NFL Progressive Discussion Forum Topic

I'm thinking about starting a new league and wanted to gauge interest......and ask a few questions for potential owners:


#1A-Would you rather be a progressive league (starting in the past and working towards today) or a regressive league (starting in today's times and working backwards)? #1B-If a progressive, what decade would you want to start.....60's, 70's, 80's etc?


#2-Would you rather be a single season league (move 1 season at a time) or a dual season league (move 2 seasons at a time, i.e. 1980-81, 1982-83, etc)?

#3-Would you rather have some kind of tie to real life franchises (example if you are the Bears you automatically get their Def, OL, and ST every year) or would you rather it be a completely clean slate each year (i.e. you might have the Bears Def, Cowboys OL, and Bengals ST this year and have the option to drop 1 or more units and draft a new one next year)?

#4-Split seasons or not? By split season, I mean one conference uses one year and the other conference uses a different year (from a different era). Example, AFC begins in 1960 and NFC begins in 1985.

If you are interested, please post your answers to the questions above.....I am thinking about officially advertising a new league by the end of the month.

7/19/2015 12:42 AM (edited)
1) PROgressive - but I would like to see a league where 12 owners drafted from 1960 and the other 12 owners drafted from 1985.

2) One year at a time

3) No preference
7/18/2015 1:25 PM
good point grayfoxx......I didn't include the possibility of a split season progressive. I will add that to the list above.
7/19/2015 12:40 AM
Awesome idea. Would love to do this for football. The only thing is, hopefully we could get enough people to be interested. It took us like, 3 months to fill the decade and draft leagues, and that's with some owners taking multiple teams. Yikes! That said, I played in a progressive league for the NBA sim, and I think some of what was used there, could apply here. I'll throw these ideas out and see if any of them stick.
In regards to questions 1 and 2: I suggest, instead of having it be strictly progressive or regressive, let people choose what season of the player/defense/line, etc. that they want, regardless of whether it is forward or backward in time. Have the draft be an all-time draft, not just from specific years. Every player, defense, o-line, special team, kicker, everyone is exclusive to the owner that drafts them (this would make the draft longer since every position on the roster is being drafted). The owner can then choose any season of that player/defense/line, etc. but it can only be used once. So for the next season of our league, if they hold on to that player, they have to use a different season. It can be any other season, regardless if it came before or after the season that was used originally (hope this is making sense). After the first season of the league, everyone posts their keepers and cuts, and then another draft is held before the new season, and anyone who wasn't originally drafted, plus cut players, would be available to draft. If a cut player is drafted by another team, the same rule applies that they have to use a different season from what was used already. 
If you do it like this, that eliminates questions 3 and 4. I hope what I wrote makes sense. 

7/19/2015 4:34 PM
#1A----Progressive. #1B----60's. #2---- One Year at a Time. #3----Clean Slate. #4----Split Season,60 & 85 would be 2 good years to start.
7/21/2015 8:13 PM

To rjk2781: What you wrote did make sense and is a Good Idea. I just kind of like going in this direction.

7/21/2015 8:37 PM
Hey grayfoxx,

I've been researching 1960 and 1985. My only concern is there are a lot more players to choose from in 1985 so those owners could grab the better players in the pool and leave the "riff-raff" undrafted whereas the owners from 1960 will have to scrape the bottom of the barrel to fill their depth. The main discrepancy is in the WR and TE groups. There are 62 WR in 1960 and 130 in 1985. TE #'s are 30 and 79.

How much do you think that would affect the competitive balance of the league?
7/21/2015 10:22 PM
2 possibilities here:

1) Give the owners drafting from 1960 the added pool of 1950 players (just for the first 6 years until the NFL gets to 24 teams).

2) Combine all of the players into one pool (1960 and 1985) and let everyone draft from it. There are alot of succesful baseball leagues doing it this way.
7/22/2015 10:09 AM
Realistically, there aren't enough skill position players in the sim to do a single season progressive until sometime around the 2005 season. You'd either have to supplement the player pool (from different era scrubs) or make some players not exclusive. Short of doing that, I see 3 options:

#1-progress 2 seasons at a time (i.e. 1980-81, 1982-83) but only allowing 1 version of each player. This is really only viable if you begin in the late 60's or 1970-71. Prior to that, there is a 100+ player shortfall across the league which averages out to over 4 players (out of the 18 skill position players required). By 1970-71, there would be less than a 2 skill player/team shortfall which could be made up easily with some $325K scrubs. Late 60's might have a 3-4 player shortfall per team.....


#2-progress 1 season at a time but use 2 separate seasons with each one from a different era (i.e. 1960 and 1985). There are 2 basic ways this could be done:

A) The NFC and AFC each take one of the chosen seasons and teams from said division will draft players from that seasons. The main "pro" for doing it this way is to keep the player pool "pure" for each conference (although there still would be inter-conference games). The "con" to this approach is the fact that a larger player pool for the later season conference will probably yield a distinct talent advantage as they can avoid the riff-raff players at the bottom of the player pool.

B) Combine all players from 1960 and 1985 (or whatever seasons specified) into one large player pool and all 24 teams draft from the same pool. This will probably allow for more parity but there would be no single era represented within the league.




My personal preference would be to either start in the late 60's and go 2 seasons at a time OR choose 1960 and 1985 and combine the available players from each season into one large draft pool from which all 24 teams draft. After season 1, you'd obviously go 1961/86, 1962/87, etc....
7/22/2015 11:23 PM (edited)
I kind of like the idea to combine the players, starting in1960 & 1985 into one Draft Pool. Then we can go one year at a time.
7/23/2015 8:19 PM
Well, it looks like we have 4 people interested, now if we all take 6 teams we can get this off the ground.
7/24/2015 1:43 PM
Posted by grayfoxx on 7/24/2015 1:43:00 PM (view original):
Well, it looks like we have 4 people interested, now if we all take 6 teams we can get this off the ground.
Let's hold out for 6 interested owners.....I draw the line at FOUR teams per owner, LOL!
7/24/2015 3:54 PM
I'll play
7/27/2015 6:17 PM
Posted by specsman on 7/27/2015 6:17:00 PM (view original):
I'll play
sounds good specsman......do you have a preference on what years to use, format, etc?
7/28/2015 10:57 AM
I would be in.

It would probably work best starting from 1967, when the combined NFL/AFL expanded to 24 teams.

1 season at a time

No connection between units and franchises, a free market

No split season

7/28/2015 11:04 AM
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