Being the AD: A FBCB Adventure
 

Partially inspired from muns coaching dynasty, I've been looking at my current long sim and decided to take a break from the hours I've been putting into FM10 to come up with an idea that's fitting given all of the coaching carousel talk coupled with March Madness right now.

Background

My universe of college basketball has over 400 teams. Big surprise, as I've added a few conferences and schools. Some are real, some are not real. The only real rule is that fake schools and real ones can't be in the same leagues if said leagues have an auto-bid to the tournament.

I might do some experimenting like altering the way bids are given out, but for the most part, we're gonna run this thing straight up.

The idea is like this. I'm going to play athletic director at a few select schools. We'll spend a few years monitoring the progress of our hires to see how well they do at individual programs. As we succeed, we'll move up to other schools and go through it again.

As such, I'm never going to play any games. It's all about the off-season in this league and evaluating performance of hires once we make them.

Since the game doesn't have salaries for head coaches (doesn't need 'em) I'm going to come up with a formula that'll enable us to determine which hires we can "afford" to get to our respective programs coupled with team and conference prestige.

I'll adapt this along the way, but the premise should the stay the same. To keep it simple, I won't be adding any new conferences and conference movement is off, though I occasionally move teams to new leagues based on performance. I think I'll probably dispense from this practice for this dynasty unless we go a long while. All four postseason tournaments are on and we've simmed from 1900 to 1999 already with the 1999 season just about to end.

So first, I'll give you a primer of what leagues we have and so forth and then we'll pick the schools we're going to AD at to start. (I think between 3-5 schools we'll start with.)

In terms of changes, I made some across the board. I don't want to recall each one of them because they're not that interesting and we'll get to them as I write, but...the major conference changes include:

Big East is a 20-team league. Mostly because it was possible, so I decided to try it. TCU, East Carolina, Memphis and UCF were added to the ranks. I purposely added schools with football programs to TCU to keep it somewhat realistic and this move is recent, so it's coupled it the success of each in their old leagues (except TCU who I moved since it'd happen in real life.)

Big 12 I gave them two more teams mostly because I couldn't think of a better rename for them. SMU and Houston joined the league. (TCU was there before Houston when conferences weren't able to handle more than 16 teams)

C-USA FIU, Marist, Richmond and Temple are in C-USA now. Marist was way too good for their league, essentially. The rest came when other teams bailed for the Big East or Big XII.

The Big 10 and Pac-12 are setup how they'll be in the future, as well as the Mountain West. The WAC is a mess, but we'll get to that later, like I said.

The custom conferences of fake teams are the Superior League and the Premier League. They are both power leagues now.

I added three conferences of real-life schools too. The three conferences are:
League of America: A league of CCHA and WCHA hockey schools that don't play D1 anything other than hockey.

Group of Nine: A group of elite liberal arts colleges and universities all who play D3 in the real world.

University Athletic Association: The UAA is a prestigious D3 league of top rated universities with huge endowments including the University of Chicago, Washington University and Emory among others. I added MIT, Cal Tech and former member Johns Hopkins to this group.

So that's the basic rundown. The postseason tournaments are the same named, except I renamed the CIT into the TOC or Tournament of Champions.

Next I'm going to pick our maiden programs and explain to you how we decide who we can hire.

Should be Fun!

Obviously I could just scour the globe looking for a coach. And I will depending on the school, but I needed a formula that would make the process at least seemingly fair.

So here's what I've come up with in terms of our lone set of house rules if you will:

1. A team from a lower prestige conference can't hire the head coach of a team from a higher prestige league, no matter their budget size unless he's an alum of that school and over the age of 55. (This is an alumnus exemption, because it could make for a good story. I don't anticipate ever using it, though.) Thus a team from a 3 prestige league can't hire even the coach of the worst team from a 4 or 5 prestige league, even if they're a powerhouse.

2. My formula for deciding the head coach salary is like this: I add the salaries of all three assistants, plus the school recruiting budget to get a baseline number. This ensures that I can't pluck a head coach from someplace without paying the price.

So let's look at to examples:

DENVER plays in the WAC. Their total including assistants and budget is $320,000. That's the base salary of our head coach there. Because their prestige is just an 8, he gets no "incentive" bump. If I wanted to hire him away, I could if my school paid more than that. Or if our team and conference prestige was higher.

SAN DIEGO: A mid-major off a successful year out of the WCC. School prestige is a 52, so their coach gets a bump that is essentially that base salary multiplied by the conference prestige. In his case, that's a 3, so his total package is $819,000. Makes it harder for someone to swipe him.

COLORADO COLLEGE: Plays in the League of America. Coming off a 2o-win season but missed the NCAA tourney. Woeful budget, but a solid coach. Anyway, with a conference prestige of 1, even if their school prestige was higher than the 17 it is...his total deal would still only be $192,500. If he were younger, prime head coach material here for someone.

Now you get the system. If I want to hire away an assistant, all we need to do is be able to offer more and we can usually do that. The idea is to put more coaches in the pipeline and also, because it's harder to know whether they'll be good or not, the idea is to increase the risk that I'll pick the wrong guy.

Okay, now that we've clarified how that'll work...I'm going to decide on the programs to run and get this thing started.

(Well I actually tweaked the formula slightly since I wrote this. If a school has prestige over 65, it's worth an extra $10,000 per prestige point to make the "good" jobs even better and if they're over 85, it's even more. )

The idea behind this dynasty is the whole fascinating spectacle of mid-major coaches and seen the ascent of a guy like Billy Donovan who goes from the Providence bench as a player to the Florida bench winning two national titles. Or guys like Brad Stevens and Shaka Smart or the programs that seem to churn out these consistent mid-major talents who go on to bigger and better things.

So the idea here is to really profile the programs, the coaches and find the shooting stars in my own little universe. I'll probably go fast, but only to keep my own interest.

Here are the first programs we're going to spend the next four years following:

I'm going to start with just two this first year and then pick up two more next season.

OREGON STATE BEAVERS
This program was part of the reason I got more curious and decided to do this. To help you understand, the Pac-12 isn't even a 5 prestige league right now (they're at 4) but..what's insane about this team is they've made one NCAA appearance in their history and only 13 post-season appearances ever. (6 NIT, 6 CBI, 1 NCAA) and they've won a total of one game in that span.

From 1900-1999 that's a long span of futility.

Here is their current coach:


Two years into his deal, we're going to fire him and replace him with one of my easter egg coaches. I didn't create this guy, I did edit him on purpose in the vein of our Shaka Smart's. I wanted to see how the game would handle him. This isn't how it'll go for the rest of the way out -- the rest will be guys we scout and hire straight up -- but I want to see how a "super coach" can affect a moribund program. I edited him before I knew I'd do this dynasty though, but since he was out there, I decided to put him to work for us.


He was making $265,000 at SE Missouri State. At Oregon State, his base will be $471,250. Just a 38 prestige school, so no bumps here. So if he's successful, it seems like he'd bolt for a better situation. But I guess we'll see how that goes down.

Our second program to take over is actually one of our fictional schools. They've only been Division I since 1990, but in very Boise State-like fashion they've left their mark on the game in a very big way.


So what's the problem, you're thinking? Well, their head coach is 70-year old Virgil Rochelle. He joined the program after a decade another created school that plays in the Superior League - Central Valley State - in Visalia, California. He's a legend of the game and he's been great. But despite his success, he's never taken a team over the hump.

The feeling at this central New Jersey upstart institution is that Coach Rochelle has simply lost touch.


He's been in the game a really long time and he's still at it. But as AD, we've asked coach politely to retire. He's not happy about this request and decides to resign. A week later, he's named Head Coach at UTEP of Conference USA, as it seems he wants a chance to reach the Top 50 all-time list and he's about 20 wins or so short.

Anyway, back to Plainfield State. We can afford to pay a coach $3,582,780 according to CoachCalc. This means a few things:

1. As a 5-prestige conference program, we can target head coaches in leagues lower than ours. We can also target coaches in our own prestige level so long as their program has lower prestige and we can pay more.

2. We can rule out guys who are not current head coaches, as this is an elite job in an elite league with a salary that essentially commands a guy who can get results immediately.

This makes our search a lot better, as a result. Next, I'm going to narrow it down to three candidates and then choose someone as the head coach for Plainfield State basketball, who will hopefully get the program to the promised land that Coach Rochelle was unable to.

One of the first things you learn on the coaching search trail is that our $3.5 million doesn't go as far as you'd like it to go. For instance, UCF has made the tournament in each of the past 20 years. Their prestige is just a 90. Still, their budget is bigger than ours by enough that they pay their head coach over $5.3 million. Our big problem is our recruiting budget is significant lower than our competitors. Making the feat of success even more impressive.

Still, it limited the coaches I was able to consider trying to poach. After wiffing on guys like the head coach at UNC, I realized that getting a coach from a 5-prestige league would be out of our budget and set my sights on leagues of 4-prestige quality.

Those leagues include:

Amongst those leagues, I went shopping for the guys who had demonstrated some success in those leagues.

Our first candidate comes from The Ohio State University


Part of the problem with this search is most established head coaches are already quite old in this game. I'd like a younger guy if we can hack it, but the ones that are out there aren't exactly tearing up the airwaves in the success department. Still, I'd like some options. So even though I said I wouldn't do this, we're effectively a mid-major playing above our pay grade. So I'm going to look at some five-prestige assistant coaches and pick one for our finalist list.

But before we do that, in that search, I found a guy from a 5-tier program who we could get. He's not young, which depresses me. But he's accomplished and I feel like unlike our last guy, he's just in need of a better program that he can take to the promised land. Plus, the pressure is on him to deliver a Final Four in his current job, so he'd consider a chance to bolt for a slightly higher pay raise and access to better talent.

He's currently the head coach at Virginia Tech.


Our third and final candidate has to be a young guy since that's what I wanted.

The truth is, this game doesn't naturally generate "hot young coaches" in the way that real life does. I saw some assistants with potential, but the stakes are too high in essentially dumping a popular coach who built our program from scratch and I can't just replace him with anybody or it'll mean my job.

So instead, I looked for a guy who might have the ability to stay with us a while if he's successful, but has had success elsewhere trying to ignore ratings and focus more on performance and the ability to "sell" the hire to the alumni and public.

My extensive national search brought me this guy as our third candidate. He's actually a coach from our league. The head man at Anglican University in Tampa, he's a guy who I felt would be able to step in and provide the discipline we need to be successful at a high level. He played at Rutgers and has roots in the area, so the move isn't completely out of left field.


He's making $2.4 million at Anglican, so it'd be a pay raise of about $1.1 million and he'd be moving up the standings in the league to boot.

So those are our three candidates. I'm going to sleep on it and then make a decision tomorrow on who will lead Senators basketball into what we hope will be an era of championships.

Dunno how it happened, but the game apparently didn't save right and my files were borked. 100 years down the drain. Sigh. I'll do this again, but obviously not right this second.

Bleh.

Ahhhhh that really sucks.... Send em in to Brian to see if he could take a look at them. Although I'm pretty sure he went on vacation so it wont help your momentum/ motivation

This happened to me once and he couldn't get them back for me, but it was worth a shot. For whatever reason my computer rebooted in the middle of a save or the program crashed in the middle of a save (i hit save and left the room).

Being the AD 2: Another FBCB adventure - Front Office Football Central

It's March Madness. Decided to dive back in while I still feel like it.