With the regular season now being over and the play-offs ready to start, I thought it would be somewhat productive to discuss the regular season. I want this to be very open, broad-range. The discussion can loom from anywhere around how regular season picks and predictions turned out, or how certain trades did/did not work out and even the discussion of the new 12-team, 9 game format.<br /><br />Being that I&#039;ve been the starter of critical discussion as of late, I see no reason for me to back off now. I&#039;ll start things off with some of the trades.<br /><br />Obviously, when discussing trades, the first IDL trade of this season is what comes to mind. The Goat/Rus picks trade. At the beginning of the season, most people thrashed Goat for it, telling him it was a bad decision and that he won&#039;t win a single game this season either. Obviously, those predictions were a bit incorrect but I want to dive into something that was not really discussed at all: <br /><br />Did the picks work out well for Rus?<br />Of course anyway with a brain would say drafting NoStar is an intelligent move but before you confirm that to be true in this case, I want you to remember a few things. First and foremost, Rus would have had the opportunity to draft the leagues MVP in LB had he elected not to trade. I believe he had 6th or 7th overall selection and he wasn&#039;t picked until the 10th overall selection. Nostar is great but I never pictured Rus as anything other than a defender. In a few games this season, he&#039;s played well as a runner and has done decent in mid but I still believe his most effective role is to play defense. Obviously, with Nostar, that&#039;s an easy no-go, so the question is, even though TKV won their division at 4-4-1, could they have done better with LB and possibly someone like Mid or another good fragger? The issue with TKV this season has been the inability to score a ton of flags, but they&#039;ve made up for it with tons of fragging. turSKA, I thought, was a capable runner but apparently they&#039;ve elected to stick with Noob now. I don&#039;t think that is necessarily a bad move, I&#039;m just not sure if it&#039;s the right one. They lack balance, they lack a pure runner and I&#039;m afraid it could come back to haunt Rus knowing he could have drafted LB and not have that problem. Perhaps last seasons experience with LB wasn&#039;t a great one or he didn&#039;t see it working out. Either case, I think TKV could have been better off drafting LB and possibly having a much better record. But who knows, Star still knows how to win and I can&#039;t knock a guy for trading up to get a two-time Master Bowl Champion and lock-down defender like Star. I&#039;m just not sure it was the right move in the long-run.<br /><br />The other side of that is how it worked out for Goat. Honestly, it worked out as well as it was going to. I do believe trading his picks was the correct move in this case because Goatface with Nostar and a shitty 3rd would have been no different than the team he would have drafted last season. He did get more overall talent but perhaps running the risk of selecting Star/Whiteboy could have paid off if he did some research and found time to select a decent fragger. The one thing this draft was rich with was fraggers. I think Goatface can still be a very capable runner in this league as long as his back-up/mid is very stellar and effective in a 2o system. Unfortunately, I think that&#039;s the only way he can be effective, which is why I thought Whiteboy would have been a better fit for him than Nostar on defense given the fact that White is a much more aggressive defender than Nostar and in order for their offense to produce, they would have needed a defender like White who can move up after fragging on D and not lose a ton of position. Nostar gives you more of an ability to grind games out and can shut down just about any solo runner, but he can&#039;t do it for 10 minutes straight without getting much on offense - nobody can for an entire season. So I don&#039;t think selecting Nostar would have worked out for Goat at all but drafting White and taking a chance on a 3rd could have possibly gotten him a better team than he has now. It&#039;s hard to say though, DMR was still pretty solid this season and just barely missed the play-offs. <br /><br />Now, onto something a bit different. <br /><br />The next thing I want to engage in is the 12-team system. Personally, I think it was very successful. I love having 4 play-off spots for each conference and I think with 12 teams in place, things were a bit more balanced than last season. Any team that is stacked is really only stacked with two great players and a shitty third whereas the other teams have much more balanced talent all-around, not all invested into one or two guys. I think this is a good thing for the league. The only complaint/gripe I have would be the amount of games played. Is 9 games really necessary? I don&#039;t think it&#039;s needed, personally I feel like you could eliminate games between conferences and still be okay with 7 games. You&#039;d still get the 4 games for your division plus the 3 games with the other division. I know that tie-breakers and play-off seeding would become much more chaotic since there aren&#039;t uncommon opponents in teams but I don&#039;t think that&#039;s a bad thing either. There are plenty of solutions to it and I think even adding an 8th game with at least one opposite conference team would be okay. The season just seemed too long and by the end of it, even teams in play-off contention seemed to simply not care and just drained out from the season. And let&#039;s be honest, the best teams from each conference got in and it only would have taken 8 games to decide those conditions anyway. All play-off spots were clinched by week 8 anyway, the only difference is, seeding would have been clinched, too. That&#039;s just my opinion though, I&#039;m not saying the current method is wrong, 9 games was just way too many for me. :P<br /><br />I&#039;ll discuss more in time, I don&#039;t want to have a super-ridiculously long post as an opening post. I&#039;ll discuss with more discussion! 