Suggestions to improve the parity of the EFA
Right now, there is at least a clear gap between Storm and Ravens, and Prague. The gap to the Raiders is there, but less so than Prague. IMO, the EFA needs to look at the Prague situation and not look at it as competitors, but from a holistic perspective, and see that Prague needs help. If you ignore it, then they will keep staying irrelevant. Yes, they may rattle of a win or two this year, but a team that does this every year will have a hard time growing their fan base and being realistic competitors.
So is there a simple way to allow Prague the opportunity to become more competitive? I think so.
Expand their HG territory. Right now they only have Poland and Czech. Expand it to more eastern European countries. I think this is the most obvious and simple way to allow Prague more high quality HG players. DO IT!
Allow non-playoff teams 1 more E-import slot the following year, and a slight increase in the salary cap so that they can account for this extra E-import.
A draft in Europe for young talented players will never be feasible (anyone saying otherwise does not understand European football) unless we start paying actual good living wages, but even then talented young players will 10 out of 10 times always choose to go to college in America over playing Europe, and drafting second tier young players will not help the losing teams.
So is there a way to give an advantage to losing teams kinda like the NFL? IMO, Giving more than 1 E-import will open up potential tanking situation, and it already may do so, but 1 extra E-import is not as big of advantage that would make a team try to intentionally lose a game that could help them get into the playoffs I think.
- Maybe not the best solution, but an idea would be to adjust the salary cap for teams kinda like F1 does after a season. I am not the biggest fan of it, but maybe there is a way to do something similar. In F1, the winner of the constructors championship gets their salary cap on car development and wind tunnel time cut (I am not 100% sure of how it works, so please don't blame me for not getting the details right here). But I don't think it helps the league to cut the salary cap of the winning team. Instead, just increase the salary cap using a weighted scale where the worst placed team gets the biggest increase, and the champion doesn't get any increase, or just gets the normal league accepted yearly increase.
Feel free to open up the discussion of whether we need change or not to help with parity and to have a league where everyone truly has a chance to beat everyone because as of right now, I don't think that is the state of the league. The league is young and we need to allow for growing pains, but the teams have been around for awhile and we have seen Prague struggle for most of the years, except for last year where got a schedule break and beat a bunch of bad teams like Enthroners, Hamburg, Helvetic, and played one great game against Frankfurt away. So sure, they looked to be on the rise, but they really only beat 1 good team last year, and the still went 1-1 against Hamburg.
The discussion may apply to the Raiders as well, but I think they at least have gotten the HC right and need to do a better job of recruiting.
I don't have all the answers, and I just want an unpredictable and highly competitive league from week to week. How do we do get this done?
