The People's Team
How the sim works
Every player carries a career rating from 0–100. It is built from era-normalized percentiles, never raw stats: each season is scored against its own (year, division, position) peer group, so a 2007 attackman and a 2023 one are comparable and old tracking gaps can't mint fake elites. A career rating is the mean of a player's best two seasons (scaled to leave headroom), plus career honor points (capped) and a small longevity bonus.
How each position is rated
- Attack / Midfield — percentiles of goals and assists per game (blended ~60/40 for attack, 50/50 for midfield), with a small shots-volume bonus.
- Goalie — save percentage percentile among goalies with tracked goals-against (2006+), weighted 80/20 against saves-per-game volume; thin or pre-tracking seasons fall back to volume.
- Faceoff — faceoff-percentage percentile where losses are tracked (~2013+); earlier years use win volume at reduced weight.
- Defense / LSM / D-mid — a proxy, disclosed plainly. The MCLA archive doesn't track individual defensive stats, so defenders are rated by 50% their team's goals-against percentile (how stingy their defense was that year, from game scores), 25% their own ground balls per game, and 25% their honors. It rewards defenders on great defenses and decorated players, but it can't see a shutdown pole on a leaky team.
- Awards floor (all positions) — All-America and All-Conference honors set a floor: a first-team All-American season is floored near the 90th percentile, and honorees with no box-score stats (including pre-2006 legends) are rated entirely from their honors.
The Champion's Gauntlet
Your lineup plays the average national champion's schedule: we take every real MCLA champion, measure each of their opponents' strength (an RPI-flavored percentile), average those slates into one difficulty curve of 15 regular-season games, and cap it with a four-round national bracket. D-III's own bracket history is too thin to build its own curve, so it borrows the average of D-I and D-II. Each opponent slot is named with a real team of matching strength (flavor — the difficulty comes from the curve). A regular-season loss doesn't end your run; a bracket loss does.
What it can't capture
Ratings compress a whole career into a few numbers, the defensive proxy is a team-context estimate, and the archive under-tracks some eras. Treat a season as a fun, replayable argument — not a verdict. Same team, same seed, same result every time; hit Run it back for a new roll of the dice.
Ratings from an era-normalized model over MCLA data 2006–present, plus honors back to 2000. Not affiliated with the MCLA.