One-night dynasties: One & Done era basketball (FBCB)
 

With Hartford going from D1 to D3 in basketball, I started thinking about the portal era and how it's not possible to make that happen in Fast Break College Basketball. Instead, the only thing you can really do is clear out rosters and replace them with new players by taking everyone off scholarship and cutting them and then releasing the rest to the draft so they leave after the current season.

I don't want to do a long dynasty that I won't ever come back to, but I'm wondering if I can run a several seasons experiment in my current long-running FBCB save where I take over a team, release everybody and max their budget (by changing the assistant salaries to $1 before start of the recruiting period, so the game uses it all) and see what sorts of players they can sign when they have max scholarships to offer. (where I do typically DC-like shit, playing in God-mode and renaming terribly named players and randomly moving teams across conferences and adding teams that should be D1)

Every year in FBCB, there are tons of good players who simply go unsigned by teams because they don't have scholarships and instead of diffusing to bad programs, they all want to play at good schools, the good schools don't offer them and they either walk on sign very late to programs where they might not play. My saves use a custom FBCB.ini file that maximizes talent to reflect the "hidden gems" of real-life college sports, in a way that the game model does not allow for as easily.

I also fixed my height.ini file along with that FBCB file to try to reflect more position-less basketball, but with nearly 400 teams and having learned how to induce more upsets (by changing the pace of play in-game throughout the season) I feel like it'd be fun to see what weird stuff we could induce.

Usually, I'd take over some program that is in some random conference and isn't known to be a power school, but since we're trying to mimic the current era of college sports with one-and-dones (right now, my league is at juniors leaving...because I am not playing an NBA file actively) then we'll shop for some down-on-their-luck major programs, coupled with an upstart or two.

I'll probably help them by building a manual schedule too, but then we'll just simulate the season and see how the team does after checking out their haul of recruits and seeing what they were able to get and what they did.

The game is really bad at generating useful transfers, but I might even experiment with one of the teams using ONLY transfers and seeing how good a team that does that can maximize. Given how bad most transfers are in-game, it's unlikely that it'll do much, but I'm still curious about it.

Let's see if I can channel my dynasty energy into a hour or two of interesting storylines.

I'm going to increase quarter-seconds to 2400 and keep pace in the 1200-1300 range so that 1) scores don't get high but 2) more guys get to play in the hopes that it'll make our transfers actually have stats when they transfer versus what mostly happens in this game, where you get a bunch of redshirts and greyshirts who transfer without every having played.

Right now, only going to commit to one season of this weirdness unless I find the whole storyline compelling enough to do for another season.

This first season, all we'll do is identify the teams we're going to use and simulate to the post-season since I can't really do anything re: transfers until after the season ends.

Here's the current state of the recent national champions

Our first target program for this storyline are the Washington Huskies who still play in the charred husk of the Pac-12, but have only made the NCAA tournament one time in their history somehow in 1956. Only Vanderbilt is the other major conference program with only one NCAA appearance.

So we'll release everybody from their roster, first with the walk-ons and then with existing players after this season. That means, this year they'll play without any intervention including recruiting and we don't take over until March when we scavenge what's left of the recruiting board, fire the head coach & begin the one-year salvage job.



So we're going to run the 2032 season unabated, then I'm going to 1) declare their entire roster for the draft and 2) use the open scholarships to grab as many useful transfers possible. Then we'll run the regular season, and then wait until 3) March before making any offers in 2033 on anyone left who might be willing to sign with them. Then 2034 you can see what this team is really made of, essentially.

Here are the dudes we're getting rid of after this season. There are already 5 scholarships coming available because of the seniors. In the off-chance anyone useful comes out of that class -- doubtful -- we can keep them around, but given how persistently bad this program has been, I'm not sure we will.

WASHINGTON HUSKIES 2032 ROSTER



They are led by 5th year head coach Buford Perez, who is 73-86 and has an NIT appearance to his credit and was named Pac-12 Conference Coach of the Year in 2027 for that. Since then, crickets tho. We'll give him a 6th year, he's a 100 in recruiting and maybe he can be useful. But chances are, the former UCLA assistant in his first head coaching job will get the ax after this transition year.

For this year, I opted to use the significant budget improvements to mostly tap the international recruiting market, with some minor exceptions.

In doing this, I basically am answering my own question on "how quickly can you turn a program around using new players" and it's a bummer we can't move underutilized guys around, but I think what we'll do to try to attempt this with another program this off-season using only transfers is to 1) release the entire class of a program via the draft, giving them 12 scholarships and then 2) temporarily increase their prestige before the transfer period to make them more appealing to potential transfers, which should mostly let you fill the roster of a new team using only portal players.

The nice thing about this we'll have two programs to follow next season and we can see how it worked out for both of them using two different models. We'll pick two more probably and try it again.

For the transfer experiment, we'll use a mid-major program though.

Also, after this season I decided that for at least next season I'm going to turn international recruits off because unless you severely constrain their talent, there's always too many and I like them as an equalizer, but there are just too many generated and I'm curious to see how it benefits American recruiting for at least a season and it's going to coincide with improved talent on the recruiting side generally. So better American recruits will generate for next season, too.

I fired Buford Perez of Washington after a 6-13 start on the season (the way you do this is to take over the head coach and resign him mid-season) and had one of the assistants take over the rest of the year, like real life. I used the best assistant for recruiting, though. For my dynasties, coaches are mostly decoration, though.

The regular season is complete. Washington finishes its season at 8-22 and lost in the 1st round of the Pac-12 tournament.



As for our transfer program this off-season, I've selected Alaska-Anchorage who along with Fairbanks I brought up to D1 years ago. UAF has made the NCAAs before, but Anchorage has never made the tournament. I'm going to see if we can transfer portal our way to a tournament in 2034 using whatever we can grab. UAA plays in the WAC and had a good season, finishing 19-12 and will play in the CBI tournament as a 13-seed. Not bad for their hodgepodge roster and I'll keep their coach in tow, but wonder what he'll do with potentially better talent.

I will keep the one Alaska native on the roster though. I'm super excited for the Washington recruiting class, which will surely be really good because I drew from so many international players and had such a big budget from which to get them. No idea how they'll perform and we'll still need to hire a head coach for Washington, too.

Oklahoma beat Indiana 84-74 to win the national title. Minnesota & Charlotte were the other two Final Four teams.

Washington hired former Kent State Head Coach Chris Sehic Jr, a young coach with an impressive pedigree. 3-time Conference Coach of the Year and has led two programs to the Sweet 16. Two years ago, he took Kent State to the Elite 8.

If there's a mid-major coach capable of leading the #1 recruiting class in the nation, this guy would seem to be a good fit for the task. Should be fun to see what the team does this year with sky high expectations, but no real legacy of success.



Meanwhile in Anchorage, our coach left and we picked up a former NC Central Assistant Chris Aikens who was part of 3 Final Four teams and a national title as an assistant, but he's never been a head coach. We'll see how well we can recruit in the portal to get him a roster that has only 3 players, a walk-on, a freshman and a returnee.

The portal players are absolute garbage, so this plan isn't going to work as nicely as I'd hoped, even with the increased time on the clock for players, seems nobody with any real game experience bothered to transfer. Which sucks for our storyline, but perhaps Alaska will uncover some diamonds in the rough? Who knows? (Probably not)

I can't afford not to offer the dudes who are interested in the program because otherwise, tthey'll just be stuck with a roster of walk-ons and I kind of want to see what it's likely to start a roster of guys from elsewhere even if they're bad. Increasing Alaska's prestige doesn't seem to have impacted positively who we can get out of the transfer portal, sadly.

We picked up guys from Clemson, Wyoming, UC Irvine, UAPB and the rest will just be walkons. Two of the transfers are seniors. To make things neat and fun, I made Washington participate in this year's Great Alaska Shootout, which UAA hosts.


With one and done's back on, this Washington class probably only has one year together realistically before a bunch of them will leave. But I'm not sure how good these dudes really are. Anything besides a tournament appearance for the #1 recruiting class in the country that I spent a 500k recruiting budget to score would be a massive disappointment, whereas Alaska will likely struggle to repeat last year's post-season appearance. Without international recruits in this year's pool, I'm not sure who they'll recruit, but I will recruit for them like I did for Washington last year, but I will turn CPU on for everything in Washington's case.

UAA's season was as bad as you'd expect with a team full of mostly walk-ons and little used transfers.



(Heaton is the Alaska native and a walk-on, strangely.)

Washington doubled it's win total from last year, which counts as success, but missed both the CBI and NIT brackets.


We'll see how many of these guys come back and whether they can build on the rebuild.

My UAA recruiting haul wasn't bad and good for 39th in the country. I aimed for a lot of Mr. Basketball-type guys in underrecruited states and when there were guys who didn't have more than a school or two interested, I would throw the house at them recruiting-wise to keep them interested. It didn't always work, but it worked well enough for me to recruit a pretty diverse class nationally.

The team is extremely undersized and we'll have to use the trash transfer market to get some experience and size. Once I've done that, I'm going to auto-sim the season and see how the team does (and we'll check in on Washington) and then that'll be the end of the road for this dynasty.

Washington finished 18-13 (11-7 in the Pac-12) but did not make a post-season tourney. UAA finished 4-25 (1-13) which is awful, but...I guess it's realistic.

On the bright side, the whole purpose of this dynasty was to figure out to induce more transfers with actual playing time -- perhaps to even get some good transfers once in a while -- and I figured it out based on research I'd done years ago, which involves increasing Pressbreak/Press/Trap stamina to be higher, so teams use bigger rotations.

This coupled with increasing the number of quarterseconds in a game will give more guys minutes to go around, so when they transfer more of them will have played. Not sure if it'll yield better transfers, yet.

Ancedotally, it did not yield me better transfer prospects. I'll keep tinkering, but I just think it's tough to pull off without a lot of intervention and probably turning off early leavers so that more guys are playing and there's less turnover.

BETTER TRANSFERS

Right now, my better transfers plan involves the following tricks:
1) artificially increase the length of games to get more usage out of guys
2) keep scoring down so #1 doesn't create insane scoring (i'm fine with NBA scores, not good with anything beyond that)
3) No early leavers, everyone stays 4 years unless I send them out early manually
4) Turn on injuries high & turn on academic suspensions so teams will use more players
5) Increase the rate of fouls so more dudes foul out to get more guys into games
6) Increase the fatigue rate on press and traps so more dudes are tired and more guys get to potentially start in games, too.

This coupled with my standard FBCB.ini tweaks to shot rate/drive rate, etc. has at least made it so everyone in the lineup averages a few minutes even in garbage time. Teams still don't have flexible rotations and the same dudes will pretty much start all year without increasing injuries and suspensions (the latter of which I don't like because it seems arbitrary) but I'm still tinkering to see whether it makes a difference or not.

My next thing to consider -- I haven't done this year -- is seeing if I can recreate the "COVID" bonus years by giving dudes a 5th year, the game will give you a 5th year on a roster but only because you used your redshirt so you only play 4 years. I'm curious to see whether it'll let someone generate a 5th year of stats or if it'll crash.

I have solved the mystery of the 5th year player, you just have to reclassify them AND have a scholarship available. Also, while no players who were Top 100 recruits will transfer, it seems that increasing fringe playing time for bench guys induces way more transfers (coupled with not letting anyone leave early) because I'm seeing dudes who actually played and were good recruits for major programs in the portal whereas before it was universally only guys who were barely getting minutes or redshirts who never saw the court.

Those guys are still in there but with the right amount of scholarships, you could probably cobble together a solid class in this type of pool.

So that'll be my next attempt (it's too late to do it now) is seeing how good a class I can get from castaways in this new portal era, and whether that team can turn a program around and/or help a program take the next step.

While there's no way to replicate the college basketball free agency era that exists now, you can reclassify guys if you have a scholarship to keep them around beyond 4 years. That coupled with increased usage rate so that more guys are getting into rotations & forced redshirts, along with no early leavers should make it so there's a lot more player movement (of actually talented players) on clubs relative to what the game does by default.

I basically envision a world where I can identify some "grad transfer" type dudes on middling teams where I'd reset their eligibility two seasons, take over their team and redshirt them for a year so they're angry that they aren't playing, then hopefully they'll transfer. It's a lot of labor, but I think it's the only real way to manufacture better elite transfers.

Interesting results. And yes, the transfer market being terrible is one of the annoying things about the engine, along with the defensive proficiency set reset and the odd late-game sub pattern logic I sometimes see from the AI

Seems the only way to induce a transfer is to keep a guy out of the lineup long enough for him to be unhappy, then he'll leave but it might take you two years to get him to transfer because I wasn't successfully able to get anyone I'd redshirted to actually get angry enough to leave, meaning that it might be more powerful to keep him eligible and burn a year not playing him (then reset that year) than going through the motions of redshirting, since some guys are actually fine with being redshirted for a season.

Seems for sure you could induce transfers if you did this same tactic for two years, but doing it for a lot of players is highly tedious because you have to make sure the game doesn't put them back in the lineup (so you can't fast-sim, you have to sim ahead but keep depth chart on user)

Still, I guess if I played slowly and wanted to do this for a few dozen guys, you'd be able to increase the pool of transfer talent this way, because it seems this is the key way to get guys to leave and because most good players will always eventually get playing time (or enough to satisfy them) then nobody ever leaves.

I just looked at my latest transfer pool and this time, it was only redshirts that were in the pool, probably a side effect of the lack of scholarships thanks to no early leavers and the fact I'd turned down injuries at one point last year.

I do think there's a way to game this manually though and I think I've figured out the code up there, as I've seen decent guys transfer before in past iterations of this same game, but in different saves where I made the talent pool ratings so neutral, that there was so much talent that inevitably you would see guys leave because they couldn't get onto the court.

I don't love doing it that way because it's hard to differentiate between players except using stats and it kind of ruins the NBA pool, but...it's kind of the only other way to juice things so that there's more movement and even that way takes some time before it works.

I've decided to test out the induce transfers theory by taking over a few programs during the regular season, controlling the depth chart, turning on refuse redshirts (so guys don't have the option of being happy about it) and taking away starting time from dudes for a whole season. I'll be curious how many I can frustrate into transferring, I'm initially going to target younger players so they have more eligibility, but I'll also pick a few juniors and would be seniors (so I can bring them back a year as "graduate transfers) and see how many I can induce into transferring.

If the experiment works, it'll be tedious to do it often and there'll be no way to be able to control how to get a guy to transfer somewhere you want him to go, but just getting them into the portal would be fun for storyline purposes.

If it doesn't work, I'll just give up because it's been broken this long, what's the big deal.

So it basically works. There are a few exceptions, but generally speaking in the cases where I benched a guy who expected to start for the entire season, all but two of them ended up leaving the schools where I benched them and deciding to transfer. It makes sense given how 1+1 the game is that it'd be something pretty simple to induce transfers. Obviously, I won't be able to influence where they end up going, but just having talented guys in the pool would really make the transfer portal a lot more interesting than it is right now.

I could envision a world where playing slowly you could induce dozens of guys to transfer, coupling that with a team where I get rid of all of their players and free up lots of scholarships, I might be able to essentially do a portal-like dynasty where we take a bunch of dudes from elsewhere and try to free agent your way to a NCAA tournament run.

It'd take 1-2 seasons of simming to make it plausible, but at least I have a way to identify the guys I want to transfer and can at least try to make a run for them in the portal and there's enough talent, it'd be doable to snag enough to make a realistic-ish run.

So that's what I'm going to attempt going into this current season is to identify like 25-30 guys if possible and sit them, it's not that tedious once I find the guys, I just take over as their coach, control depth charts manually and take them out of the lineup then you can sim through the entire season in one fell swoop.

You do need to make sure nobody can leave early from college to pull this off though, only because otherwise your potential transfers might declare for the draft before you're able to snag them as transfers.

The easiest way to do this as a one-off is to create a new program at the start of a new season, you'll have a clean roster and can pick off any transfers you want right when they're available and then you can see how the team performs right from the outset. I don't wanna add a million new programs, but as a one-off experiment it might be interesting.

So I guess I can use this upcoming season (2039-40) to do some scouting of the guys who I want to ID as potential transfer targets. Fresh off a year where I got some pretty fun guys to transfer from their programs, it'd be cool to be able to superteam my way into a tournament somewhere.

I know I said the easiest way to free up schollies is starting a new program, but I'd rather just take over a moribund program and release everybody, get them a good coach and see if we can go on a crazy tournament run that turns the program around.

UCLA last won a title in 2003, so I'm going to pick them as our target school for this transfer experiment.

The experiment didn't work as well this time, I didn't find many of the guys I benched in the transfer pool. What has worked this time was increasing the talent in-game & turned off early leaving so that major programs end up with a surplus of talent that will leave frustrated for not getting enough run early in their careers.

This did make the pool interesting this time in ways that it wasn't before, but almost universally guys only leave because of lack of playing time, you can't seem to induce a star player to transfer unless you sit them for a year after they were good and even that hasn't really worked yet.

Also, you're just not going to convince most of the stars to come play for you a la the portal, you might only get a handful even if you have a full roster of scholarships available which makes it harder to replicate things.

So the verdict is, you can't really rig the game to modestly simulate the portal, which we pretty much knew. Needless to say, higher prestige really does increase your likelihood of getting recruits but it doesn't get you all the best ones.

I think my new accessory to this project is doing a dynasty where I start with a new program from scratch and every year we fill the roster entirely from transfers and walk-ons.

Because I want the program to be potentially successful, I'm going to max out their prestige at the start of the transfer period, so they're able to get access to almost anybody, but not everyone signs so it's kind of moot.

I think after 5-10 years, we'll be able to look back and see how successful we were with each class. I'm not going to promise I won't hold my favorite guys back if we ever get into a run where we have guys I like, but...the general premise will/should remain the same annual with the same program over the course of the decade.