[Preds]

I'm wondering if we should also consider kind of mechanism to discourage teams from basically standing pat once they know their playoff chances are unlikely. We've seen a few teams in both leagues essentially ignore any effort to remain competitive by adding UFA's or moving up PS or TS players just because they don't want to impact their cap the following year and don't care how low they finish. I'm not saying teams shouldn't be able to sell off talent when they know it's a down year, but we should highly discourage basically ignoring your team once you do so. For example, 2 years ago I was besieged by injuries early in the season in Frenzy and traded away 70% of my starters, but still made every effort to remain competitive down the stretch through UFA, trades, and my PS/TS. In the end I won a few unexpected games because I never gave up trying to field the best lineup available to me, even though it hurt my draft positioning and cap the following year (a year where I reversed fortune and took my Preds to the Frenzy championship as the 1 seed, only to be beaten by Patrick with his recent Frenzy/SACD dominance)!

Maybe we could have a bottom 6 playoff bracket where you have to win to get the top picks, so that teams, even when they're out of it, are still incentivized to keep pushing to better their team? Kind of the opposite of a lottery. Seed the bottom 6 teams in reverse order, with byes to the 2 worst teams and seed the bracket based on who advances to the top. For example seeds 7-3 would have to win 3 games to earn the # 1 seed in the draft, whereas the 2 worst teams would only have to win 2 games, but will be facing tougher teams, which incentivizes even the lowest team to continue doing their all to be competitive.

I'm just spitballing here but wondering if we might be able to do something like this to incentivize all teams to remain active, which also gives everyone something to play for though the end of the NFL season.

Thoughts everyone?