[Bee]

Originally Posted by Bee

I don't think I spent enough time with the game to say for sure, but I also had the same feeling. It seemed to me there was too much parity between the good teams and the bad teams. I kept seeing "cakewalk" teams beating top 25 teams. While this should happen occasionally, in the 3 seasons I played it was pretty common. The reason I attribute this to "too much parity" was that I seemed to see a significant number of minor upsets as well (things like a #90 team beating a #25). Like I said, I don't think I played enough to know if this was the case for sure, but too much parity was my gut feeling.

This was posted over at the GDS forum and seems to address my concern, so I thought I'd post it here. Hopefully, this doesn't violate the GDS EULA and I won't get banned or anything.

Originally Posted by Arles on GDS forum

Another point I wanted to make is that I've seen a lot of comments on "parity issues" - ie, a mid-range team beating an udefeated top tier team. Now, these are still going to happen as upsets are a big part of college football (just ask UCLA this season ). However, the injury issue of too many top QBs and RBs have really made this parity issue more of a factor than I would have liked. I have found that since I have made injuries more realistic in my testing that the number of major upsets have decreased.

When you combined the injury issue with the underclassmen leaving early bug(sophs), as well as the aggressive transfers by some players - you ended up with a situation ripe for major upsets. Before the injury and underclassman fix, I had a Southern Cal team lose a 5-star QB for the season, have a 4-star (RS soph) leave for the pros the year before, a 5-star RB injured for half the season and a 3.5/5 star RB transfer away the year before. This left a very green QB/RB combo (both were around 2.5-3 star actual) heading up Southern Cal.

As some of you may know, young players in BBCF play very inconsistent. A 2.5/5.0 star QB could look like a 4-star one game and a 2-star the next. In this case, Southern Cal ended up losing to a very average Washington State team as the QB looked awful and the team had a couple other key injuries. I haven't seen this type of thing occur tonight (after I added the injury fix) and expect some of the other fixes will add even more stability in certain areas.