What house rules do you implement in CCM to make things more real?

[BrianU]

I am strictly talking about the front end, i.e. the draft, free agency, trading, resigning, and player progression.

I am back in football mode and wanting to start up a CCM with my Jets. I would like to make it as challenging and realistic as possible not just the gameplay but also the frontend management side of things. I have my playing style down pretty well and sliders that work for me I will post when I have them final but in the meantime, I was curious for you guys that have been playing offline CCMs all year what sort of restrictions do you put on yourself to make things more even.

It seems it would be incredibly easy to stack draft picks and progress players to HOF level if I tried to, I want to avoid cheesing the CPU in CCM.

I am most interested in hearing how you manage the player progression/xp? I would like to enjoy as many features as possible but not if it gives me any unfair advantage over the CPU teams. If they do not progress players in a smart way I wouldn't want to have an advantage. I believe the CPU teams do not get XP from practices so I plan to avoid using those.

I also set my CCM setting to 'progress yearly' to make the CPU save up all the XP and let them have more to spend in one big sum instead of spending a little XP every week or four weeks and only being able to upgrade the simple packages. I plan to only upgrade my players at the end of the year as well. Having not played a full, CCM how do the CPU teams manage with player progression, do any of you guys use 32 team control and upgrade the other teams players for them?