(S26) - PT 5 - Fortune Teller

[Troen]

The New Year is fast approaching along with a flashy new sim, a wave of re-creates, and a potentially larger draft class overall. What do you think 2021 is going to look like for the league? Do you think the new sim will dramatically impact player/team performance? Are there any specific players or teams you think will stand out from the rest in the coming months?

The first thing that jumps out at me for S27 and early 2021 is that it's going to really make or break the S22 class hall of fame chances. Changing the sim and the subsequent position/strategy changes will likely lead to a lot of shakeups in stat production. With the giant S22 class hitting the top TPE positions in the league over the next couple seasons, I think there is a really strong chance for some previous front-runners to fall off or for some players who had struggled to make a big change to finish the second half of their careers strong. I have absolutely no predictions on which players are in which groups, seeing as it depends greatly on teams' needs, position switches, strategies, etc. But, I do think that S27 will give us the first view of what team strengths will look like and if there's any obviously better or worse strategies. I'm personally really interested to see what the conventional wisdom ends up being on going for stats vs. traits, as well as the impact from strict player sizes by position has on the value of different positions. As a DE myself, it'll also be interesting to see if we see DEs and DTs get stats more like their actual NFL counterparts or if we keep up similar values from past ISFL years.
So, I think it's really too early to predict any single players or teams coming out the best from this beyond "teams with more high TPE players will probably do better". I could see traits making higher TPE players be even more valuable if it gives s big edge, making teams with a lot of filler players worse? But, if traits are relatively low power then maybe it'll actually help the decent average but low peak TPE teams. S27 will again give a lot of information on if there's a clear advantage one way or the other.