Colleges

February 3, 2020-

Players in Basketball GM and Football GM now may be assigned a college when they are generated. This doens't impact gameplay in any way, it's just for fun.

You can view a player's college on his profile page. Or view all players colleges on the Player Ratings page. Or get a historical summary by going to Frivolities > Colleges:

How are the colleges picked?

All of the D1 schools are in the game. I counted the number of NBA/NFL players that came from each school. Those counts are used as weights in the random selection of a college for a new player.

I did all that separately for basketball and football, since both the list of D1 schools and the distribution of pro-level talent is different across sports.

For basketball, there are a bunch of D1 schools that have never produced an NBA player. Don't give up hope, Abilene Christian alumni! Every D1 school has at least a small chance of producing a pro in Basketball GM.

One problem with this approach is that it may not appropriately account for the talent differential between the best and worst colleges. With the method I implemented, a player's skill level is completley independent of his college. I'm not sure if that's true in reality. So if the distribution of colleges seems strange, that's probably why!