Nathan Sliver, here again. Like Wig, we here at sevenfortyseven.com have been thinking about how training camp insurance has changed our league and decided to do some math. First, let's look at how average attributes have changed over the years.
- Average Ratings.PNG (22.41 KiB) Viewed 340 times
The obvious big figure in this chart is that the average ratings of players under the age of 27 (in orange above) reached their highest level since 1995 last season. Could it be a coincidence? I doubt it. If you look at the green cells above. The high ratings for young players in the mid 1990's stemmed from the fact that the 1992 and 1993 draft classes were absurdly good. The 2009 draft class was one of the best on average but it wasn't near the level of the 92 and 93 classes. Not enough to boost the average for young players 24 points. So the first takeaway is that preventing potential rating from going down is leading to better young players in the league.
At the same time the overall average is not going up, which presents a puzzle. Let's look at the average year-to-year changes throughout the league.
- Changes.PNG (18.24 KiB) Viewed 340 times
The average change for younger players hasn't changed much. This is interesting, insurance doesn't prevent the training camp gods from damaging a player's current attributes but the first table suggests that it does keep the ceiling high, meaning that it allows for better trainings in future. This probably explains why the 2009 and 2010 training camps were the most favorable in league history. In other words, insurance may prevent a player's potentials from decreasing at 24, which simply shifts the growth trajectory up on year so that they are having a good sim or two at a time when they previously would have leveled out.
Finally, we just had the worst TC for old guys in league history last year. Why? Well, it doesn't seem to be because the league was old according to the last column in the table (Note: I can only collect the data at the end of the season and I only collect it for players on a roster so it could be that an old guy had a bad TC and subsequently cut). You'll notice in the last column of the first table that the game seems to keep the average player level pretty steady. Could it be that the game killed old guys to counter balance the better young guys? Maybe. I think we'll need to keep an eye on this moving forward.
In summary, insurance has achieved its main goal of decreasing uncertainty for GMs as they try to build a team. The question then becomes, what does this mean for competition? If there are going to be more better players it will hopefully lead to more teams trying to be competitive (which I believe it has) and an emphasis on getting the right combination of guys rather than the best guys.
