I could be wrong here, but I semi tested this on my linemen. It seemed to progress players by trying to get the most upgrades for the amount of points. When you auto progress a single player at a timr? It'll say it bought 20 upgrades with your 10k points or whatever. While I didn't track the numbers before and after, it seemed to spend points indiscriminately with whatever was cheapest.
What would really make this faster would be to have an option to purchase multiple stats at a single time. Instead of upgrading awareness from 40-55 individually, it would be nice to set a single increase of 15 for the total cost.