Season 13 Ideas and Suggestions (read the first post or you'll get an infraction)

It looks unlikely at this stage that there will be a tenth Bannerman Shield side in Season 13. If there is one it will be the Lions, and I'd love to include them, but I feel the break may stretch us a little thin on the player activity front. If I can be convinced otherwise by the Lions group then that's fine, so there's no need to rage if you've got lots of players lined up for it; just drop me a PM and I'll put it back on the agenda as such.

However, and here's a new one, each Bannerman Shield team will field two ALC teams next season, essentially allowing teams to recruit squads of 33. There are a few cons with this - double the ALC games for me to sim every week, slight lack of club unity, slight decrease in standard and perhaps logistical confusion as to which players end up being eligible for which teams at the start, but the pros outweigh it.

I think allowing clubs to have bigger subforums will help the forum's activity, and also encourage recruitment of new members when they sign up and indeed people from other forums. You can pretty easily rest on your 22 all season at the moment, but while I envisage most clubs will start with ~ 22 anyway, this will give them so much more room to recruit members as the season progresses without worrying about how they're going to squeeze them in and ALC team balance. We'll be seeing a lot of "past player fillers" at the start, but I like seeing a lot of those guys in action anyway.

 

Neither of those really. Players will be told they're eligible for one or the other at the start of the season. So they'll be two theoretically equal teams with pre-determined player eligibility.

 

If clubs want to find a way of creating two equal squads out of it at the start of the season then I'm okay with it in theory, but I'm just worried they'd basically stack one side deliberately to give one team a chance of winning the comp, or - more likely - hold a draft to pick the players and end up screwing each other over deliberately with hoarding.

It'd all have to be done pre-season though. You couldn't just decide to move a player from the Fangs to the Crocodiles mid-season because you felt like it.

 

Unbalanced as in one side would be slightly better than the other? Well sure, yeah. But that'd change once you signed a second one of those, or the BS team dropped a player, or anything like that. And that's not to say one wouldn't be slightly stronger than the other to start with, meaning such an event would actually close them in. That's all part of the journey of a sporting season. As long as players aren't regularly changing between teams in the same competition in the same season then it'd be fine - you'd know at the start of the season that, for example, your BS side was the Ravens and your ALC side was the Ducks, whereas someone else would know they were Ravens/Test Eagles instead.

We're probably going to get situations where one of a clubs's ALC teams finishes a lot higher than its other one, but as long as they're reasonably similar then I'm not really too concerned about it. I just wouldn't want one to be absolutely stupidly stacked sides deviously plotted to win the ALC premiership.

 

Yeah these were pretty much my thoughts. Looking towards the future with a more consistently staged season, and all these ALC spots creating upward pressure on the BS, I hope we can re-visit the Lions for Season 14.