Online Dynasty--Tougher for Commissioner?

[TimLawNYC]

I'm not sure about this, but I've seen enough to make me think that something might be up, and I wanted to see if anybody had thoughts or similar experiences about this.

Quick Background: My brother and I have been playing NCAA football games religiously since 1999, and we're very competitive about it. In the PS1 and XBox days, we would play a dynasty together and go to each others' houses to play. Then I moved across the country, but for the past few years we've been playing Online Dynasties together. So we're both veterans of this series and when we play head-to-head, it's almost always a close game.

This year, we're on our second OD. We've been using PlayMakers' sliders the whole time, and I've always been the Commissioner. In our first OD, we were 4-star teams in tough conferences. Over 2.5 seasons of this OD, we each lost two games total, but it seemed as though every one of my games was really close and came down to a few clutch plays in the 4th quarter for me to pull out the win. This happened against really good teams or teams that my squad had far superior ratings to. The only teams I could blow out were FCS teams; almost all of my games against FBS schools, no matter their rating at the time, were one or two score games. My brother, on a team with similar ratings to mine and similarly difficult schedules, seemed to cake-walk through his schedule, beating even highly-ranked teams soundly and never really being challenged. I thought this was strange but I was having a TON of fun with my close wins, so I didn't worry about it too much.

Recently, we decided that we wanted a bigger challenge, so we picked two of the worst one-star FBS teams in the game to rebuild. The teams' overall ratings are identical, and we've only played a couple of games, but now it seems like my brother is having the type of very close, white-knuckle wins that I had in our previous dynasty, but against teams that are much better than his on paper, while I'm getting killed every game. His team has no business, ratings-wise, knocking off the #8 team in the country, and my team, realistically, can't score much and can't stop really good offenses.

I'm starting to wonder if there's something going on with the difficulty for Commissioners. I might even be willing to admit that my brother is a bit better than me on the field, but that still wouldn't explain the sort of consistent, systematic dissimilarity between the types of games we are each having in these ODs.

I do remember reading something about a disadvantage that OD Commissioners had in NCAA 09 or 10, but I think it related to recruiting, not the difficulty of games.

Has anybody had similar experiences? Any explanation for this? Is it at all possible that, despite being in the same OD, we are somehow playing with different slider/difficulty settings?