Coach Contracts!

This update is highly anticipated, and greatly improves one of the core features of the game: hiring and firing coaches. With this update, a new Coach Contracts setting has been added, which can be enabled on new saves. If enabled, coaches will sign contracts with teams during the Coach Carousel phase. Teams will pay coach salaries, buyouts if they fire coaches, and even insurance payments to other teams for certain contract guarantees.

Coaching Staff Balance

Each team has a coaching staff balance, which you add money to in the "School Updates" offseason phase. This cannot be negative if you want to spend money on school upgrades (like facilities, marketing, etc). This means that coaching staff expenses effectively come out of your school upgrade budget. Hopefully it will make you think twice about firing a coach and paying that expensive buyout!

Contract Guarantees

Coaches will still move between teams throughout their career. Different 'guarantees' on the contracts provide restrictions on when the coach can leave to another team, or be fired. For example, a contract with a "Coach Lock" guarantee means the coach cannot leave to another school for the duration of the contract, but they can be fired. These guarantees will usually expire after a couple years. If you want to retain a coach, you can renegotiate their contract once the guarantee has expired.


I have other features planned for coaches, including the ability for them to leave college for the pros, adding alma maters, and different coach personalities. These will come later, as I want to get the core update out first.

And more!

And contracts are the main feature here, but there are still lots of other improvements, which you can read below. One worth mentioning is I've increased the realism of player portraits to match demographics better, and added 2000+ last names for each demographic. I've also added charts in different areas to make viewing history more visually interesting and easily digestable. More of those will come with time.

Features

- Add coach contracts league setting, enabling teams to offer contracts to coaches; if enabled, a new contract renegotiation stage is added at the start of the coach carousel
- Add team coaching staff balance, which pays for coach salaries and buyouts; upgrades to core school attributes are blocked unless this balance is positive
- Increase booster base payouts to account for coach salaries
- Add thousands of new last names for use
- Improved avatar appearances to be more realistic based on demographic
- Add "Game History" page to view past results of all bowl games and CCGs
- Add 'Ranking over time' chart below school schedules to see poll ranking change for a season
- Add bar chart for yards per game in "Summary" tab of the team page
- Add bar chart for team wins per year in "History" tab of the team page
- Improve early season poll rankings to have less crazy swings

Improvements:

- Add quick access buttons for rankings, award winners, postseason etc in the header
- Add setting to do conference realignment every year
- Add button in depth chart to redshirt all players at once
- Add button to use previous plays when doing practice
- Improved early season award race calculation for offensive players

Thanks for playing! Hope everyone is getting as excited for the real college football season as I am. It's one last hurrah season for the current conference alignments before the brave new world is upon us. Go gators!