Another Day. Another Alternate Universe. (FBCB/PB)
 

So this is a fairly substantial copy of what Emmett13 is doing, though he seems to have more patience playing game by game than I think I'll be able to muster.

All I've been wanting to do is create a universe where I can watch some guys go to the pros and then see how their careers end up. That's pretty much it. It'd be cool if some guys who weren't stars in college, manage to be big in the pros too, but in general, I don't care.

I've just been simming and seeing how it plays out for a while now and I figured I'd eventually start playing things out at some point.

Seems like now is as good a time as any.

I think my personal goal is to create a coach that has a successful career and breaks the all-time wins record before his time is up.

CHANGES
It's me, so you KNOW there are changes.

The WAC is gone. The American is now the American League and I've made some tweaks to it, too. I brought the UAA - the D3 league with elite schools to D1 and added a few D1 hockey programs to the big leagues as independents in recent years. The Pac-16 exists in this universe, as does a 16-team SEC and a 16-team Big Ten. But it all makes sense and the changes are relatively recent in some cases.

None of this will be relevant until they come up, but I figured you ought to know.



The Coach
My head coach will be a prodigy Shaka Smart-like talent so we can hit the ground running.

He's going to start his career as a young head coach at Cal State-San Bernardino. They're currently an independent, which is lame and his job is going to be to get into a conference through winning and not being terrible.

Last year, the Coyotes went to the NIT and lost in the 3rd round after winning 24 games. This is their 3rd year in D1 play since moving up from D2 and their hope is to get out of the independents and into a conference. Along with CSU Monterey Bay, there is some speculation that the Big West conference is considering an expansion to 12 teams that would add the programs. The Big Sky conference is also considering a west coast expansion that would envelope the non-football playing schools.

NCAA CHAMPIONS

Cal State San Bernadino Coyotes
2010-2013
2010-2011 Season Recap
2011-2012 Season Recap
2012-13 Season Recap


Portland Pilots
2013-2020
2013-14 Season Recap
2014-15 Season Recap
2015-16 Season Recap
2016-17 Season Recap
2017-18 Season Recap
2018-19 Season Recap


Maryland Terrapins
2019-
2019-20 Season Recap
2020-21 Season Recap

2010-2011 Season Recap
 

Not my players. Not my schedule. Still a solid year on balance with wins against Stanford and played ranked Santa Clara tough. I'll take it. Lost in the 3rd round of the NIT again.








The Big Sky Conference offered both CSU-MB and CSU-SB invitations to join, in an effort to expand their presence to Southern California, especially since we're not football programs. It's not the Big West invite either program wanted, but it'll be a shot at getting to the NCAA tournament that isn't possible now as an independent.

We accept.

2011-12 SEASON RECAP
 

I forgot to mention we're playing with a 2 and done rule right now, so guys can't leave until they are sophomores.

First year in a real conference and I knew that things would be rough. Injuries didn't help, nor did bringing in 7 new players plus a transfer from MIT who spent most of the year hurt.

I think it's hard to look at this year and think it's anything other than a disappointment, but we lost some talent, we're inexperienced and we ended up in a new league that seemed less competitive than it really is.

My hope is that next year we'll be in better shape, but no guarantees.





2011-2012 CHAMPIONS

NCAA: Loyola Marymount def. LSU
Final Four: Santa Clara, SMU
NIT: North Carolina
CBI: San Diego State
CIT: Iona

All-time Coach Wins List
 

Here's the all-time record for coach wins & titles.

2012-13 SEASON RECAP
 

2012-13
NCAA: Michigan State def. South Florida
FINAL FOUR: Santa Clara, Kansas
NIT: Mercer
CBI: Howard
CIT: Yale

Coach Synder took an offer to become head coach at the University of Portland. The Pilots are the worst team in one of the best conference in our league, the West Coast Conference.

Their last post-season appearance came in 1991 and their last winning season in 1996. It'll be a tough job, but we're hoping that we can create a winning culture at the university.

Known for his recruiting prowess, coach Synder brought some of the best classes in the Big Sky during their three years in that league, making many believe that working his west coast connections, he'll be able to get Portland into a respectable place in the conference.

2013-14 SEASON RECAP
 

First year in Portland was mostly about installing a system and recruiting. The nice thing about a better conference already is seeing that we can get the best player in our state to show up. That's my new policy, too. Every year, the best player in the state always gets recruited by our programs, unless it's just not a good positional fit, but even then, we recruit them and attempt to get them as a walk-on if nothing else.

It's just a good policy and it ties up a schollie, but I like the idea.

Besides, that it's mostly about seeing where the chips fall this year. Overall, I was pleased with their effort, we didn't bring anybody in, this was the roster we inherited except for one transfer.

I knew the WCC part of the schedule would be rough and it was. Bright side is that some of our seniors performed admirably with better coaching. I think the other coaches have a tough time with my league setup because the talent level is a lot better than what the game has pre-loaded and so, it's not unusual in my current iteration for there to be guys ranked out of the Top 500 who are 4 or 5 star recruits.

What I like about this is parity reigns, but it also means ratings don't mean a whole lot and it comes down to gameplanning and luck rather than just riding one or two guys to a title. What I have now feels more like basketball.

Anyway, I'm excited for our recruiting class next year to show up, just to see if we can install a system that starts to work over the next few seasons.

2013-14
Notre Dame def. San Francisco
FINAL FOUR: Northwestern, Michigan State
NIT: Tennessee
CBI: Iowa State
CIT: Old Dominion

Also worth noting that CSU San Bernardino won a school record 26 games en route to a 26-9 season. They lost in the Big Sky semis, but were on pace as regular season champs to make the NCAAs for the first time. They lost in the Sweet 16 of the NIT.

2014-15 SEASON RECAP
 

We recruited a Top 25 class last year, but we're still burning off the old recruits. Also, the WCC is a tough league. Rebuilding takes a long time.

Here's the recruiting catch from this past season.










CHAMPS
NCAA: Seton Hall def. Kansas
FINAL FOUR: Maryland, Arizona
NIT: Chattanooga
CBI: Kentucky
CIT: UC Irvine

The talent inflation of my league -- I modified the FBCB.ini file a while back after getting stuck in a wormhole of one of the dudes in the main forum talking about the game's bad rebounding -- and I have it at a place where I like the way it's generating recruits.

For starters, I don't have to modify players anymore -- it's tedious and I hate it -- but it's also fun to see how teams all have really good players -- much like real life -- so there's parity, but still there's a good chance major conference teams will usually win with some exceptions. It also makes it REALLY CHALLENGING to play, because essentially now there are guys who might be otherwise "1 star players" who have 5 star potential if they get into the right system. It makes it hard to really know what tricks for roster composition are necessary to create a dominant team besides "have a lot of prestige and recruit Top 25 players and get a bunch to sign with you."

It's especially notable during tournament time where you just can't be sure who will win, you can expect your bracket to be busted and yet, the guys who go to the NBA and have solid careers might have played on teams that didn't do much in the NCAAs (a la Ben Simmons) and so it's an interesting way to play. I'm still adapting to the league in a non-simming context, but as I recruit and sim, it's interesting to see how the results play out.

Speaking of things working, Cal State San Bernadino won 27 games last year and made the NCAAs for the first time under their 2nd head coach since Coach Synder left, his replacement left after one year for Wash U in St. Louis.

Given those are the players we brought in, it's good to see that the system works. I don't have any massive regrets about leaving too soon, I felt like proving ourselves in a top tier league would pay more dividends in the long term than whatever we were going to do in a low-level league without the resources to really recruit how we wanted.

But it does prove there are a surplus of west coast and international recruits.

We'll see if we can turn the tide over the next few years before our talent starts leaving. Luckily, none of our guys are so highly touted that they leave us for the NBA yet, so at least we're likely to hang onto them for 3 to 4 years. Hopefully I didn't just jinx it.

2015-16 SEASON RECAP
 

No scholarships available this year, so it made simming this season relatively easy.

It's hard to judge this team during the OOC schedule, so I just wait until the real season because there are no nights off in the WCC. 9-4 in the non-conference is a good start to the year, especially if wins are going to be hard to come by.

This year at least we finally got more than one scoring option. Last year, we were losing so much because we didn't have diversity in our scoring. So this was another year of mehgasm, but I went into the conference tournament and actually tweaked the setup of our offense a bit -- I'd been doing that all year -- and trying to distribute the ball better than the AI was doing it.

I can't coach games outright, that just doesn't appeal to me. But this was a hope that maybe we could get hot for a few games and do the unthinkable.

I started our freshman PG Arnold Beddingfield from South Dakota (Mr. Basketball babyeeee) who actually spent half the year redshirting, before I decided there was no reason to leave him out if he could help us.

I ran the offense through our bigs, rather than relying on our wing guys to outscore our opposition because IT WASN'T WORKING.

WCC Tournament 1st Round


In the WCC Quarters, we got #15 Pepperdine. Kept the scheme in place. Money in the bank.


That setup a WCC Semi-Finals date with another would-be Cinderella 11th seeded Grand Canyon, who we've beaten this year. Let this not be the game where we choke.

Luckily, we somehow pull it out. The dream continues.


That sets up a WCC Tournament Final against top-seed Santa Clara, who beat us 75-62 in the only game we played against them this year. But we were only down 1 at halftime in that matchup, playing with our OLD setup (AI induced) and so I'm wondering if my changes will be the trick to get us over the hump?!?!


It wasn't to be. But I really admire the fight in these guys this year. None of that was expected at all and they really had me believing we could do it for a bit of time there. Provided we don't lose anybody major, next year could be a lot of fun.

We don't have any seniors, so technically we should be okay save for transfers.






I'll do the scheduling myself next year in the hopes that we can load up on wins in the OOC, but it won't matter if we can't win in-conference when it counts.

Fingers crossed.


CHAMPIONS
NCAA: St. John's def. Maryland
FINAL FOUR: Baylor, Louisville
NIT: Rutgers
CBI: Brandeis
CIT: NYU

2016-17 SEASON RECAP
 

I was prepared for disappointment. Once we got our recruiting class set by January, I turned on the sim and let the game run its course, I need to go to bed and I figure any tinkering I was going to do would just make it worse.

We hired a coaching staff, let them do the job we hired them for.

But man.

The inconsistency of February obscured the fact that the Pilots would be finishing with a winning record for the first time in 20 years. With a win or two in teh conference tournament, we might even be looking at a post-season appearance in the CBI, which would be the team's first postseason tournament since 1991.

But first things first, winning conference tournament games. Just like last year, I took over the gameplanning reigns not enjoying the AI's insistence on a 15 man rotation for the last two months of the season.


That secure the program's first 20-win season since 1989 and a trip back to the conference semis for the 2nd straight year. Is there magic in this club?

We face off against 9th seed Gonzaga


That win gets us a date with 6th seed Pepperdine for the WCC tournament title and a bid at the NCAA tournament. A place that Portland hasn't seen since that fateful 1989 season where the program won 22 games.

I moved Horace Spangler into the starting lineup for this game.


Welp, it wasn't pretty and yet...it's a result.

The Pilots are going dancing! We're a 9-seed in the South Region for the program's first NCAA tournament appearance in 27 years.

As you can tell, my writeup was developed under the idea that we'd be losing somewhere along the way and I'd do a normal season recap with stats and then these guys screwed around and decided to start going on a win streak.

Now I have to go to sleep knowing we've got a tournament to play in. I expect just one game, but...at the same time, this game -- especially with my setup -- loves upsets and so, why not us?

2016-17 SEASON RECAP CONTINUED
 

The greatest Pilots season in history resulted in an improbable Final Four run that I cannot begin to explain. My gameplanning was working, so we stuck with it all the way through the Baylor game.

Warning you now, Coach Synder will be parlaying this insane run into a new job elsewhere. I already have his replacement sitting on the bench, the former coach at Providence that we hired as the #1 assistant and who would've gotten the job if we somehow missed the post-season this year because Synder would've been fired.

NCAA: Santa Clara def. Baylor
FINAL FOUR: PORTLAND, Clemson
NIT: Washington
CBI: Tennessee State
CIT: Detroit



Champlin is going pro this year, so we lose him to the pros. It's understandble, he's kind of great. Will be fun to see what he does at the next level.

Keith Beecroft transferred, pissed that we redshirted him. This game is broken in that way and I hate it so much. I should turn off transfers, but it's a good way to move talent around generally.

Also, after pondering it before finally calling it a night, decided Coach Synder is coming back for another year at Portland. Who knows what will happen, but these are his guys, any other job would be a rebuild again or guys who aren't his and it's just exhausting. After this improbable run, it'll be interesting to come back, prove it wasn't a fluke and see what these guys are made of.

2017-18 SEASON RECAP (PT 1)
 

Tried to balance the schedule this year with a few "fun" games against good opponents although we didn't need that with the bloodbath that is WCC play. I wanted to get a gut check to see how good the team was heading into conference play by doing so.

This is almost surely our last year in Portland. Senior-laden team, but small budgets when you go get the kinds of coaches we do to help keep the ship afloat. Coach Synder thinks he has the tools to be elsewhere. Now it's just a matter of executing it, a bad season will probably mean some kind of lateral move.

We'll see how it goes.

Whereas last year's team was very top heavy with height, this year's squad is way more reliant on guard play. That has not boded well for us in the past, simply because we don't have the kinds of athletes who can last an entire game against more elite competition. Or we're just more inconsistent. Or both.

Either way, I'm not sure how this year will go as a result. It's a heavily recruited team of really good players, all brought here by me. So it'll be a sink or swim type situation.

By February, I decided to change the lineup a bit to see if we could capitalize on our outside shooting and I was the reason for the 4 game losing streak, so clearly I have no idea what I'm doing. I fixed it back, but it was too late.

Basically our post-season hopes were essentially in the tank. Without a few wins in the conference tournament, we weren't even going to be playing in a minor tournament this coming year. You can chalk the return season to a loss of elite personnel, which is fine but...it's still a bummer. A post-season appearance would salvage things a bit, to put it mildly.


In the middle of the conference tournament, I made an offensive switch moving the primary ballhandlers to Guerin (who I previously thought wasn't very good), Corey Opp and Ridgeway who I was actually big on. This had a transformative effect on our offensive situation. I'm mad I didn't notice until March.

To show, here's the first game of the conference tournament which we beat Pepperdine.


It took me to the conference semis to figure it out. But here's the difference:


Where the hell was 26 PPG Guerin all year? He wasn't getting enough touches, it turns out. He gets to the line and is a difference maker for us in the paint. Not useful at much else, but hell...what he's useful for is big. We win the conference tournament for the 2nd straight year.


Our 1st round game as a 12-seed in the Midwest region is against 5th seed Northwestern. We beat them.


In the 2nd round, we take on 4th seed Xavier. I move Darryon Cantor further down the bench. It pays dividends as we head back to the Sweet 16. Guerin again is player of the game. I am flabbergasted.


In the Sweet 16, we take on top seed Baylor and lose. But a heck of a year after starting off slowly. Guerin is a star, we lose but he has a double-double.


It was a high pressure, double team defense that we also used in these games. But in this game, we ended up turning the ball over way too much to be useful and couldn't capitalize on them being 0 of 10 from downtown.

Still, salvaged a good year and proved last year was no fluke even though this year was more of a fluke than that one was.

2017-18 SEASON RECAP (PT 2)
 

Worth noting that 3 #1 seeds made the Final Four. I haven't seen that in a really long time, like surely since the 1950s or so that I've seen that.

CHAMPIONS
NCAA: Baylor def. St. Johns
FINAL FOUR: Seton Hall, Butler
NIT: Yale
CBI: Utah
CIT: South Alabama

2018-19 SEASON PREVIEW
 

We're back again.

There was just no logical move to make. I looked for one, but honestly, there wasn't anything that made sense from a professional (or storyline) perspective. So, we're back again. The good news is, we bring back our breakout postseason star and some other familiar faces.

Maybe its three tournament appearances in a row for the Pilots? Maybe? We'll see how an entire season of my new offensive/defensive scheming works on the rest of the league and whether they pick up on it.

2018-19 SEASON RECAP
 

I'm glad this season is over. Don't get me wrong, we pulled the three-peat in the conference tournament because I apparently know how to gameplan for four days in March. It's the regular season in a bloodbath league against tough teams that I have a harder time with. I bet if I played out games, I'd see a better result or adapted my gameplan game by game.

But I can't quite bring myself to play that slowly yet.

In any case, in a rebuilding year of sorts, we make the tournament for the 3rd straight year this time as a 15-seed and go one and done to SMU.

We'll see what jobs are available after this season, but we'll be looking hard for a liferaft. Portland is fine, just ready for the next step.






CHAMPIONS
NCAA: Chattanooga def. Cincinnati
FINAL FOUR: Villanova, Clemson
NIT: VCU
CBI: Western Carolina
CIT: Kentucky

Next Stop....
 

Coach Synder becomes the 13th head basketball coach in the history of University of Maryland basketball after Frank Rushing II retired. The team's last national title came in 1968, they've won four in their history.


The program brings back a senior laden team with six seniors and a pre-season rank of #2. High expectations and questionable experience makes the fans in College Park skeptical about this decision.

2019-20 SEASON RECAP (Pt. 1)
 

With a senior-heavy team, there were six scholarships available this year at Maryland. The good news is that we get to put our stamp on this team really early into our tenure and hopefully, we can take these seniors and everyone else together into a run this year.

We needed bigs more than anything, but really, just a full rebuild of the starting lineup. It'll probably take me half a year to figure out how this team plays and works together, the pre-season rank does give me some hope that they're talented enough to compete leaguewise and just needed better coaching to get over the hump.

But I won't know.

RECRUITING CLASS

We have one scholarship available, but I'm holding onto it for now. I will say this job has been nice in that, when I want to recruit a guy, it's a lot easier to get into the rooms of dudes that at Portland we had a hard time convincing. Plus the distance on the east coast makes it easier to recruit across states whereas out west, it can be more challenging, though California does have a ton of prospects that go unnoticed each year and not all are elite 4/5 star guys, but lower ranked dudes who just don't get evaluated.

It was a relatively smooth season for us, especially compared to life in Portland. We won the conference tournament without a hitch, entering the event as the #2 seed. We head to the NCAAs as a 5-seed in the East Region at 25-8. My thinking without looking, is that we're probably underseeded, but that might benefit us.

Our first round matchup? Pepperdine. I leave the WCC and I can't avoid its teams. (In case you were wondering, our friends in Portland did not have a good year. The team went 9-22 in our first year away.)

Like I said, I thought we were underseeded and our post-season experience sort of showed that. I didn't have to tinker much with the lineup, I did during the conference tournament, basically making a deeper rotation than I like (but with the talent level, I felt it was warranted) but that's it.

We got the team back to the Elite 8 for the first time in 4 years, but anything less than a Final Four would be a disappointment. Our barrier? Nebraska also in the B1G of course.






FINAL FOUR: 2) Clemson 1) DePaul 2) Baylor 5) Maryland


NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP

Welp.

2019-2020 SEASON RECAP PART 2.
 

I'd love to tell you this title was all by design.

Did I look at the roster and think "if this goes right, we could have a good year?" Yeah, absolutely. Coach Synder did not expect to pull a Tubby Smith and win a title in his first year in College Park, however.

And yet, here we are.





Much like my Portland teams, no respect from the award-givers. But we'll take the ultimate prize thank you.

2020-21 PRESEASON PREVIEW
 

Top 5 recruiting class, so Coach Synder can change coasts and he's still got it.

We'll see how good the replacements are at helping us offset what we lost, though I imagine some will be redshirted. Didn't get another transfer schollie this signing period either, so we'll run with what we've got.

I'm tweaking the FBCB.ini file again, not the talent level of the players. I like how confusing that is, for the most part. I'm severely lowering foreign talent because that's been an exploit for a bit in my existing game -- since they don't get recruited -- and lowering the talent level slightly (but still way above the stock install) because I feel like my league's talent levels are more reflective of real life.

I've done the reverse before, with terrible players under the idea that maybe it would mean the "best" players would appear more readily and be more dominant, but what really ended up happening was just a ton of junk players emerged and it's not as fun to play the game.

But mostly, I wanted to fix possessions. Scoring is way too high and I'd like to see it slow down a bit, but I hadn't figured out what to do until I did some searching. So this next season, we'll just see how it goes without any real idea of how it's going to work.

EDIT: Basically, I changed it back to the default values with the exception of changing usage of the guards to be higher than the use of the SF/C like in the default. It looks a lot better. Oh, the lone exception I made is I increased the Time value to 1250, basically to lower the # of possessions team have to diminish scoring. Small sample size (and no Maryland games yet) but it looks good to me.

Also increased injuries to 200%. If you know me, I hate injuries with a passion, but with the way the league is setup with all of this talent, I feel like it's good to have injuries on to see how teams adapt with depth and to give really good benchwarmers a shot to play. Injuries were previously at 150%, but during the playoffs, I turn them down to 50%. I had suspensions off, but I've turned those on too at 200% as well, at least for the time being.

During the post-season, I lower both those values probably to around 50% because the algorithm doesn't know what it's doing.

2020-21 SEASON RECAP
 

Finally scoring is back to reality.

We lose in the second round of the tournament to Louisville. Not bad for a team that started March on the bubble. I'm still adjusting to scoring being down and really, to the personnel on this team. It's a lot of fun and gun right now. We'll see how it shapes up next year and how I adapt accordingly.

CHAMPIONS
NCAA: Baylor def. North Carolina

Clerical Items 2021-22 OFFSEASON
 

The Independents have reformed as a scheduling alliance named the Federated League (FL) and joining the five independents are four schools from New Jersey and one from Wisconsin.

The league does not get an automatic NCAA tournament bid, but by hosting a conference tournament for the first time, they're going to eligible for a CIT bid I think like the Great West used to get in real life.

2021-22 SEASON RECAP
 

Disappointing year. I scheduled too many tough OOC game and we ended up in a preseason tournament playing Xavier when we'd already had them on the real schedule. It was just a mistake and I should've known better.

Oh well. We're losing 3 players to the draft: Cs David Mayhan and Jimmie Candelaria, as well as guard Abdul Beets. Beets has been a star, Candelaria has had his moments and both will be hard to replace.

I clearly need to adjust my system, the press and defend hard scheme of a few years ago just isn't as effective anymore.







FINAL FOUR
6) MIAMI 1) South Florida 5) Marquette 3) Notre Dame

NIT: Stanford
CBI: NC Central
CIT: Northern Arizona

Just monitoring the coach's career is getting to be a bit of a drag by itself. I'm kicking around some kind of daily fantasy game to spice things up a bit. It'll get me through the holy grail of ::gasp:: playing out games and it'll also let me do the G-d mode thing of being able to look around the league. Things are going too fast and I can't really keep up.

Once I get good at it in college, I can export the way I play daily fantasy to the NBA league I'm simming (it's a few years behind the college league, though. Eventually they'll be on the same schedule.)

The real problem with daily fantasy is that I have no one to play against since it's my league. So I need to figure out a simple way to do it where I can essentially play against myself.

Come tournament time, I can just figure out a way to monetize my Starting Ten forum game that Wade Moore and I run every year here on the forums. I can't play precisely that way - I've tried - but again, because there is no opponent it doesn't quite work as well and me creating a bunch of teams and playing against myself is a little silly.

So I'll need to come up with some ideas. Feel free to share some ideas. I'm getting more immersed into the league and now that the stats are back to earth and rotations are normalized, it'll be a fun league to follow. I just need to come up with some ways to 'gamble' against the sim results...and then I can create a spreadsheet to track the ridiculousness.

1) I'm absolutely doing some kind of NCAA tournament bracket game, where I essentially pick my bracket and then I earn points for every correct entry that translates to some kind of prize pool.

2) But I'm still contemplating exactly how I can do a daily fantasy-like game against my league without any other players to compete against and without having to create multiple teams to "play against myself" because that doesn't really sound all that fun.

I'd prefer some kind of method where I earn money for picking a team and/or players (probably players over teams tbh...or some combo) because it'll mean I have to explore all of the players out there, get to know them and all that.

Here are my games
 

1. Sports Agent: I use my old coach salary generator to generate contracts for the coaches I pick, starting off with assistants and then moving into emerging head coaches to build an agency.

2. Glory Hunter: A game where I pick a team in any day's slate of games that I pick to win & predict the number of points they score. If they score at or above the number I pick, I win $100. Each entry is $25.

3. The Hot Hand: A daily game where I pick the leading scorer from either team. I get $25 bucks for each one I get right.

4. Bracket Madness: An NCAA tournament bracket game, this the ultimate money game each year, as there will be a randomized jackpot that could exceed $1 million. (or be as low as $250k)

I haven't decided exactly how it works yet, though.

I start off with $1000. I might add games or discontinue others. And I don't have to play them everyday during the season, just when I want to. I think I want some kind of daily scoring game, I just haven't figured out how I want it to work.

My first two sport agent clients are Joshua Wemmer, an assistant at Louisville and Darryl Jowett, an assistant at Temple.

My coach calculator also has a calculator for career assistants picking their first job. Jowett, according to the calculator can take any job up to a 44 prestige at is current level, which is also based on his head coach (Think of it as a recommendation.)


That's the list of programs at 44 and below prestige level.


He's a young guy, Temple is a good program and so I doubt he'll take a job this late in the cycle. Another good season by the Owls would get him potentially at a higher level to take even better jobs.

On the other hand, Wemmer has a lot of experience and is almost surely ready for his own program. I haven't run him through the calculator yet to see what job he can get.



Wemmer would be eligible for a job up to a 59 prestige right now. I'm thinking he might take a job before the start of this season, a la a coach leaves a program just before the season starts because he should already be a head coach. Alternatively, he could hang out and wait to take over at Louisville when Sammie Macklin who he's been with his whole career finally decides to retire. But that could be another 10 years.

Starting with the 2018-19 season in my NBA league, we're going to shorten the season from 82 games to 70 games. Records be damned.

It shouldn't affect as much as you think though, because games are going to increase from 12 minute quarters to 20 minute quarters. Over the course of a season, players will still play almost as many minutes as an 82 game season.

We'll see how the first year experiment goes before I decide what to do about it long term. I'm going to (probably) expand by two teams next year to get the league from 34 to 36. (San Jose and one other city)

For 2022-23, I changed the NBA draft eligibility back to a 1 and done rule. I'm curious to see what it does to parity, but the game won't end up noticing and it won't take effect until 2023-24.

The NBA simming is catching up. I'm about to take over an NBA team, perhaps having a feeder program will give me a reason to follow the college game more closely because my gimmick games haven't held my attention yet.

Maybe I'm just too old and unfocused for text sims anymore.

For 2020-21 season, my NBA expanded to 36 teams (from 34) adding the San Jose Whalers (unless you have a better idea) and the Virginia (Beach) Admirals.

I'm going to run the expansion draft for both teams. The idea is to do them with totally different philosophies and see how it pans out.

Virginia is going to build a team that can win now. They have the #1 overall pick and San Jose got the 4th pick in the lottery.

San Jose is going to opt for a strategy where they can get younger guys to build around and maintain their financial flexibility a bit more.

I only know a handful of the guys in the pros at this point, with so many leagues and so much simming, it'll be a learning process to put it mildly, but I'm intrigued to see how both teams evolve.

It's the off-season heading into the 2024-25 season. There are 36 teams in the NBA, but I decided it's too many. I killed off the D-League heading into this year and created a second division "NBA Second Division (NBA2)"

and to staff it, we're going to take 12 NBA teams and relegate them.

I created a Liga MX style relegation format to figure out what teams get relegated, taking the win totals of the teams over the past 4 years to average out who would get dropped.

Here's the verdict. Promotion/Relegation System FBPB3 - Google Sheets

After this season, two teams get relegated each year. I thought it'd be an interesting twist and frankly, I think would make the NBA more interesting or at least, we'll see if it does or not.

Hilariously, I didn't have to adjust the divisions and this format didn't create any conference inbalances, an equal number of teams from the eastern and western conferences managed to get dropped. I got rid of divisions starting this upcoming year, both leagues will be a single table. NBA season is shortened from 70 games to 50 games. Playoffs are now just 10 teams in the NBA rather than 16.

I think rather than let the game handle pro/rel, I'm probably going to keep using this system to do it instead. Otherwise, what happens is...you have to figure out which of the worst team from whatever division to relegate and that's just not fun. Plus it adds some drama to the process each year.

The college league and pro league have caught up with each other on the timeline, so I'll start simming slower now after I run through one test season of the NBA league just to make sure it'll work post-pro/rel.

I think after watching League Two playoffs, I decided this would work best in the NBA more than any other league besides MLS, so hence this test. Well and those Raptors first two series weren't a joy either.

I screwed up the setup of the 2nd league and the game won't be able to sim to the playoffs. I have to restart the league, but at least I have a ton of college files to seed. Bleh.

I reset my college league (and a corresponding pro league) where I'll have players being fed from an omnibus college league where all three divisions of NCAA have players entered. I'm going to mess around with the data set and see how the players end up performing in a league where I've turned ratings off.