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I was kinda making a point like your last paragraph; advice for managers who literally just joined the game, want to have some fun and experience and learn the game. Managers that just joined don't have the capability to properly train high potential guys yet, but if they are to learn it, they should start training. Since it would be a waste to spend a lot of cash on something you can't do properly yet, I recommended star/allstar potential players. And when I mean cheap, I mean sub 50k prices. You can get a star player for under 10k and sell him for 100-200k, or keep him so you don't have to buy a veteran for that price.

My advice is a combination of fun and learning, while still being somewhat efficient. If you don't train, you can't get fun or experience out of it. If you train high potential guys, you waste money better spend in your arena as a beginning manager. So, that's why I recommend low potential training when you start with the game.

don7t take advice from guys also in DIV that have never made higher divisions. If you want to know about training, talk to NT coaches and U21 coaches and guys who've promoted while training and made profits/usuable players with their trainees. more bad advice than good on these forums most of the time.

Wow, I can't believe it's this time of the year again! ;)

You clearly have a definition of "usable" that is perfectly relevant to your situation but does not at all apply to the USA. I still am playing two of the star guys that I trained from my first full season here as my starting and backup PG, in what is inarguably one of if not the toughest III series in the USA, and they're getting ready for the playoffs. Now, they're not at all elite or even particularly good fits for my current offense, and the one that is a backup is one of the next few players to be replaced, but the "unusable" players still played a big role in getting me out of V, then out of IV, and holding down a place in III while I've worked on training higher potential guys.

Personally, I'm surprised you'd mention listening to NT/U21 coaches as a reference - of course they understand training but the last thing a new team needs to do is building those types of players. If anything, teams at the lowest levels who do choose to train higher potential guys should work on getting their secondary skills up while at the lowest levels rather than, say, spending four seasons in III doing so. ;)

I suppose in terms of profit, it'd be debatable at best. I think one factor that you're not explicitly acknowledging and that would be really annoying to try to figure out anyway is offsetting some of the trainer's cost with salary savings. If the trainee is getting paid $8k/week but his current salary formula would kick out a $13k/wk, that can be considered as 5k in profit. Of course, then if the player is not appearing at all in league/Cup games, it shouldn't count as real profit since there'd be no real benefit to his better performance. But for newer teams, one imagines that their trainees would be playing regularly in league games, so perhaps that would also be a factor to consider - and the counterpoint that in V, if you have any sense about game shape and enthusiasm management you should win almost every game might also render the "profit" irrelevant. I'm also not sure what role depreciation and player replacement would have - other than the fact that I know for the veterans I buy that I don't train, by the time I'm ready to replace them they're worth a whole lot less, and having to replace even more players by not training would also drag down profit a little.

I do actually have training data far enough back to try to figure that out for my guys but I don't have the coaches salaries for that time, and I've always been more concerned with building up the players the way I want them so I'm not sure the profit test would go well for me. ;)

Of course, don't get me wrong - if I were coming back to the game from scratch, I'd probably take a look for higher potential 6'8+ 18 year old PGs and hope I could snag two or three of them before too terribly long.

I think its a bit unfair to judge anyone's advice by the levels they have reached. Ive only been active since season 20 or so, but I have studied the game pretty dilligently and talked to higher level managers to get a pretty good picture of how things work and what it takes to succeed.

Im not claiming to be an expert or anything, but I think I have a fairly solid knowledge of this game, and to throw out my opinions or anyone elses like mine, due to the number next to my teams name isn't really fair.

Just because I haven't won yet doesn't mean I don't know how to win, or am incapable of winning.

Im not saying every D.V/D.IV is going to give you great advice. Im just saying that you should judge your opinions on the substance of what people tell you, and not the level they are playing in.

well, two of hrudey's trainees were sold for $450K; one was purchased for 55K, the other for 10K.

So, call it 850K net on just those two guys.

If he trained those guys for 4 seasons, and the average trainer cost was 20K, that's 1.12 million for the trainer.

That leaves him down just 270K, meaning whatever other players who got trained in that time period only have to be worth that much to break even on trainer cost. I'd guess that Menard and Wray (who were contemporaneously trained) would likely sell for similar amounts at Newton and Tuozzi. If so, his training program created 4*425K - 1.12 = 580K.

Now, that's not to say that training is a way to make huge amounts of money. You have to train well and create well built players. But you have to do that whether you train high potential, pricey trainees, or cheaper low potential trainees. And yes, there will be times you put out a substandard lineup, and lose some games you could have won. But as hrudey points out, there's also the fact that as the season progresses, your trainees perform better than the salary you pay them.

In the end, your assertion about the TL worth of well-trained, low potential players was wrong a couple of seasons ago when we had this exact same discussion, and is even more wrong now, given the rise in the market (following the change in free agent criteria).

I never claimed to have it all figured out. Maybe using myself as an example was a mistake.

My point was that I dont think condemning all advice from lower level guys, and accepting all advice from NT/U21 coaches is a good way of going about things. You and I may have differing opinions. Doesnt make your opinion right merely because youve been around longer than I have. Like you said, any advice should be taken with a grain of salt, regardless of where it comes from. Thats all :)

Last edited by yeppers at 2/6/2013 11:47:34 AM