Recruiting, agents, and nepotism

Yes, that is the name I hope to use for the team. The town I live in has a rather lagre prawn as its most well known landmark, so I should be able to use that as the jersey pic.

Anyways, on to the team building.

I've been quite lucky with the two teams I've been onvolved in thus far. The first was a group of friends, and the second is a group of active people with varied levels of experience.

It seems to me that the biggest key to a fun (and successful) team to be on is an active group who get along well.

All of this lead me to believe that I think in the initial recruiting, the prime consideration should be the quality of the agents, even over the quality of the builds - builds can always be improved later if the agent has a good attitude and is willing to learn and adapt.

Thinking about the recruiting in more detail, I ended up making a spreadsheet to work out what sort of playing roster I thought I'd need to be competitive, assuming some sort of capped league. It was during this process that I decided I really wanted to go for a 3-4 defence. I think if built from the ground up as a 3-4, it could work quite well, and a well run 3-4 would provide a different look for a lot of OCs to work out!

It did have the added effect though of vastly reducing the recruiting pool, as players, particularly on the D-Line, need to be built very differently.

These thoughts coincided with me having a decent amount of extra cash about, and I decided it would be helpful to lighten the recruiting load to make a whole bunch of players myself. I started out thinking I'd build an O-Line, D-Line, and LB Corps, but I found the process so educational in terms of working out how the various positions worked that I eventually wennt bonkers and made enough for some of every single position!

Having so many players to possibly step into the team makes a big difference in how I can approach it. With so many players on board to start with (at prices that suit me just fine), it really enables me to take my time with recruiting and get what I want. It also gives me some control over the purse string from the get go, as its a lot easier to deny equipment bonuses to your own players than other peoples!

However, there is a big downside involved. Nepotism being the big ugly monster under the bed. By using so many of my own players, I risk the perception that they will get preferential treatment over players from other agents, and to be honest, I can't fully deny thats possible, as its hard to tell how emotionally attached to a player I'm likely to get in that situation. When it comes to crunch time and one of my precious builds is underperforming compared to a low level build of brilliance, am I going to be able to swallow my pride and swap them on the depth chart?

It also reduces the number of agents involved to contribute to the active team forum I hope to foster, so there will be a fine line to tread in order to make things work.