Well, with The Coco running, we all know this NT election is a formality and there's not any room for other serious candidates, so it's time for the joke and token candidates to come out of the woodwork, I suppose.
But before you dismiss me as a joke or token candidate, I'd like you to consider the following:
- Top level US managers have a minimal amount of desire and/or ability (largely, I think, ability) to sustain very high salary monsters on their club roster. As evidence, I put forth the transfer histories of: Joe Bronson
(7929116), transferred 5 times in the last two seasons; Ade Maples
(10593870), transferred 5 times in the last two seasons; Lorenzo Bland
(11777035) transferred twice last season after his USA owner had to sell him...
- Chile's top 4 big man salaries: $375k, $331k, $322k, $320k
- USA's top 4 big man salaries: $334k, $303k, $271k, $267k
- Estimated impact of 1 primary (IS, ID, or RB) pop for a big man in the USA top 4: $35k
- Coco's recipe to close the gap with Chile: more monster bigs
I don't have a problem with having monster bigs. I think having high primaries at any position is great. I think having high primaries and good secondaries is even better. But our bigs are all within 1-2 primary pops (based on salaries) of their corresponding Chile counterpart already, and yet they're apparently a lost cause.
Obviously we do need to make sure the next generation meets or exceeds the performance levels of Bronson and Maples and Renteria. But if the communication coming from the top of the NT program is 350k big or bust, then we leave a good number of potential trainers standing on the sidelines, as they look at their club team's revenues in division 3 or 4 and say "well, I can't fit a 350k big into this roster, so what's the point training something like that and wrecking my club team?"
Some of the training problem is a communication/mentoring problem, which can be solved by helping interested trainers develop a plan that will help their club team promote to a level that can sustain the salaries. However, I feel it's equally important to change the rhetoric surrounding our NT, to shift the focus away from the monster big we're missing and shine some light on other pieces that would help too. I think the "Building Specialized NT Talent" thread in the Training Strategies section of the offsite is a step in the right direction. But I think that we need to encourage a club taking ownership of a player with the desire to see him all the way through,
because the owner knows it will help his/her club team. Planning for a pipeline of "lower division team gets prospect, trains first three years, sells to higher division team, trains next three years, sells to NBBA team for finishing/GS maintenance" sounds great... but will have limited success in practice, because a majority of BB managers have no interest in training in that manner, and you'll be just as likely to lose the prospects.
The tl;dr version:
- NT training should be something a club team wants to do because they recognize the merchandise and team performance benefits of a strong training program centered around American trainees.
- The magnitude of the current focus on "the BIG big problem" is crippling our ability to recruit and retain managers into the NT training community.
- Encouraging a training program of train-to-keep and helping teams promote along the way will result in owners with more "ownership" of the NT prospects, which will in turn increase enthusiasm for the NT and will improve our future training results. Train to sell is a great second option; but should not be the primary focus of our training development program.