T-Moar's Eurosnob Relegation System

[T-Moar]

Since we've been given the opportunity to resize and realign conferences, relegation systems mimicking those of the European soccer leagues have become vogue, and have proven a good way to keep dynasty mode fairly interesting. Unfortunately, as a soccer fan, I've noted that each of the popular relegation systems violates at least one of the major tenets of any good promotion/relegation system:

1) Every team in a league should play every other team in that league. This is simultaneously the most violated rule of a relegation system on this board and the easiest to maintain. The goal of a relegation system is to ensure that the best teams play the best teams. If this goal isn't met, the entire relegation thing is pointless.

2) It should be just as hard to stay in a league as it was to get there. Some of the relegation systems on this site give a promoted/relegated team a period of time before changing leagues again. That shouldn't happen. Staying in a league should have to be earned, and the failure of a team to stay up shouldn't be seen as a failure of the system. In the English system, for example, at least one promoted team has been relegated 19 of the last 21 years. Work for your place or you lose it.

3) No pre-season games should happen during the regular season. I'd imagine that scheduling logic makes this difficult, but it's also not that important.

4) Inter-regional parity is not a goal. Regions should be determined exclusively based on geography. No, I don't care if one region is dramatically better than another.

5) There is no way to force independents to play a round-robin schedule, therefore, independents should not be treated as a conference. We could do it if this were NCAA 12 and we still had 11 conferences for 120 schools, but we're in NCAA 14 now.

Unfortunately, there's no way to ensure that all of these goals are achieved with 10 conferences and 126 teams. The biggest conference you can have while still having everybody play everyone else is 10 teams, which only allows for 100 teams to be included in the system. As such, the first thing I did when creating this system was to lop off the 126 teams with the lowest Overall ratings. I know it's harsh, but it had to be done, and the cut-off point winds up being just slightly lower than 75, which is nice.

After eliminating the bottom 26 teams, I cut the remaining 100 teams into four regions -- Northeast, Southeast, Central, and West. Unfortunately, you can't divide 100 teams into regions of 25 when your conferences have to consist of 10 teams, so I decided to create two regions of 20 (West, Northeast) and two regions of 30 (Central and Southeast). Admittedly, the Central region had to take some pretty wonky adds to get to 30 (Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota) but other than that, the geography makes almost perfect sense. The map wound up looking like this:



After all that was done, it was a pretty simple process of sorting teams by overall rating and then dividing them into tiers. The regions wound up looking like this:



Once you've got all that set up, the conference rules should be the easiest part. Every conference's rules should be exactly the same:

Night games in November is up to you, same with BCS bowls.
Set conference games to start in week 7. Assuming all goes as planned, that should mean no bye weeks and no mid-season non-conference games.

Managing the conference promotion and relegation is fairly easy, too. Outside of the top league, the top two teams get promoted. Outside the bottom league, the bottom two teams get relegated. Don't worry about bowls, or overall records except as a tiebreaker. Ideally, the best teams would go to the NCG, but other systems have shown that's not going to happen, so just ignore bowl season. Treat the region as the highest recognized championship.

If you have any thoughts/comments/questions/suggestions, feel free to let me know.

[Zac]

Is this something that is built in to the system now, or do you manually have to track the best and worst teams form the divisions?

[Lzydd]

I think this is a great system, particularly the round-robin format which is, as you note, by far the most legitimate way to crown a champion (boo on the Pac10 for adding Utah and Colorado).

My only change would be to use historical record for the initial placement, rather than the 2013 team alone. There's nothing too egregious with your setup, though Pitt probably deserves better than quite a few of the teams ahead of them. Taking account of a program's entire history seems more fair to me than EA's somewhat arbitrary ranking.

[T-Moar]

Quote: Originally Posted by oulzac

Is this something that is built in to the system now, or do you manually have to track the best and worst teams form the divisions?

The Conference Standings screen does this. Just make note of where each team is at the end of the season.

Quote: Originally Posted by Lzydd

I think this is a great system, particularly the round-robin format which is, as you note, by far the most legitimate way to crown a champion (boo on the Pac10 for adding Utah and Colorado). My only change would be to use historical record for the initial placement, rather than the 2013 team alone. There's nothing too egregious with your setup, though Pitt probably deserves better than quite a few of the teams ahead of them. Taking account of a program's entire history seems more fair to me than EA's somewhat arbitrary ranking.

I disagree with you about using historical record. Yes, Pitt gets kind of a raw deal the way I did this, but I feel that this is the better way to sort teams for two reasons:

1. A championship doesn't cement your position in the top division. This is based on a European model, and plenty of teams have been relegated after winning it all. Leeds United has a long history of success, and used to be Man Utd's main rival. Nottingham Forest won a European Cup.

2. With this model, the divisions are as competitive as possible. The teams in each division are fairly close to each other. If I were to switch that around, there would be teams that were almost certain to get relegated (like Pitt).

Feel free to modify this model for your own purposes should it suit you better, though.

[gtyjrocks]

I really like this and think I'm going to use this for my first dynasty tomorrow. I think it'll be a fun system. Have you tested this system yet at all and see how teams do?

[T-Moar]

Quote: Originally Posted by gtyjrocks

I really like this and think I'm going to use this for my first dynasty tomorrow. I think it'll be a fun system. Have you tested this system yet at all and see how teams do?

Not yet. I don't have the game, and probably won't get it until I can get a used copy somewhere around August or September. If you decide to try it out, let me know how it goes.

[thesnowman8]

What do you do with the other 26 teams? Or, did I miss that??

[gtyjrocks]

Quote: Originally Posted by thesnowman8

What do you do with the other 26 teams? Or, did I miss that??

I believe they are all put as independents.