*Should We Expand (Hint: Yes)

[Amidships]

My concern for filling the DSFL is less than others because its a league who's only role is to fill the ISFL and its own population isn't important. Especially as the majority by far of the DSFL players you counted are actually drafted ISFL players already. 75 currently drafted ISFL players are sitting in the DSFL as of when I wrote this article. If the ISFL had that much trouble filling its roster, we wouldn't have 75 ISFL players in the DSFL. That's an insane amount. Slightly over 5 per team on average. 
And the 307 activity checks were during new year's week. It and its two previous (ie the week of christmas to new years) represented the 3 lowers AC totals since July. Treating the lowest point in 6 months as a high point isnt accurate.

I'm not super concerned about filling the DSFL, but using my data we won't have a DSFL at all if we expand to sixteen teams. That's a completely separate discussion.

Even if this time of the year is technically considered "down time", the teams had to post updates for their inactives last week in order to have them added to the new sim. There should have been a historically high number of updates this week considering that GMs were putting in updates for their IAs. Nearly every rostered player should have updated this week. If we only got this many, what does that say for the league numbers? Further, what does it say after removing the inflated number of IA updates that GMs had to post? Looking at these updates, we have enough people to support a 16 team league at a much lower average TPE level and with fewer players per team than you suggested was normal.



You're looking at roster counts, but rosters don't tell you who is still around and actively participating. Using your numbers of 409 players, expansion might make sense when you include the new class. However, 61 (or 15%) of those players haven't updated in a month and can't be considered active. Expanding now means we keep IAs around longer and rely on them even more to fill out rosters to be competitive. We also need to be ready for the repercussions of losing our Developmental league, and drastically changing the way the ISFL works in terms of TPE/team and TPE/position, etc. It just seems like a lot since we're going through  another huge change at the exact same time.

At the end of the day we had 350 individual players updated in the last month. That's not enough to support expansion. My data doesn't paint the whole picture, either. Manic brings up another very important point that we have no idea if we're going to continue to attract new players to the league at a rate to replenish those that leave. We need to make sure we're "refilling the coffers" before we bleed them dry. We drafted 58 players into the DSFL last year, and have currently retained 43 of them and that number will drop. You're right, we've got a few more this season at 70 in what was supposed to be another huge recruitment drive. Like you said maybe we can improve retention for this class, but we can't count on it.

Every argument I've seen for expansion only looks at current roster count (which still doesn't warrant expansion) and doesn't factor in our recruitment sizes. That's not a knock on the recruitment team, it's a simple fact that our best resource for recruitment catastrophically failed us this time around. We must be mindful of this fact and continue working on that front before we can expand.