No problem, the stamina is in the custom equipment, so not a problem

Was gonna go 6 points into speed and the hard hitter tree, or would the pass rusher tree be more useful?

I like your LB suggestions.

Just had a look at the AI, too complicated for me to really get my head around. Will have to see it in action I think.

Our schedule is very tough, particularly with Winona as the cross conference game. But we may be able to get away with a few sneak wins early on as everyone comes to terms with the changes.

Blomstrand has enough flex points for a triple boost already, but like GY, I might wait a couple of weeks to see what the best attributes to put it in are - a big tackling boost may be in order. I've only just managed to afford the lvl 16 equipment upgrades, so at some point he'll need a new contract. It might be cheaper to give before I boost.

I think your instincts are right. His speed will be amazing (especially once you get your agility up), and the hard hitter tree is most useful for a MLB (plus, as you already have a bunch of points in there, the custom equipment will give you more value).

I'll send the contract now.

JTS, I'd wait for matej/gyuri's advice, but my tip would be to go for the hard hitter tree. The pass rusher is only much use for the ROLB position. (plus it's much more points efficient to allocate it to SAs that you already have than ones from scratch).

Etienne,

Waiting for Blomstrand definitely makes sense to see what the tackling issues are going to be (by the way, in the second game, we may want to see what happens when our better tacklers go on combo tackle rather than wrap up). Fortunately, our two preseason games against great competition should give us a good sense of what our weaknesses are.

I also agree that it makes sense to renegotiate his contract before you boost (and early enough so that we have a pretty good sense of what our salary burden is going to be for the season). . .maybe after we get season ticket sales and have a sense of our finances. One thing to consider is, in the new contract, for us to give you enough of a bonus to slightly rearrange your equipment into 1 or 2 attributes (now that speed and agility are approaching the soft cap, having the equipment just there will be more efficient than adding SPs).

By the way, Etienne, I traded away my center to help fund our new contracts, so the backup center position is now all Casey's.

Ok. I should have enough flex points to give Casey a couple of level boosts as well.

I'm going to generally defer to Gyuri's opinion on defense, as I'm pretty weak in knowledge there, but the LB and DT approaches seem reasonable.

Things just got more complicated at LB, as J. Charlie has triple boosted to lvl 20 (he hasn't allocated the SPs yet as he has asked me for advice).

Etienne and Matej, any thoughts on how we should arrange the guys now? He has relatively high strength (40) and 3 points in the defense general SA. I'm leaning towards having him start at either LOLB or MLB (for now), but could use some input.

By the way, as a test, I just changed our defensive AI to have us play 3-4 in the 2nd and 4th quarters, just to see what happens.

I'm beginning to think that our strength at LB is becoming so much higher than at DT/NT that we should go 3-4 at least some of the time and try and recruit another LB or two. Otherwise we're going to have lvl 20 LBs on the bench and lvl 13 NT on the field.

Charlie's got a very balanced build, could do either L or M

The main problem here is that there are no decent LBs in the market (for the reason that so many teams are trying to go to 3-4). That's been the toughest position for any team to fill this offseason.

Also, it's not really the trade-off of DTs for LBs (though it's that, too), it's that it makes our otherwise excellent DEs not nearly as good (as I don't think they're strong enough to handle the stronger interior guards and the double teams). In other words, we'd need to trade our DEs, bring in new, better NTs and then add to our LBs if we wanted to play 3-4 full time. I think we can try and throw the 3-4 in their sometimes, and maybe start recruiting this season to add good LBs to make the move to a 3-4 next season, but I don't think it makes sense to do it this season. By the way, I've been trying to strengthen our DTs, and there's at least a decent chance I'll be bringing a lvl 20 in some time today.

Also, Etienne, could you check your PMs?

Our prices set too high for season ticket sales, btw. I've dropped our prices now to just 2x.

Duly noted, Gyuri.

Matej,

Are you sure you don't want to scale down the prices slower (like 2.5x) we still have 3 days before our first game, so there's no need to rush to get them sold.