13. I’ve been on the anti expansion crusade around here starting around after the New York Silverback and Berlin Fire Salamander expansion. While I think that was a good expansion and was a net gain for the league, I never got on the hype train that started up briefly afterward for a set of another two expansion teams. Sure, another round of expansion would round the league out to a nice 16 team format, allowing us to split into not just the conferences we have now but into divisions which on paper would be really cool. The unfortunate reality though is that despite the attractiveness of a 16 team league format when compared to 14, we plain and simple don’t have the user base numbers to support that and haven’t recently shown the growth that it can be sustained. I actually wrote some media that was indirectly related to this subject earlier in the season. What I did was take a count of active players sorted by position, and compared them to how many players at each position the league would require to field a full roster. An important note here is that the list was of active players, not just max earning players. What I ended up finding is that in our current 14 team state, we have a deficit of active players. By my count, we ended up 31 players short of where we would be ideally if all 14 teams had a fully active roster, and that’s without including positions where you don’t necessarily need to be active to be effective such as offensive line and kicker. What that means is those 31 spots are being filled with inactive players, which are a temporary solution at best. Now, if we were to do what people were previously clamoring for and expand an additional two teams without seeing a huge influx of users, we see the “vacant” position count more than double to 67. That would be an average of 4-5 starting positions, excluding kicker and offensive line, being filled by inactive players PER TEAM. In my opinion, that level of inactivity on every team isn’t as good for the long term health of the league, as right now we are at a much more reasonable 2-3 inactive starters per team. All in all I’m not opposed to expansion, but before we can even begin thinking about expanding we need to figure out how to pump our recruitment numbers up to sustain that growth.
29. Oh boy, awards. By far my least favorite subject in the league. I even took it upon myself to step in as Tijuana’s awards representative after a last second drop out, and if you think my experience in there changed my opinion of the awards process you’d be dead wrong. The whole thing is a toxic mess that truly brings out the worst in people. In the awards committee alone there are so many bad faith arguments where users try to make ridiculous cases for themselves and their teammates. And if you want to fast forward to when the awards are actually announced, it doesn’t get much better, with people whining not only about winning, but by how much they won and whether they were or weren’t unanimous, leading to witch hunts. I’ve actually been planning to write up some media on this topic soon, but I think there’s a valid argument to be made to just move to the sim generated awards. At the very least that would lead to the toxicity and vitriol that comes with awards season being directed to the sim rather than to other users. Sure that would lead to the loss of a good chunk of awards, most notably all of the positional awards and GMotY, but it would also result in us gaining the often demanded playoff MVP award.
30. It might be a bit of an unpopular opinion around here, but I thought the ISFL players union was a poor, doomed idea to start. I never saw the reasoning behind it if I’m being completely honest. The idea was to give players a voice when it came to proposing and voting for rules, but to me it seemed to ignore a very obvious detail. A union shouldn’t be necessary for that. Every single player in the league plays for a team with a GM that has a voice when it comes to making and voting on those rules. It’s the GMs’ job to represent their players in these discussions, and frankly if players don’t feel like they are being listened to that falls as a failure on the GM for not fighting for their guys. I’m not sure of the intention behind founding the Union, but from what I saw of it there was also a large meme following. The issue with that is that you have certain members of the Union that are trying to take it seriously, while others are only there as a joke, resulting in mixed messages, confusion, and a seriously hampered ability to be taken seriously by the league at large.
29. Oh boy, awards. By far my least favorite subject in the league. I even took it upon myself to step in as Tijuana’s awards representative after a last second drop out, and if you think my experience in there changed my opinion of the awards process you’d be dead wrong. The whole thing is a toxic mess that truly brings out the worst in people. In the awards committee alone there are so many bad faith arguments where users try to make ridiculous cases for themselves and their teammates. And if you want to fast forward to when the awards are actually announced, it doesn’t get much better, with people whining not only about winning, but by how much they won and whether they were or weren’t unanimous, leading to witch hunts. I’ve actually been planning to write up some media on this topic soon, but I think there’s a valid argument to be made to just move to the sim generated awards. At the very least that would lead to the toxicity and vitriol that comes with awards season being directed to the sim rather than to other users. Sure that would lead to the loss of a good chunk of awards, most notably all of the positional awards and GMotY, but it would also result in us gaining the often demanded playoff MVP award.
30. It might be a bit of an unpopular opinion around here, but I thought the ISFL players union was a poor, doomed idea to start. I never saw the reasoning behind it if I’m being completely honest. The idea was to give players a voice when it came to proposing and voting for rules, but to me it seemed to ignore a very obvious detail. A union shouldn’t be necessary for that. Every single player in the league plays for a team with a GM that has a voice when it comes to making and voting on those rules. It’s the GMs’ job to represent their players in these discussions, and frankly if players don’t feel like they are being listened to that falls as a failure on the GM for not fighting for their guys. I’m not sure of the intention behind founding the Union, but from what I saw of it there was also a large meme following. The issue with that is that you have certain members of the Union that are trying to take it seriously, while others are only there as a joke, resulting in mixed messages, confusion, and a seriously hampered ability to be taken seriously by the league at large.
![[Image: unknown.png?width=1143&height=1371]](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/870826491120853012/990799351523713044/unknown.png?width=1143&height=1371)
![[Image: rich-g.jpg?width=1204&height=677]](https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/350042516843921413/749838702863319090/rich-g.jpg?width=1204&height=677)
