It's that time fellas - SIM TIME!
I have not done a full sim in a while, but I had the chance to put the teams in over the weekend, so the prognostications/analysis below are the result of multiple simmed seasons with 25-man rosters. I recently added another 8G RAM to the desktop, so that helped crunch things a lot faster, could do a full season in around 3 minutes, used to be closer to 8 minutes.
For those of you like me with some big injury rolls, these sims will likely underestimate your performance a bit, but should still be close. I did 5 full sims total.
Season 1:E: Qk, C: Zim, W: Palm, WC: Smokey
Palm had 97 wins, other playoff teams in low 90s. Smitty & Craig were close with wins in the upper 80s.
Season 2:E: Smokey, C: Zim, W: Craig, WC: Qk
Smokey had 98 wins, I had 94 as did Craig, Zim had 91. Palm & Smitty contended.
Season 3:E: Qk, C: Zim, W: Craig, WC: Smitty
Craig had 99 wins, Smitty 97, me 93 and Zim 87 in this go-round. Palm & Smokey contended with wins in the mid 80s.
Season 4:E: Qk, C: Zim, W:Palm, WC: Stoney
A bit of an outlier as I had 96 wins, Zim 91, and the West had Palm at 86 and Smitty and Craig at 83 & 82. Stoney snuck into the WC with 85 wins as the West beat each other up down the stretch.
Season 5:E: Smokey, C: Lev, W:Palm, WC: Qk
Smokey busted out with the only 100+ win season with 101. Lev snuck into the Central title with 82 wins to 81 for Zim, the only time Zim didn't win the Central. Palm had 89 wins to take the West and I took the WC with 91 wins. Jason had 88 wins as the WC came down to the last day of play.
So based on 5 sims, I think we see some pretty strong trends:
1) Zim wins the Central. It's close but there is enough evidence to call this one.
2) The West is the div of death in Season 1. Their low win totals are due to beating the crap out of each other. I'm going to call it for Palm but it's close.
3) The East seems to be a 2-horse race between me & Smokey. I am going to call it for my team since my bench is much deeper which will come into play down the stretch, but I will need some injury luck.
4) The WC is likely to come from the East. The Central seems weaker overall after Zim, and the West has 3 good teams that take away wins from each other.
Happy to field any questions!
Qk