Create leagues from a mix of teams - random teams, real current/historical teams, and teams from your existing leagues

Recently I added an exhibition game feature that lets you play a game between two teams from any season in any of your leagues. In BBGM you can also pick any real teams, current or historical. This was a pretty exciting feature because it was the first time there was any type of cross-league play. But you can imagine a lot of other things involving multiple leagues that might be fun.

So here's another one: when creating a new random/custom league, you can now include and current/historical teams from any of your leagues, including real teams in BBGM! Try it out by clicking the "Customize" button next to the team selector when creating a new random or custom league.

That "Customize" button is not new, there has been a "Customize Teams" page for a while that let you define the confs/divs/teams in a random players league. But all the teams were fictional, filled with only random players. Now there are some new features.

If you click an "Add Team" button, you can still add a team full of random players if you want, but you can also now add a team from one of your existing leagues, or (BBGM only) a real players team.

These new types of teams include their players. You can see that on the list of teams after adding one, there is a new "Players" icon next to teams that include players.

And if you click it, you see a list of the top players on that team.

Pretty cool, right? But we're not done!

In BBGM only, there is a new option under the "Reset" menu: "Randomize - real teams".

That will look in BBGM's database of real historical teams and pick a random set of them (without any duplicate cities) to replace all the teams in your league. (BTW, the way it groups teams into divisions is pretty cool!)

So with a click of a button, you might find the Atlantic division is now filled with these randomly-selected real teams:

I think it will be pretty fun to play leagues like this, where you can see historical teams go head to head.

It's a little similar to random debuts mode, which has existed for a couple years. If you're not familiar, random debuts mode lets you randomize all the players in a real players league regardless of when they, so that you're starting it with a totally random subset of real players and then future draft classes are made up of the remaining real players.

The difference here is that they are complete teams of players, rather than having all the teams be a mix of players from different teams/eras.

But if you are creating a league that is a mix of real teams, might you also want to use something like random debuts mode for determining the draft prospects? Otherwise your real players will gradually be replaced by random players.

So I made random debuts mode available in these custom leagues too. Access it by clicking "Customize Settings" when creating a new league, you'll see it under "Randomization" near the top. The "Real Draft Prospect Ratings" setting is also available in these leagues.

Although I did this for leagues made up of real historical teams, it actually works just the same for purely random leagues. So you can now create a league where all the active players are random players, but all the draft prospects are real players. I'm not sure if that's actually a fun idea, but you can do it!