Jabbering JAG 131.1 (As Good as it Gets?)

Sorry for all of the media absence this season. It seems life just hit us all at the same time. I will try my best to be more active this season. Congratualations to all of our national champions! Good luck to all of the coaches who get a coach of the year nomination.

As I often do in the off-season, I got to thinking. Have we made Wilkinson the best that it can get in Gridiron Dynasty these days? I will take a look at the world population and the changes over the last couple of seasons and provide my theory into why that has happened. Anything I say in this isn't meant to be offensive or a dig to anyone, it is just me throwing some ideas out there.

Season 128 - Didn't track

Season 129 - DIA 71 DIAA 57 DII 55

Season 130 - DIA 72 DIAA 56 DII 55

Right Now - DIA 74 DIAA 50 DII 56

The trend, as you can see, is DIA continues to grow. DIAA hasn't been able to maintain numbers and DII seems to be consistent and I know things could change since we aren't completely done with the job change period yet.

Is this the best a world can hope for in Gridiron Dynasty?

Don't get me wrong, DIA is the most full and the most competitive that I have seen in a VERY long time, if ever. However, I don't understand why DIAA can't fill and why DII has slowed down. Are we more "stagnant" now because the competition is so fierce here that it drives coaches out who can't find success? I do honestly believe that that is a probably pretty good chunk of it... but what if there were another cause? What if the current situation were cause inadvertently by the media.

Again, what I am about to say isn't meant to be a dig at anyone. I love everything everyone does for this world and appreciate everyone's hard work and heck... I am part of the media. However, I have began to wonder if we didn't contribute to this slowdown a little bit as well.

I believe the media could have caused this for two reasons. First, we now cover DII. When we added DII to the content it was a great idea and I was and still am all for doing it, however, maybe we took away coaches' incentive to get to the higher levels and continue to allow coaches to move in. People join this world because they love all of the media content and the parity of the game play. Now that you only have to make it to DII to get access to content, maybe coaches don't have the desire or feel the need to move up anymore. Now this is great for DII as it makes that division all the tougher but as you can see from the trend, DIAA has started to suffer because coaches aren't moving up like they used to and as DIA surprisingly continues to fill up DIAA might suffer even more. I know there are still plenty of teams at DIAA and DII for new coaches to choose from, but for some reason we aren't seeing influx like we used to.

The second reason is limited coverage. All of the media likes to talk about the best teams or the national title contenders. Which is great and those are important things to talk about but let's be real... for the most part that is going to be the same 6-10 teams every season. That leaves 60+ coaches at DIA and 40+ coaches at the other two levels that never even get so much as a mention. So if you're not finding success on the field and the media doesn't even care you exist, why stick around? Now, I am not saying that as the media we need to start covering every single human coached team out there, but what if we didn't JUST pay attention to the top teams every season? I have been trying to keep my posts broken down on a conference basis that way everyone has a decent shot of getting a post about them, however, I probably focus a bit too much on the "better" teams in each conference.

I could be completely wrong in all of this. Maybe since we were inactive this season things just seem a little off this off-season. I also know that real life is more important and doing all of the research for what we do cover already takes so much time. Maybe the world has pretty much everyone already in it who has any interest in joining a world such as Wilkinson. We have a lot of legendary coaches in this world, probably the largest collective group of any world, who have joined because of what this world has to offer.

I personally think that Wilkinson is capable of getting 70+ DIA, 60+ DIAA and 50+ DII but we seem to have lost a lot of our momentum.

Feel free to tear this apart or add to it in the forums if you have something to add or disagree with.