you know, i've thought that this season, i had to be in one of the toughest leagues in the division, but i wasn't sure how to go about quantifying it. i think i've come up with a decent metric. now, yes i know that money doesn't say everything, and that salary doesn't tell the story of estimated current incomes due to decay or improvement, but i think it's a pretty solid ballpark metric. usually salary has an extremely strong correlation with winning. it's the best predictor i've been able to find over my years playing this game. however, when comparing leagues to leagues, having a total salary is extremely misleading due to teams tanking, and some just being top heavy. i decided that i would take the top 5 teams from each conference in terms of wins, accounting for 10 teams per league, and find out the total salaries between the different leagues. i considered just doing playoff teams, but that doesn't quite tell the story of the difficulty to entry into the playoffs, and also avoiding a relegation series, which i think both factor into how "tough" a league really is. all that said, here are the results, listed highest total salary to lowest total salary. dividing them by 10 gives you the average salary of the top 10 teams (in terms of standings, not wins) in the leauge. without further ado, here is how the leagues stack up against one another:
1 - III.15 - $2,746,345
2 - III.7 - $2,705,501 <---my league
3 - III.16 - $2,662,063
4 - III.13 - $2,499,216
5 - III.11 - $2,497,514
6 - III.8 - $2,466,445
7 - III.12 - $2,289,008
8 - III.3 - $2,271,410
9 - III.5 - $2,234,385
10 - III.4 - $2,192,685
11 - III.14 - $2,165,297
12 - III.1 - $2,083,316
13 - III.10 - $2,076,643
14 - III.2 - $2,060,135
15 - III.6 - 2,043,725
16 - III.9 - $1,996,066