That's reasonable. I came up with the PO performance thing because:
1. A bot-bound team would always have the upper hand in terms of game record against a manager who joined midseason and racked up a couple of losses, but it is the latter who will most likely be playing the game moving forward. But then, having a last login criteria should solve this issue.
2. This game rewards PO performance. As things stand now, the team that barely qualified into the PO and had the worst record of the 8 then suddenly beat everyone to win the playoffs will get the prize money, promotion, and the best draft pick of the playoff teams. It took quite some time trying to decide which side I should be on while making this post - should I continue to reward PO performance like above, or do I prevent the gap for going further.
In the end I went with what I felt was the trend because I felt that I needed to throw out more ideas so that we can cover all grounds. That said, I do agree with you that the PO performance can be detrimental to the game. I guess just having the last login criteria can pretty much solve the problems I pointed out.