I definitely would be interested ... everything I do is in google sheets (excel) but I've got it pretty advanced. I will clean it up and share it for sure and try to make sense of what is going in it.

But yes, player progression is where I struggle. I simmed like 20 years of a league where I would randomly eliminate 2 players from every team and they would "draft" rookies to fill the gaps, but it ended up with either one team full of veterans and the others full of rookies, or the rookies would be eliminated after a few seasons by random draw and the league would be a bunch of 40+ players.

3pointtally wrote:

I definitely would be interested ... everything I do is in google sheets (excel) but I've got it pretty advanced. I will clean it up and share it for sure and try to make sense of what is going in it.

But yes, player progression is where I struggle. I simmed like 20 years of a league where I would randomly eliminate 2 players from every team and they would "draft" rookies to fill the gaps, but it ended up with either one team full of veterans and the others full of rookies, or the rookies would be eliminated after a few seasons by random draw and the league would be a bunch of 40+ players.

Yeah I think for player progression I still want control of creating players and adjusting attributes as needed but if the progression side of things could be automatic that would be amazing. I'm kind of an Excel noob so I'm sure there are ways to do it

I'll go ahead and start a new project thread where we can start brainstorming some ideas.

Wallflower wrote:

It is a bit of a process, but as soon as I've completed the Awards and All-stars I just go through team-by-team and increase all their ages and then find all the players that would have developed or regressed and apply the changes. It helps to have a standard system especially with players that don't have like breakout seasons and are just in the background. I have been able to do this across 26 teams before from the project that I built this system in and it got a little much at times, but I was managing 3 different sports and leagues within those 26 teams so it was more all over the place. This is also mainly the reason why I am not in any rush to expand the NAAF massively for both the rosters but the schedule and the weekly style will become longer the faster I expand. So I want to get a good few years under my belt before I get that far but I have a rough idea about the size of the league after each decade. 

There is also an element I like about having control, for example when I made Laurent Brazeau as a free agent. He was only a 73. In two seasons he has now jumped to an 82 because of the story but it would be above the typical development, I also take into account players around them like Jean Matieau as the backup for Ottawa got lots of good development despite backing up Logan because Logan was a really good player and he could learn from that. Those are my best examples, but it has happened to many players around the league. 

The weighted scores are new this season, I just thought to add them and I think it will make it more realistic and interesting. I also keep track of all the players that have played, where they played each season, how they moved there and if they have won championships. I don't track stats, football is not exactly the most simple, so that's just imagination. It is a bit of a process to set up but once it is and you update it alongside the league it becomes simple. 

If you are interested in taking a deeper dive, I wouldn't mind a bit of feedback, but probably not gonna release the whole thing to the public or to very many people.

Yeah, on my 1-10 system, I typically just assign a rating and they keep that rating more or less through their career, and instead I take into account age and team play to determine if they qualify for awards and such. ​I also have several different sheets for players, retired players, coaches, owners, etc.  It's super helpful to have the automatically advancing age formula though. I'd recommend it. But the static 1-10 system doesn't help with developing prospects at all. So if a player is less than a 5, it's gonna be very hard for him to make it on a pro roster for any length of time.

I've also been exploring different ways to account for contracts. I'm trying to come up with a simplified system so I don't have to crunch tons of numbers.

As mentioned above, I'm going to create a project thread for exploring an automated player progression model but I'd definitely like to see further into your process. If it's a Google Sheet, I'll PM you my email. All my stuff is on Google Sheets as well.
 

3pointtally wrote:

I've been playing around with formulas today and have had some success.

Using a 1-10 player rating, I took the current year, subtracted the players birth year and if that number was 35 or lower, I divided their skill rating by 2 to determine their "expected contract length" ... This gives you the flexibility to still award contracts to anybody regardless of their age but gives you a decent idea of what somebody's "value" is based on their skill. Example, a 28 year old player who is rated an 8 would be expecting a 4 year contract in the off-season, whereas a 39 year old player who is rated a 10 would be expecting a 1 year contract because of his age. Since the contracts have to be manually entered into the team and player list however, the 39 year old can be given a 3 year contract if that's what you chose to give them.

In terms of player progression, I randomized a row of numbers from -1 to +3 ... Then I would add the previous years skill rating and the new "progression rating" to get the players new skill stat. Anything over 10 is maxed out at 10. The randomness works well because it can allow a player to slowly get better or suddenly have a great season, where the next season they may stay the same or regress back to where they were which often happens in pro sports. This new rating also plays into the previous expected contract rating. If a players skill set improves from a 5 to an 8, they will now expect a 4 year deal, where-as if a player went from a 7 to a 6, their slight decline in skill would lead to them expecting a 3 year deal. Players who had a skill set reach 0 would automatically retire. Example, a player who had a skill set rating of 6 in 2020 gets a +2 rating in 2021, therefore making them a player with an 8 rating for 2021.

The -1 max negative skill point works well IMO too, because a player that is a 10 wont just fall off the map, but can slowly decline season over season. They could also decline one season and then come back as a 10 the following year to be a consistent hall of fame type player.

THEN, I added up the skill points of all the players on the team to determine a players point percentage. Example, if there were 10 players on the team and their total skill rating was 75, a perfect 10 skill set would score 13% of that teams goals. So if that team scored 112 goals, this player would have scored 15 goals for his team. It worked perfect through every simulation I ran and thus generated scoring stats for all players on the team.

That's as far as I got today. I haven't toyed around with goalie stats and there was still some manual things that had to be done, but 90% of the data was automatically generating through the excel codes so it was a promising start. The real challenge will be making it user friendly because right now there are numbers everywhere. Once I figure out the best way to lay out the sheet and can start hiding columns it should clean up quickly.

Not sure if any of this makes sense reading it or not.
 

This sounds exactly like what I've been wanting. I've started a new thread and quoted your post here so we can continue brainstorming and put together a project.