like

[The_ButtFumbles]

Enjoy this thread and the idea of this but I have just one beef, and this my be my inner Jet fan, but... NO NO NO Brandon Marshall would not be moving anywhere XD

Plan on starting one of these up soon. Prob will just cut every player from JAX instead of dispersing them. If they're good enough another team will pick them up. No sense of going through all that trouble dispersing them.

[tubaSimulator]

Don't know if anyone is still doing expansion drafts or following this thread anymore, but I'm still messing around with it and trying to improve my methods so this is an update on my latest improvement.


I've been messing around with Madden 12 lately (since you can use the create-a-team option and actually start with your 'expansion team' in season 1) and have had a thorough rethink of both the expansion draft and the rookie draft. I'm not quite done with my redesign of the expansion draft (still trying to nail down the right criteria) but I think I found a good solution for the rookie draft.

Backstory and development

Spoiler

So, previously my rule on the rookie draft (and I'm talking about the one that happened in real life BEFORE the first season in Madden starts) I would just keep every rookie on the team I was replacing (both drafted and undrafted). The reasoning behind this was to not exploit the rookie draft by going after the best player from every round and end up with 5-7 starters from just one draft (which seemed very unlikely). The results however weren't always that great; maybe I would get 1 or 2 good starters, but I didn't have any control over what positions I addressed - which also seems unlikely for an expansion team with the #1 pick in the draft. And I felt... 'handcuffed'; I was stuck with a group of players (depending on the team I was replacing) whether they fit the system or playbook I wanted to run or not.

So, I had to come up with a new idea, one that wouldn't exploit the knowledge of every OVR of every player in the draft, but also wouldn't give me a predetermined list of players that may or may not fit my system and didn't take the Expansion draft into account (i.e. if I got my starting LT in the expansion draft, it doesn't make sense to draft a rookie LT #1 overall and so on).

I made a list of 6 teams I could potentially replace in my upcoming franchise and every player they drafted in the 2011 NFL Draft, including their OVR. The reason for this was originally to find out what team I wanted to replace partially based on who they drafted. This was in line with my old way of finding rookies - stick to the rookies that team actually drafted.

I wasn't too excited about it and started to look into yankees028's way of doing the draft and try to build a good model based on that. I'm not sure I understood his way of doing it correctly (might want to update the OP with exactly how you do it) but my solution was inspired by it at least

Long story short, to experiment with new solutions, I made a list of every rookie drafted in the 2011 draft who were still in the game along with their OVR. For this experiment I picked Washington as the team I would replace, who had the 10th overall pick before they traded down. I then divided the draft into Rounds 1 through 7 based on my draft position (10th).

The top 9 players taken was off limits. Round 1 consisted of all players taken from the 10th pick of the 1st round (B.Gabbert) to the 9th pick of the 2nd round (J.Jenkins). Round 2 consisted of all players taken from the 10th pick of the 2nd round (B.Reed) through the 9th pick of the 3rd round (S.Ridley) and so on until I had a list of players for each 'round'.

I ran some 'test drafts' where I was only allowed to pick 1 player from each 'Round', but found it too easy to get a way too good draft class as the 7th round was the only round that didn't have at least 1 player with 75 OVR or higher. So, I tried a few more interesting limitations, like having to pick 1 QB, 1 HB, 1 Receiver, 1 offensive lineman, 1 defensive lineman, 1 linebacker and 1 defensive back (7 players exactly). That made it more difficult, but I still had an overpowered draft class.

Then I had the idea of an average OVR. I went back and looked at draft classes for the 6 teams I thought about replacing and calculated the average OVR of all the players they drafted. The average OVR varied, but only slightly; the biggest difference was between Buffalo (66,4) and San Francisco (70,4). The average of all 6 teams was 68,8 but I decided to round up and give myself an easier number to remember.

After trying out a lot of different methods last night with varying degrees of success, I finally came up with a solution to the problem that I'm very happy with (although I'm not happy with the current name so that could change in the future!):

The Average OVR Approach:

In short;
- The OVR of all 7 players you pick from the draft can NOT have an average OVR higher than 70.
- Only 1 player can be picked from each 'round'; Each 'Round' is dependent on the team you are replacing's draft position. If you didn't read the Spoiler text, I'll repeat that in my experiments I replaced Washington who had the 10th pick in the 1st round. Round 1, therefore, consists of all players taken in the draft from the 10th overall pick in the first round to and including the 9th pick of the 2nd round. My 2nd round then consists of all players taken from the 10th pick of the 2nd round to and including the 9th pick of the 3rd round and so on.

That was my working idea. After some more testing, I felt it necessary to add one more rule:

- You can't pick any players with an OVR below 60 – this is to stop an exploit where you can 'throw away' two picks on 50-52 OVR players just to pull the average down (which would allow you to pick 5 players with a very high OVR).


I ran some numbers to test if this approach would be easy to exploit but as long as I have to get an OVR of 70 (maximum 70,4 as 70,5 would round up to 71), and I can't pull the average OVR down with 50*55 OVR players, it gives me a good but realistic draft class. You can take 2 maybe even 3 players in the 77-84 range, but would then have to counter that with the rest being low 60's. For example: I can get an 84OVR, an 82OVR and an 80OVR, but my last 4 picks would then have to be one 65OVR and 3 60OVR players.

Conclusion
I think this approach to the draft is both fair in that you won't get an overpowered draft class, and it gives you flexibility in that it's up to you whether you want those two big building blocks (80+ OVR) and 4-5 long-term prospects (60-65OVR) that may never develop into anything, or if you instead want 6-7 good prospects to develop without necessarily getting that immediate superstar.

I'm gonna run a few test drafts later today and see what kind of draft classes I get out of it but I'm very excited about the idea

As usual, any comments, critique, advice, tips or own experiences with this idea is appreciated and encouraged!