[nol]

The NBA offseason made me remember that it had been a long time since I'd fired up FBPB, which in turn made me want to first play FBCB so I could have some draft classes. The amount of time I spent playing the older version dwarfs my experience with the 2010 edition, so I started off with a level 0 coach and spent a dozen or so seasons jumping around at the mid-major level to get the hang of things without abusing stuff like dumping all my points into recruiting going too hard after foreign players.

In 2022, I'd come off back-to-back NCAA appearances with a young team at Pepperdine that was on the cusp of promoting from the WCC to the WAC (which would happen the following season) when I saw an interesting challenge at St. John's. Somehow, the team was still hanging on as a 52 prestige team in the loaded Big East (with 5 teams at 95 prestige or above - even local contemporaries Rutgers and Seton Hall had over 25 points on the Johnnies in the prestige department), so I knew this wasn't something that could get turned around in a single recruiting cycle.

The first five or so years were exhilarating as we clawed our way to being a mid-level conference team despite recruiting in an entirely different ecosystem than the Connecticut/Syracuse/West Virginia caliber teams stocked with 5-star All-Americans (being outgunned for recruits by CAA/MAAC teams was not altogether uncommon). With one fewer bottom-feeder in an already brutal conference, any 70-80+ prestige team that slipped for a year was likely to find a 4-14 conference record waiting for them.

Although prestige was now in the high 60s and we were coming off an NIT championship, making the next step proved elusive thanks to questionable draft departures, injuries, and potentially huge recruits falling just short of qualifying.

It was during this stretch when I really discovered the fun of JUCO recruits - the college equivalent of taking on an expiring NBA contract. The older, more developed players were further aided by the fact that my training facilities were still dead last in the conference by a long shot (side note: making requests to the AD is the thing I miss most from the first game. Even if the net results aren't that different, it's more fun to play the role of the diva coach that asks for improvements every year and says "Screw you" and leaves when the board of some small-time school has the nerve to get pissed at him.), but it was still a revelation to be able to plug some JUCO guys ranked outside the top 1,000 into the starting lineup and remain an NCAA bubble team/competitive in conference.

Anyways, we managed to avoid falling into the cellar those 3-4 seasons, and as our luck evened out we broke through with an Elite 8 appearance in 2032, the program's first NCAA appearance in this universe. While we lost some key seniors from that team, our caliber of recruits had improved to the point that we were now a consistent NCAA tournament team. In 2035, I had my best team in this career: some key freshman contributors from the Elite 8 run had stuck around, and with the #2 recruit in the nation - a stud SG from our backyard - joining us, we were ranked #8 in the preseason polls. Then, disaster struck.

Not with the team, mind you. We got off to a bit of a shaky start with our established players deferring too often to the hot shot recruit, but getting more involved by managing the depth charts, game planning, and even manually coaching the games had us on quite a tear. We had just finished up the regular season as outright Big East champions, and with the team #4 and rising in the polls, I knew we had as good a shot as anyone at winning the title. It was at that moment my computer crashed, leaving my most recent save at July of that season.

With how much time I'd invested into that dream season, I didn't want to immediately replay it, so in the effort of keeping my interest in this particular universe (and churning out some eventual draft classes for FBPB3), I'm starting from a fresh perspective. My coach at St. John's is no longer under human control, and this is where Desmond Gunther comes in.