*How much TPE should you earn?

[Troen]

One of the first things that players new to the NSFL who are reading over the post about creating a player see is a warning about QB not being great for new players:

players at [the QB] position will need an extremely high level of dedication and activity to earn/keep a starting job

So, seeing as I like numbers, I started wondering if that was true and what high level of activity was actually required to get a maximum statted QB. I then naturally expanded that to look at all the positions because might as well!

For each position and starting archetype, I looked at the TPE value of starting stats. I then classified stats according to the importance of each attribute per positions doc (which might be out of date/wrong but it's what I had), and figured out how much more TPE you'd need to max out the important stats. I calculated the cost to max each of only high stats, high and medium, high/medium/low, and all stats (if you want to have a 25 kicking power for funsies). You can see the numbers below. Note that while the value in the start column is the amount of TPE you'd need to get to the starting TPE starting from zero stats, the values in the later columns is the amount of TPE required to get there from the starting position. As a concrete example, the pass blocker OL position has 539 start and 431 to max high. So, someone selecting pass blocking OL would need to get 381 TPE plus their starting 50 to get every high-priority stat to the max allowed for that archetype. Maxxing out the high and medium stats requires a total of 1016, or earning (1016-431)=585 more TPE after maxxing out the high priority stats.

Offense:
TE and RB both feature some archetypes allowing maxxing out high stats with less than 200 TPE gained. QB has the mobile role maxxing out high values after gaining 266 TPE, lower than OL or WR. QB does show a fair amount of medium-valued stats, though, with all archetypes requiring more than a thousand TPE to max. Wide reciever across all roles also requires over 1k and OL is not far behind. TE was on average lower cost to max than RB for high value but getting RB to medium max is cheaper than TE for all archetypes.

Defense:
(Note: I have both strong safety and free safety costs calculated here since the stat guide has different recommendations for the different roles).

Defense doesn't offer any roles that can hit max on high value stats for under 200 but a run supporting strong safety is the lowest at 204. SS is overall the cheapest to get high max on with even a center fielder taking 314 - less than getting any archetype for DT, DE, or CB to max. Defense seems to a bit lighter on medium priorty stats, though, as no roles takes more than 1000 to max those out. DT seems to have no medium priority stats and so despite its cost for maxxing high stats it's actually the lowest for high and medium with DE not far behind. Including low stats has defense also a bit below offense (mean cost for defense of ~1041 vs ~1138 for offense) with all DE and 3/4 DT roles hitting max for less than 1k additional TPE.

K/P:
I think this clearly shows that kickers are in fact a convenient option if you're not able to gain TPE at a high rate. Maxxing out the high stats isn't the lowest cross across all positions (see: TE/RB), but needing to only really work on 2 stats keeps the ceiling on costs quite low.

Earn rate and regression
The other interesting thing to consider these costs is what the career span of a player looks like. Considering again our pass blocking OL, it requires 431 TPE to max high priority stats, or earning 381 more after the starting 50 are taken in to account. Considering a TPE earn rate of 200/season, that menas the player will max out high stats during the second year (aka first year of being drafted in the NSFL). However, if the player earns 100 TPE/year, year of max will be the 4th year slash 3rd in the NSFL.

Looking further out, the 200 earn rate player will have 1450 total TPE at the end of the player's 7th season.but will have to lose 20% of it (down to 1160) entering the 8th. During that season, the player will earn 200 more to get to 1360 but then drop down to 1020 after 9th year regression. Skipping the additional intermediate steps, the OL player will drop below the TPE required to maintain maxxed out high priority stats going into the player's 12th year t about 417 TPE (depending on rounding). Earning 200 during the season gets back above what's required to keep max high stats, but for the 13th season the player will start at 155 TPE and never get above max again. This will naturally be an issue faster at lower earn rates - our 100 TPE/year pass blocker who gets max high stats in the 4th season will drop below having them going into the 11th season and never get back to max high stats again.
I thought about trying to graph this, but it's very much a multidimensional kind of chart. I don't know of any easy ways to produce it which probably means I don't have the correct math software for the job or something. If anyone does have a good suggestion on how to make the graphs, though, I could try and do nother post showing time at max stats vs. TPE earn rate or something.

Conclusion
I think an interesting exercise, then, is for players who are thinking about what positions to play in the future to consider their TPE earn rates and desired career longevity when selecting a position. And, circling back to the original warning about positions - QB has one of the higher TPE amounts required to max out high priority stats. That, combined with the other information stated there (eg only 1 per team) makes it seem like a valid warning for new players to avoid it unless they are confident.

[siddhus]

Interesting article, love to see the uniqueness of articles coming out

[timeconsumer]

Yeah don't read that much into my post. It isn't necessarily linear. While endurance might be a high need that doesn't mean 100 endurance is a major gain over 80, it just means that it is important to build over the base values of an archetype.

[nunccoepi]

this is a great post. I've always wondered about these numbers and have never had the motivation to do the math myself.

[Troen]

Yeah don't read that much into my post. It isn't necessarily linear. While endurance might be a high need that doesn't mean 100 endurance is a major gain over 80, it just means that it is important to build over the base values of an archetype.

That is completely fair and doubtlessly more right than any model I could come up with for this post!
...but I wanted something I could do math with and I'm not (yet?) at the point of running the sim a bunch myself to try and measure stat efficiencies to develop a more detailed model of optimal TPE allocation.