In RL, players that play in the playoffs get playoff experience, and players on teams that don't make the playoffs usually just get an earlier offseason. Maybe instead finding things for the 5th and 8th place teams to do to make up for the "penalty" of lost training minutes and income, it would be a little more realistic if instead teams that played into the postseason had more of a fatigue factor (and injury risk) in the following season, which is something that does happen in RL. (Granted, the effect is not quite so noticeable, like say would happen to a baseball pitcher logging innings in the World Series rather than resting a tired arm for an extra month, but maybe there could be an adjustment in Game Shape. Of course, then really Game Shape would need to account for cumulative minutes over the course of a season in addition to previous season playoff minutes to be more realistic... oh bother! I'll leave the details to the smarter folks here and just leave this post with the basic idea of not worrying about 5th and 8th place team penalties since that's just the way it is, and if anything should be done about this, it should be something more realistic such as something affecting Game Shape somehow, however the BB geniuses figure it out.)
Don't ask what sort of Chunks they are, you probably don't want to know. Blowing Chunks since Season 4!