Let's see how D4 college sports will look

For real ballknowers, NCAA Division 3 is a massively complex web of over 430 schools throughout the US. It's a far too large collection of liberal arts college, regional state universities, branch campuses of flagships, and everything in-between.

As a result, you get a really diverse group of philosophies on sports. With the way higher ed works right now, for a lot of schools, that means admitting kids so they can play sports because tuition keeps your school open. So that means prestigious academic D3s playing in conferences where 80% of the kids get admitted and 1/3 to 1/2 of the school plays a sports. JV sports in college? Maybe at a D1, but let's be real and say that's not necessary.

Okay so back to the tennis sim. I decided to pull the thread on a real-life proposal that's circulated for decades -- splitting D3 into two -- because I realized that I could. I didn't start here, though. My work initially began with me moving a bunch of pricy D3 schools in D1 because I felt like seeing them in D1. (Hello UChicago back in the Big Ten!)

Making recruiting work better

One of the problems with the tennis sim was the way that the game would generate walk-ons. The actual real problem was how recruits were going underallocated, even at the elite level, because there weren't enough slots on teams for programs to absorb talent. That was because I mistakenly gated rosters at 8 for D1 programs and even with all of my other changes, forgot to increase roster sizes.

That's fixed now, which lets teams carry as many as 10 players -- at the D3/4 level it's up to 16 -- meaning top programs can afford to stash a developmental player, which sucks for a bigger program hoping to use that kid, but it feels more realistic. The other thing that was problematic was apparently 97% of the coaches in the game were non-Americans. This was mostly an accident of development, I didn't direct the LLM on what wanted the composition of coaches demographics to be, so I guess somewhere along the way way earlier in development, this was codified. I noticed all of the coaches were foreign, but had other things I was more interested in fixing.

Recruiting now works a lot better. I significantly increased recruiting budgets, so elite tier programs can significant outspend everyone else. Major programs have largess, all the way down to D1 programs at the low major level who still can spend more than your garden variety D2 program. D3/4 programs don't get scholarship budgets at all, but academic D4s do get a budget that sort of operates like a scholarship for the purposes of simulating the real-life deal where top tier academic players who could have played low-to-mid major D1 go to D3s instead. This idea was probably 75% of the reason I ever wanted to build a college tennis team sim, was to see how to simulate this in practice.

I'll be extremely curious to see how the D3/4 split operates in the game, not just the H2H matchups but to see here recruits end up. The other thing we did was significantly increase the talent pool, so now there are double the number of recruits in-game, meaning there should almost no more reason for the game to generate synthetic walk-ons for programs after the signing periods are done. This lets me follow a player from their HS/juniors career all the way through college and beyond which is the other big reason I ever wanted to embark on this garguantan effort.

A side effect of the latest effort was promoting a few more D1s to the academic leagues i've had created, but I'm not ruling out sending the UAA and the D1 hockey schools back down to D4 at some point if their recruiting doesn't keep up in-game.