Project Holy Grail – CBL’s creation of D1 Baseball (all teams) League Journey

[CBLCardinals]

Project Holy Grail – CBL’s creation of D1 Baseball (all teams) League Journey

This is it fellas… the MOST COMPLEX project I’ve ever tackled in OOTP.
My goal with the project is to create a universe that is D1 baseball, using all the real college teams, real conferences, etc. I have ALL 308 (also includes pending/future teams) teams in this massive universe. I am testing many of the concepts below and hope to share an example with everyone soon (next few weeks). Below is my work-in-progress outline of how the league will operate.


The Schedule

The great news is I already have the most difficult part of this project put to bed… the schedule.
With 29 conferences, all with differing number of teams this was something the OOTP schedule maker by default could handle. Not only is the schedule created, it looks fantastic with the qualifiers I put in place below. I recruited the help of AI (Claude) to create a schedule that reflects:
• 60 total games for each team
• 30 total home games for each team
• Using the college schedule of a typical week of Friday, Saturday, Sunday (weekend) series, and Tuesdays (week day) game
• A vast majority of each team’s weekend competition will be within each division. For example, in the SEC Alabama versus Florida.
• All Tuesday games are versus a non-conference opponent. I had Claude generate this at random for matchups.
• This gives most teams 45 games versus division opponents, and 15 Tuesday games versus non-conference opponents.
• Regular season starts Mid-February, and runs through end of May.
• One note… for conferences with odd number of teams, they will have non-conference opponents occasionally on weekends.

Logos/Uniforms

• Vast majority of the 308 teams will at least have real life logo, and team colors on team page
• Quite a few of these teams have uniforms/pants/caps from all the great work I could find on the OOTP mod boards (lots of great college stuff from Cheo25!

Stadiums/Park Factors/City locations

• UGH. I don’t see a great way in OOTP to batch load from a database/workbook to OOTP. This one will probably take a while unfortunately unless someone out there has a way I am unaware to push 308 stadiums to OOTP with park factors, etc.
• If anyone has links to real College 3D stadiums already created, please let me know!!

Player churn/progression/roster orientation

• I’ve tested this out in a few smaller and larger fictional leagues and seems to work well!
• Players will be fictional!
• Limit player creation age and participation in league 18 to 22 years old. Since the designation of Freshman, Sophomore, etc will not be in OOTP for a fictional league, each age is reflective of a class. 18 = Freshman, 19 Sophomore, etc. To avoid potentially playing five full years, I will need to have a restriction on service time. Some 18-year-olds will be “Red shirt freshman” if they do not play much for instance.
• It seems like most D1 rosters have around 40 players. Because of injuries, and ability to have 18-year-olds “red shirt” I’ve tested my hypothesis of a 30-player active roster (15 pitchers/15 position players) with a reserve roster set at 20 players. I may adjust the reserve roster down to 10…TBD on the final landing point.
• Pitching will use a 4-man rotation. Teams typically start their ace pitcher on Friday nights. So, weekend series will have the #1-#3 arms on the staff starting, and #4 starter for the weekday game on Tuesday.

Playoffs/Road to Omaha

• OOTP has a BUNCH of different playoff formats, which is awesome, however none are quite the same as real D1 baseball with the system of regionals, then super regionals, them College World Series…which is less awesome
• I have tested a few concepts….
o Double-Elimination for all games. This kind of simulates March Madness type excitement, with the caveat of double elimination for the entire tournament (until finals).
o Pool Play. With 16 pools of 4 teams each, this approximates “regionals” in real life college baseball. You don’t get double elimination per se, so it’s a compromise.
• All 29 conferences will have at least one representative in the playoffs/Road to Omaha! Since majority of each team’s games are versus conference opponents, the team with the best record from each conference will receive an automatic berth.
• Power conferences will receive more post-season births (as we see in real life). Power conferences like SEC, ACC will not only get the first-place team in the tournament, but also several others.

Recruiting/Team Finances

• Ok now for the fun part… how do you acquire players? I have free agency/extensions/arbitration/drafting/IAFA all turned off. I plan to incorporate finances to project as best as possible bigger teams (such as SEC) having a higher budget and more money to spend on “recruiting” than smaller schools. In real life teams can offer “NIL” money so think of this money as NIL funds, plus some type of enhancement for power conference teams having more prestige. I am testing a few different options, however top power conferences like the SEC and ACC will have more money at their disposal versus the smaller less known conferences
• Shortly after the season tournament/playoffs conclude, I will retire all players that will be ineligible for the following season either due to age, or service time. Once I have this number established, I will share with everyone my filter. To me, it appears the deadline is February 1st…. meaning if a player turns 23 on February 7th for instance, they are still eligible to play. If they turn 23 on January 30th, they are not eligible to play.
• Once players “graduate”, sometime around July, I create two classes of players for recruiting to begin. A huge batch of 18-year-olds (to simulate recruiting high school players), and a smaller batch of ~20 year olds to simulate recruiting Junior College players
• For each batch creation, the player positions and quality will be set to random. More than likely 18-year-olds I will set to either raw or half-way on development. The Junior College players will be more than likely fully developed. Classes will be random so we should see some years better classes than others hypothetically.
• What we term “free agency” in OOTP will be treated as a recruiting period that will last from Summer to somewhere around end of January.
• TBD on the salary ranges for players, initial budgets, scouting, et al.

Season Flow
• February pre-season begins
• Mid-February through end of May regular season play
• June post season/Road to Omaha play
• July players “graduate”. Players created in two batches (high school 18-year-olds, Junior College 20-year-olds. Both random quality). Recruiting/Free Agency begins.
• Recruiting/Free Agency occurs July through end of January
• From there, if any free agents still exist, I plan to retire/delete them. Colleges do not typically pick up players during the season, unless it’s some odd scenario of a player on campus coming over from another sport, or mass injuries and walk-ons needed.


Ok I’ve spent a TON of time on this idea, and testing scenarios out in OOTP the past few days to determine its at least realistic. The end user will just need to do some maintenance to “graduate” players and create free agents/draft classes.

What feedback or questions do you have? Is this something that you would have interest in?

[CBLCardinals]

Screen shots of:

Florida team schedule in OOTP for March

Team schedule in Excel workbook from AI/Claude

Example of outputs for a few different conferences with different team counts

[CBLCardinals]

More screen shots:

Team Home page (no players yet)

Team Jersey page

Standings (308 teams going to require LOTS of scrolling)

[rwd59]

Sounds very ambitious, and very exciting. I'm afraid I can't help you out but I can tell you that I will absolutely play it when you get it done.

[mgom27]

Interesting other then Fictional guys.

[kev24fan]

Very much so. I would like to play College baseball.

[dmacgreg37]

I did a much smaller version of this about 10 years ago. Good luck and look forward to checking it out.

[bwburke94]

How is Oregon State, who is independent this year, being handled?

[CBLCardinals]

Originally Posted by bwburke94

How is Oregon State, who is independent this year, being handled?

I placed them in Big 10 mainly because the league w/o them is 17, Oregon Ducks are there, and since they were the only independent team I placed them with what made the most sense

[luckymann]

I wish you all the best with this bud, if anyone can get it to work I suspect you're the guy.

I have tried similar universes a number of times with limited success. Headwinds were mainly size-related but also the game really fights against the whole idea. It struggles to maintain a college-aged environment for some reason. It seems to prefer adult supervision.

Would love to see that change in an upcoming version but won't be holding my breath as it's got TOO HARD BASKET written all over it.

G

[itsmb8]

Any plans to design this to work with your MLB save, or is this completely standalone?

[CBLCardinals]

Hey gang,

Making some REALLY GOOD progress

For the road to OMAHA, here is my vision for the 64 teams:

Good news is you can pre-set this up in the custom playoffs.
All 29 real life NCAA conferences represented.
I used approximate power ranks for real life teams/conferences, as well as payroll/talent for each conference for the fictional players to match up 1 through 64.

More to come soon....

[rwd59]

Impressive!

[CBLCardinals]

Hey gang, more updates...

Overall, League Totals for my CBL College League (pre-season simulation) vs D1 NCAA 2026 Season totals are now statistically DEAD ON.

[CBLCardinals]

And here are the sim results. I enabled conditional formatting to easier see variances across the 308 teams.

[zappa1]

Wow that's pretty incredible.

[LansdowneSt]

Impressed.

Here are the college parks and there are of course others spread about. They prob could use some updated scoreboards. Have not gone through the thread in a while.

https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...d.php?t=327037

i have thought for years OOTP should put effort into the feeder system so you can elect to use the draft as it is now or a college-like system. Lots of games so big files size risk but if they shipped with a CollegeTeams.csv with generic names that could be swapped out, it'd make modding easy. Release a modest D1 structure and focus on getting the talent levels right and the rules and all of that hard stuff. Again. with a CollegeTeams.csv one could drop in different modded structures of more teams or less teams or renamed teams easily done in the csv file and not the tedious team by team in-game approach. The Teams file also allows you to enter the ballpark info easily and the game looks for it in the proper folder and auto-loads it. I did this in the NeL mod so I tricked the game into thinking NeL teams were MLB teams with all the things the game does and loads automatically.

Will be watching this. The best things the game integrates often come from modders and I can't say enough how impressed I am you are taking this on!

[BestbatBoy]

CBL, would you ever want to attempt something with real players? I have a file built in last year's game that would give a hugh head start on the real rosters. Plus with what you have added in your last update. I'd be willing to help with a lot of the player creation

[rwd59]

I guess my question would be is will all leagues be equally rated? I mean hitting .400 in the Horizon League because you play the majority of your games against that league is not the same as hitting .400 in the SEC playing the majority of your games against SEC opponents. You get what I mean? I mean in reality all leagues are not equal. I know there are games that adjust things between stronger and lesser leagues/conferences to give advantages to stronger conferences. But is that even possible with OOTP? Not knocking what you are doing just thinking about things. When you are retired you got a lot of time to think, lol.

[millhousebc]

My issues has been with real players, is you have to manually assign each player to a team. I haven't found a quick way of doing this.