I am looking for references from previous seasons to see exactly how franchising worked (since I wasn&#039;t around for IDL when it was like that). From what I see, and mind you this is what I read on the rules portion on the IDL site for franchise players, I don&#039;t see how it would do much good with this season. <br /><br />I think the problem you&#039;re seeing with this season is that the talent pool isn&#039;t as large as it has been in the last few seasons (again, going off of what I&#039;ve looked at on the site because I wasn&#039;t around). Think of the people who currently aren&#039;t in the IDL who have been in previous seasons along with the current IDL players, minus a few newcomers of course. Humanbones, oaf, metalblack, chewy, dev, jkist3, shakal, chaindude, cha0tix, Fast, etc. <br /><br />I guess my point isn&#039;t necessarily bashing the idea of franchising, it&#039;s more or less just saying that in a case where the level of talent just isn&#039;t as high, I doubt it&#039;d make any difference at all. <br /><br />That being said, I&#039;m not really opposed to it either. I think one thing it seemed to do is do away with previous inconsistencies the IDL had back in 2007 when I was still around. One of which was people simply not showing up for matches because teams changed around so frequently. At least by franchising a player, you can be on the page with 2/3 of a starting lineup. <br /><br />And yeah, I&#039;ll break it down like this since a few people want to comment on Goat: First off, back off and fuck off. The guy might not be the most talented but out of all of these captains, he is surely the most loyal to his player&#039;s. I requested a trade after we lost to KGB because this is probably my last go-around in competitive doom venues of any sort due to [b]real life.[/b] It happened in 2008 and it is happening again. <br /><br />Would I have preferred to stay on DMR and help take goat to the promised-land, sure in a perfect world but that simply isn&#039;t the case. The reality is, I was the only trading piece Goat had that was worthy of shopping around - who in the hell would trade for Quik or Souler? There was no way Goat and I could be on the same team and acquire somebody with mid-level to high-level talent. This further proves my point about the lack of talent being about. If the guys named above were around, do you think I&#039;d even be on DMR? Aha I&#039;m pretty sure I wouldn&#039;t have been - at least, not with the second overall pick. <br /><br />Goat wants to work with Souler and Quik to help prepare them for future IDL seasons and I commend him for that. He was willing to trade me to a team with a better overall level of talent and sadly, at 0-4, a tie in the wildcard race. This still gave me the ability to win it all in my last season, or at least be put in a situation where the chances of it were much higher. And he also knew the good teams weren&#039;t going to give up much for me because hey, if it&#039;s not broken, why would you fix it? Even though I&#039;m better than 100% of the players here, it&#039;s not worth trading for me and giving away half your team in doing it. So he took Nero (who subsequently raged himself to sleep and still has yet to wake up) for me in a trade to give me that opportunity. Call it what you will, but I think that tells you what kind of person he is and how loyal he is to his guys even if it means good-bye. So yeah, back off Goat and let it go. It&#039;s done, it&#039;s over and we are where we are now. Thanks!<br /><br />So yeah, for anyone who didn&#039;t know the facts behind it, there it is. Franchising may have prevented this one-sided trade (or at least I think it would have) but you have to ask yourself, with the lack of talent around, would teams like DMR even be around? A team that not only will most likely not win a series, but a team that probably won&#039;t win a single game. It&#039;s a lack of talent, folks, that&#039;s all. Don&#039;t use the struggling teams as a source of proving your point that franchising would do away with this - it wouldn&#039;t, a perfect system can&#039;t fix an imperfect foundation, which in this case, is the level of talent. 