Nightmare

Didn’t stay up for the draft, but have caught up with all the coverage through the day. Thought most teams did alright apart from the Falcons (an astonishing draft pick) and the Broncos (reaching for a very mediocre QB). For the Raiders, I’m happy enough with the Brock Bowers pick. TE wasn’t really a need, but reports seem to suggest he was one of the better players in the draft and will be a really good weapon for whoever we have at QB.

Of course he is. It’s his regular routine on here.

If a team want to, they can apply for a grace period where they will then be given time to meet the licensing criteria. Or teams can do a Buckie and essentially forfeit the right to promotion. Which I guess is totally up to them, but it looks very small-time.

Fair enough, cheers. Forgot there was a Conference League vote in addition to the many B team-related votes as well, and the former might be the one I was thinking of when remembering that the Braves had at one point been on the ‘good guys’ list.

I thought that Caledonian Braves took a fan poll (yeah, that joke writes itself) and based off the results of that, voted against the B teams. It sticks out in my mind because I’m sure people were surprised that they voted this way, with everyone just assuming they would choose to take the B team cash. Happy to be proven wrong, but that’s my recollection of it.

No idea what's going on there, but hoping Doig has a relegation release clause to get out of it.

In terms of Scottish football, it's a wild fall which is probably unlikely to be replicated barring a team getting into financial difficulty which renders them uncompetitive over numerous seasons. The case of Paderborn in Germany in the past decade is the most extreme example of the antithesis of this thread: 13/14 - 2nd in 2.Bundesliga, promoted 14/15 - 18th in Bundesliga, relegated 15/16 - 18th in 2.Bundesliga, relegated 16/17 - 18th in 3.Liga - should have been relegated but saved on a technicality because 1860 Munich lost their license and were demoted 17/18 - 2nd in 3.Liga, promoted 18/19 - 2nd in 2.Bundesliga, promoted 19/20 - 18th in Bundesliga, relegated So not only a mad fall from grace between 13/14 and 16/17, but then back to back promotions to follow it (and then another relegation). They've finally calmed the f**k down and settled in the 2nd tier for the last 4 seasons.

Fans would go to games whatever the setup is, imo. Attendances in the second tier have remained broadly similar* in the SPFL era (since the playoffs were introduced) to what they were in the 00s when the First Division had 'one up, one down' and where there were far more so-called meaningless games for teams in the top-half/middle of the table. *notable exceptions to the rule being when various combinations of Rangers, Hearts and Hibs were playing at this level

At the core of it, this is my main problem with our current setup. The fact that it's technically possible for a Championship club to play another Championship club 10 (TEN) times in the space of a season is absurd. The problem isn't quite so extreme for the Premiership where teams can't meet in the playoffs or the Challenge Cup, and so where the maximum is only 7 - which is still far too high a number, but anyway. The suggestion mentioned above of 12-18-18 would be fine. Just like all the other proposals mentioned, it's never going to get past the voting structure because it would mean there are more league clubs needing a split of the SPFL cash, but I would much rather an 18-team league where my club gets a wee bit less cash and plays some "meaningless" (they're never really meaningless, though, as covered previously) games than I have to watch Thistle play Airdrie, Queen's Park or whoever 7 times a season.

Not sure if you're just being deliberately obtuse at this point or are too thick to understand something that's really, really not that difficult. Either way, cba. Congratulations, you've bored someone else into submission.

The irony considering you've spent the last hour or so flailing around failing to comprehend a relatively basic suggestion.

Another swing and a miss from P&B's resident bore. I've already said in a previous league reconstruction thread that I wouldn't expect the top flight to change any time soon for a variety of self-serving reasons, but if we could at least expand the lower tiers then I would be happy with that. What league my team is in is completely irrelevant to any of this, which has been my stance for as long as I can remember (including our years in the Premiership).

Yep, it's all just hypothetical (and yes I'll admit, very unlikely) but I genuinely don't think the meaningless games argument holds as much weight as people often suggest in these conversations. Crowds in our game haven't changed too much since the years before the lower league playoffs were introduced. The old First Division used to see one club promoted to the top flight, and if a team ran away with the league there were often teams with nothing to play for for large parts of the season. People still attended, you still got good games and bad games, ultimately I don't think too much changed suddenly when all the games started "meaning something". Regardless, I'm not exclusively stuck on 16 teams with a 4x4x4x4 split system anyway - it wasn't even my suggestion originally. I just feel like the leagues need to be bigger because I'm sick of playing teams 6+ times a season.

Mentioned in the second paragraph.

Nice deflection from your 'teams playing each other too much' comment before. The only section that would potentially have "nothing to play for" would be the 9-12 portion of the league. Which is a flaw, yes, but I've already indicated that no split system is without flaws, including in the current Scottish football setup. The section with teams 1-4 would be involved in the title race, 5-8 would battle for a European place in the top flight/for a potential promotion playoff opportunity in the lower leagues, and 13-16 are battling relegation. So to suggest that the majority of the league would have nothing to play for after the first 30 games is, yet again, nonsense.

What would make you think any part of that post is sarcastic? Please explain why you think that option proposed is a bigger issue in terms of playing opponents too many times than our current setup. Because there's absolutely zero logic in what you said in your previous post.

In that type of setup, the majority of the 16 teams in the league would only play each other twice over the course of the season. Only in each section of 4 would you play three opponents 4 times. That suggestion is clearly an improvement on the 'playing sides too much' argument that we have in our current league setup.

Aye, if it’s a 16 team division you need 2 down automatically. And possibly 14th going into a playoff with 3rd place in the tier below as well. 16 would definitely be my preferred size of division, though. Not too fussed about which one of the many potential split structures is selected, but just getting a wider variety of opponents each season and greater movement between the tiers would be a big improvement in our game imo.

Lawless is out for the best part of a year with a ruptured achilles.

Our title winning team at this level in 2012/13 had plenty of players who we signed from way down the pyramid. From memory I can think of Doolan, Erskine, Craigen, Muirhead and Taylor-Sinclair who had all been signed from League Two or below. There might be others I’m forgetting as well. I also have no idea about Armstrong, but seems the exact sort of market we should be shopping in for cheap squad depth. Especially given that we seem to have a pretty good record of finding gems at these types of level.

Excluding the anomaly of Rangers (RIP) being in the lower leagues, the OF haven’t finished outside the top 4 of Scottish football since the 1980s. And the financial disparity between those two and the rest of the league is far bigger now than it was back then. Any split would get 4x OF games, whether it was a top 4 or top 6, so I’m not buying that as a reason TV companies wouldn’t back a larger league. There are unwelcome elements in any split, including the setup we currently have. More unwelcome for me is the nonsense scenario in Scottish football right now where you can play the same team 6, 7 or even more than that times per season. It’s just very dull. The bolded at the end is ultimately why league expansion won’t happen any time soon, though. Because of the pathetic self-serving mentality of clubs in Scottish football who are so dependent on a couple more home games where they can cram a few thousand bigots into their ground and make some extra cash. I thought this kind of outlook might have changed after our clubs (correctly) voted not to allow Rangers back into the top flight following their liquidation, and where it was proven that we didn’t need the OF to have a strong, successful Scottish football. But unfortunately there are still clubs in the top tier who will refuse to change the current setup out of pure selfishness and greed.

You can have 4 OF games in a 14 team league, or indeed a 16 team league. It all depends on how you structure the split(s).

Unreal save, that.

The PFA team just announced. Not drastically different to many of the (sensible) team selections in this thread.

Rant might have been a harsh word. "I'm not suggesting anything really." - fair enough, that's kind of all I was clarifying. Because it feels like this whole thing was going round in circles, and I didn't know if you had an actual suggestion as to how we could make better use of our resources, or if you were just... saying things to say them. One thing I would argue is that I'm not sure the injury situation is anything other than bad luck. You get injury crises at all levels of football. Dunfermline in our division being a particular example of one this year, but even as far up the food chain as Liverpool. That's a club who I'd assume has a pretty state of the art setup in terms of training, sports science, etc and have still had to field plenty of youth players this season due to injuries. It's not like they have a lack of squad depth either. So to suggest that Lawless got injured because he was overplayed and Graham is putting in graft in his own time because the club can't afford to train him properly is speculative at best. If we spent an extra £30k or whatever on a sports scientist this season, would it really have changed much? I doubt it.