Division Realignment

[David Yun]

We'll be doing this redistribution each season. In order of standings from last season, teams are distributed in snaking fashion.

So the champion remains in their division (Joel in Wudan). The Dire Bowl loser is placed in the other (Dave in Shaolin). Third place team is placed in that same division (Dee in Shaolin), as it snakes back and forth, sliding in the expansion teams placed by expansion draft order. It'd be cool to expand again someday, to create a third divison.

WUDAN - Joel, Mike, Paul, James, Esther
SHAOLIN - Dave, Dee, Alex, Kang, Steve

[Dave]

We could always hit up Ny. He showed interest back at camp. Don't know who else we can get.

[David Yun]

Ny would be great if he committed to competing. I'm just concerned about his penchant for LULZ tampering with competitive balance

Expanding again is a matter to be tabled for much later. We're already settled on ten teams for the 2013 season.

[David Yun]

I'll discuss this with the commissioner, but I'm tentatively setting the schedule as follows:

Weeks 1-13 for our regular season: this provides a balanced schedule of playing each division rival twice, and all other teams once.

Weeks 14-16 for our playoffs: last season, we allowed half our teams to make the playoffs. I'm thinking we keep that ratio, meaning the two division winners and the next three top teams as wild cards. This means that the division winners and the top wild card team get first round byes, with the two lower wild card teams dueling for the right to advance.

The one real drawback is that there is only one official game on week 14, between the two lower wild card teams.

Alternatively, we could go with only the top 4 teams making the playoffs. This means we truncate another week off the season (boo), or using the extra week to add one more game resulting in an unbalanced schedule (screws with my OCD) against a random non-division opponent.

Thoughts?

I think we want to avoid using Week 17, wherein top teams could sit their stars once playoff positions have been settled. Last year, I was even worried about Tom Brady sitting as early as week 16.