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I was trying to figure out the best way to do this. You want to see where or not certain recruits who are hyped or not are able to transform programs over time. That's what I'm curious about, seeing if the existing blue bloods are able to maintain their reigns and whether upstarts can move themselves into the upper classes of college basketball royalty.
Also, I want to be able to go quickly which means I can't do a whole lot of stopping to do things like recruiting and stuff. So instead, it's simply about finding the talent and watching what happens, seeing where they go. Or helping a program along from the outside without coaching, so really just playing "booster" to a few programs to see if you can direct enough recruits there to turn the program around over time using some kind of consistent strategy (e.g. getting more in-state recruits to an otherwise talent rich state to attend their home school vs going elsewhere. Or creating a pipeline to another state to a school outside of the region to reverse the fortunes of a program.)
The deal here would be that I wouldn't reverse the program prestige, change the talent of the coaching staff -- I can hire new coaches, but not edit them -- or make the players any different than the game generates them (only their names) to see how it all goes and whether my bets pay off. Also, I do have injuries on this league (at over 150% usually, except during the post-season) so things can go awry, but academic suspensions are off because it's just not well-designed in this game. (p.e. you can't make a kid go to study hall, it just presupposes you recruit 'smart' kids.)
Ultimately, this is just me trying to sandbox my way into interesting ways to break a game that's over a decade old at this point. It's purely for my own amusement.
SCENARIO A - FROM OUT OF THE CELLAR
There will be several of these storylines going at once, because I'll want to know different things. My first question is can we take a doormat program in a major conference and turn them into a national player?
The way we'll do this is two ways initially: First, the program will get a temporary prestige boost for a few seasons. I have no idea how much prestige will impact a program's ability to improve its hauls, but I figure that since I can't edit facilities (that'd be the easiest way to do it) that giving them a prestige boost would be akin to a booster giving the program a huge injection of cash to improve things.
The 2) thing we'll do is ensure there's an increase in the pool of talent in the state that school exists in, so they'll have more chances to recruit in-state talent. Again, we're just editing the locations of international players in this instance and not changing anything about their attributes otherwise.
After a 4-year period, we'll return their prestige to what it was at the start of the experiment, but we'll see how much (if any) impact it has on their prospects in the near term and beyond.
Depending on how long they've had their coach, we'll probably replace their coach with someone else in-gam.
SCENARIO B - THE REGIONAL POWERHOUSE GOES NATIONAL
I want to build a program into a regional powerhouse -- a la Gonzaga -- that turns the corner into a powerhouse team in a small league. They can recruit from anywhere, but if they recruit any 5/4 star recruits they **must** be from in-state or a neighboring state.
With this program, the story starts with a class of players all leaving around the same time, leaving a lot of scholarships available. Preference will be for players from their region, to develop a regional player identity and to eventually win recruiting battles for players in their local area.
By doing this, will it be enough to win conference titles and beyond? No idea, we're going to find out. Especially if it's just a bunch of 3-star dudes.
The program will get similar benefits as the Scenario A program -- increased prestige -- but largely so that it makes it easier to recruit local talent.
Will it work? Or will it be the wrong group of kids? We'll find out.
What's fun about both these scenarios is it gives me an ability to get invested in some players, to follow some careers and track the progress of specific programs to see if stuff works. With Scenario B, it's going to require a bit more hands-on because I'll need to actually do the recruiting to make that scenario work better, so we're going to start with Scenario A, where I can be more hands-off.
Also, I can see variations of that scenario as I try to build up other minnow programs/conferences and turn them into powerhouses over time.
SCENARIO C - MAKING HBCUs GREAT AGAIN
What if I made every HBCU in the SWAC and Heritage League (my MEAC successor) a high-prestige program and a 4-prestige league? How long would it take for them to become competitive power leagues if I change *nothing* else about how they're setup in-game. I won't change anything else, not their coaches. Just their prestige and conference prestige to see how long before one of their programs breaks-through.
This is an easy one to sim, because it can happen in parallel to my other experiments. It'll be the first one I start.
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