Here’s a suggestion to make the Rival issue more interesting, and perhaps more relevant to “rivalry”, and to generally enhance the enjoyment of the game for those who enjoy rivalries.
Right now, we are all assigned our rivals based on some sort of formula accounting for certain data (it seems like this includes number of games played against each other, relative team strength, etc.) I’m not proposing that this function be removed. But I’d like to see every team have the opportunity to express which team in their conference (or maybe even in their league) they want to have as their rival (this could be done as a scroll down menu on a Rival page) and to have this preference be part of the determination of which team should be designated as the Rival. Obviously, the determination should take team strength into consideration and not just automatically assign the Rival based on preference or else every team would try to get the worst team in the league as their Rival. But it could mean that if two teams both express a desire to be each other’s Rivals (either because they know each other and want to be competitive, or because they really don’t like each other and really think of the other team as a Rival, or because the teams have been in the same league for a long time and play a lot of tight games but never seem to be designated as Rivals due to the mystery calculation in spite of what they think has developed as a natural Rivalry, etc.), then they should almost automatically become Rivals (I express almost since there may be some odd collusion with this, so some checks should be in place, say prohibiting a 1st place team and an 8th place team becoming Rivals unless they’ve had a history of a minimum of x number of games against each other). And, in theory, we should be able to change our preference (and by extension our Rival) as late as a couple weeks into the season to account for new teams as we get to know each other, though not later than that so that a team can’t change Rival preference every time his team loses to his Rival.
I don’t know, maybe I’m making this too complicated. But I was inspired to this idea as a second-year team in a division without much of a “Rivalry” with any team yet, and finding a newly promoted team in the league who likes to talk smack. I’m very likely going to battling this team for 7th place since, on paper, we seem to be the two weakest teams in our conference, and yet we both have the same other team as our Rival (and of course this other team does not have either of us as his Rival since that team has been in the league much longer then our teams). It just makes sense that, since he’s starting the (to be fair, friendly) smack talking, and we have comparable roster strengths, that we should somehow be able to make our games have even more at stake by being each others Rivals.
Any thoughts on the viability of implementing something like this?
Don't ask what sort of Chunks they are, you probably don't want to know. Blowing Chunks since Season 4!