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As I was mulling over potential ideas for custom leagues, it struck me that I would love an easier way to generate a pool of players that is random, but realistic. Today, we have the ability to quickly create fictional players, and that works okay, but it requires a bit of attention to detail to make sure all the stats of the created players truly make sense.

The new tool released today (which can be found under Player Management in Commissioner Tools) will randomly import a historical season. When you import the players, you can choose to retain real-life name and age, or you can import them at a custom age (if you're building a rookie class) or even with fictional names.

The nice thing is, the stats are from the real world, and you can set a year range if you're worried about different eras messing up your pool.

I think a lot of interesting league ideas could spawn from this... college leagues could use it for incoming freshmen, or leagues wanting to create a more balanced pool of players rather than an "all-time greats" situation.

Like any new feature, it's not perfect - you can't influence how good or bad the random players are, but it's a good start that should be a handy tool for some leagues. If you try it out, be sure to let me know if you run into any issues!