United Sim Sports LLC acquires the ECFL

As of December 6th, 2024 the ECFL has been purchased by United Sim Sports LLC. The ECFL will continue to be run and operated by Kichler and Canes for the upcoming season before the United Sim Sports LLC staff take over full operations the following season.

We as a staff are very excited about the opportunity to bring the ECFL into the United Sim Sports family and we are looking forward to establishing amazing memories together through the coming years. We'd like to share with you a bit of what we plan to do with both the ECFL and the USFA in the near future and in the distant future.

Near future

ARCHETYPES/TPE SYSTEM

For the near future, and one might say immediate future is the transition from Elite Coin to TPE. We are working on a way to restore everyone's previous Elite Coin to them in the form of TPE. Once the system has been fully integrated and works properly we will work on restoring everyone's accounts.

The incoming system will work exactly like our current system in the USFA, minus the subscriptions. Instead of a subscription that cycles every few months, we will be keeping the Elite upgrade. The Elite Player upgrade will last for your entire Collegiate career and provide weekly TPE, after you graduate the Elite Player upgrade will be obsolete on that player. All attributes can be upgraded regardless of if a player has the Elite Player upgrade or not

Speaking of attributes we will be bringing the USFA's archetypes into the ECFL and adjusting their starting values. Currently all USFA archetypes start at a base of 65, but that will be going down to accommodate the extra 3 to 4 seasons of unregressed earning potential. At this time we do not know what those numbers will start at, but they are expected to be somewhere between 35 and 50 to start. Attribute caps will remain the same for all of our current archetypes.

Any player who is already apart of the ECFL and created using the ECFL's old archetypes will be grandfathered into the new archetypes. We have observed that there are a number of attributes that only exist in either the ECFL's NCAA14 or the USFA's Madden 24. For these attributes that only exist in NCAA14 after graduation they will not transfer to the USFA. They will be considered dead attributes. For the attributes that only exist in Madden they will automatically start at 65 when you graduate to the pros.

RIVALRY WEEK

As a means to add some engagement to the league each team will be designated a rival. Rivals will be determined based on geographic location primarily among other smaller factors such as conference alignment and team competitiveness.

During rivalry week, every game will be a rivalry matchup and the winner will win a small boost of TPE to give out to their players, or upgrade their OL. For this upcoming season, we will not be rebranding any of the current colleges. But as of the season after next if a team rebrands, they may receive a new rival which could cause multiple rivalries to change.

TEAM RELOCATION

Due to the cascading effect relocating a team could have on the rest of the league's rivalry matchup we are going to include a 20 dollar fee to relocate a team. We will offer all existing Head Coaches one opportunity to relocate their team for free after the upcoming season. Afterwards, all subsequent relocations will come with a charge of $20 USD.

We will also be removing several teams from the banned teams list. The banned teams list will now only contain the following teams

Michigan
Alabama
Clemson
Georgia
Ohio St
Texas
Miami FL
Notre Dame

Any team not listed here is available to be used in the ECFL.

STAT TRACKING/LEAGUE HISTORY

With most of the leagues history being missing or unavailable to us, we will be considering next season to be Season 1 for the purposes of keeping records and stats. This isn't done to discredit anything thats been done before or any of the history of the past, but with none of the stats from those seasons readily available it's hard for us to input them into the website. If someone has access to those stats and wants to input all of the rosters, players and stats from the previous seasons into the website we'd be happy to let them do it.

But as of now, the plan is to call S10, S1 for the purpose of keeping accurate stats and records for the league. This would mean that teams would be offered a free opportunity to relocate before the start of S2

DISTANT FUTURE

GAME CHOICE

Eventually we want the ECFL and the USFA to both run on the same game/software. While we are working on developing our own software, we don't have an exact timeline on when it will be available for commercial use. In the meantime we may explore options to bring both leagues onto the same game to help streamline the system further.

Currently there are some problems with continuing to use NCAA14 due to not being able to generate the necessary files for backdoor editing of the game. If this is unresolvable we will immediately start looking for a substitute game to run the ECFL on.

WEBSITE MERGE

Eventually we would like to merge the USFA and ECFL websites so we don't have to pay to maintain two separate sites.  We don't have any type of timeline on this but if we don't have our software running before Footballshift makes it possible for us we'll be migrating the ECFL site to the USFA site.

BALANCING

As we monitor how the changes to the upgrade system work, there may be some balancing work done to the sliders for both the ECFL and the USFA. As well as some potential changes to the attribute upgrade scale, TPE earning, and salary cap charts. All of this will be adjusted as needed as we continue to monitor and watch the ongoing developments.

It is our goal to provide not only an entertaining product for both the ECFL and USFA but we also want to ensure that there is parity within the league. Nothing saps the fun out of a league more than knowing you stand no chance against a super team. Rules for the ECFL may be developed to preserve a fair playing field for all teams.

ECFL RULEBOOK

This one lands somewhere between coming soon and Distant Future. We plan to develop a set of rules for the ECFL akin to the USFA Rulebook. We will use the ECFL charter as a framework but there are many missing pieces and so it will take time to deliver a rulebook that is actually useable. We expect there to be problems with it when it is first released but we will continue to revise it to ensure that there are no easily exploited loopholes or caveats while also maintaining fairness for all teams and users in the league.

For at least the start of S1 we will be using the ECFL charter as it stands as our official rulebook, plus a few pieces that are easily transferred from the USFA Rulebook.

CUSTOM ECFL PLAYBOOKS

Something that we will research how to do provided we are able to continue using NCAA14 is how to implement custom playbooks for coaches. We believe that it's an integral part of running a team at any level is being able to set your own playbooks with your own plays. Once we are able to figure out how to implement this, we will do so.

If we aren't able to continue using NCAA14, one of the requirements we'll have for finding a new game is the ability to create custom playbooks.

Closing thoughts

As things continue to develop and progress we will be monitoring and making small tweaks as needed. The integration between the ECFL and the USFA will take some time and we will need help from the community to pull this off. But we firmly believe that we can create the greatest football sim league universe ever made. Remember that none of this is possible without you, we greatly appreciate you being here and we hope to continue to be able to provide you the greatest sim football league experience in the world.