Jump To Season Two

Short, 5-game initial season was a very, very good idea.  5 games doesn't sound like much, and indeed it put a cap on things right as I think they were getting good, but with so much going on and so many schedules to work around the time I spent on running it was plenty enough.  It put a cap on things right as a couple coaches were ready to/forced to bow out as well.  I'm seeing 20-man single round robins out there with playoffs to boot and I'm thinking holy crap how can you expect to finish that??  At that point an initial run at it needs to be divided into conferences/pools that can run more or less independently of each other, with the hope that one conference, at least, will somehow emerge on the other side in one piece.  Even the 10-game + playoff seasons of Three Die Block seem far, far out of reach.

So all-in-all 5 games was a perfect shakedown.  But, having proof-of-concept, we were ready for something with a little meat on it.  I also wanted to see how the other half lives and try a simple, fixed-schedule setup with all its pros & cons.  I suspect Season 3 will be a mix, a swiss regular season followed by a playoff.  But that’s only if this goes well.

8 teams is a nice, pretty 7-man  round-robin, tidy little playoff bracket and it’s ready to go in the books.  I even had it all made up.  BUT, 2 coaches signed up at the last minute and brought us to 10 teams and 10 teams is anything but pretty and tidy.  A 10-man  round-robin + playoffs would have made the season too long; if I learned anything from Season 1 I was right to err on the side of too short.  So I setup 2 5-man divisions, division coaches would play each other and the odd men out that week would play each other in a cross-division game.  This all works out to 5 Weeks, and I threw in a “Wildcard” week where you play someone random across the divisions.  So 6 Weeks: play the 4 opponents in your division and a random 2 of the 5 in the other division.  Because the seeds were random but not equal, the playoffs basically had to be overall (in other words, your divisional record was irrelevant), 1^st overall seed playing 8^th overall seed and so on.  I made a Wooden Spoon game between the overall 9^th and 10^th seeds, because it’d be really funny and cool but more so because I knew we’d have dropouts by then and this was the sacrifical game to soak up the losses.  Dropouts were going to royally screw up the regular season schedule, but that’s one of the prices you pay for making it fixed.

If the playoffs ignore divisions why have them, no one asks.  Well, I really wanted an All-Star game.  Just after the teams in the Championship are determined, but before the big game, I envisioned the two coaches that lost their Finals game (so 3^rd and 4^th finishers overall) coaching their division’s All-Star team.  The 5 division coaches get together and assemble the best team they can using all their rosters, with the ultimate aim of beating the snot out of the other side’s famous guys.  Putting a nice big bow of carnage and mayhem on the season, which is the way Blood Bowl should be.