It looks to me like a tough year for cash cows. Have we been spoilt over the last 5 years with the expansion teams and established teams bottoming out? Port Adelaide and West Coast a few years ago, Melbourne, St Kilda, Brisbane and the Bulldogs the last couple of years. I can only see Carlton this year declaring the start of a rebuild. Those who have played supercoach from the early days might be able to shed more light on this.
Yeah it looks tough at the moment, however the rookies will come by the end of summer, they always do. What one may have to be prepared for though is that there may not be enough that reveal themselves in either the Def or Fwd line. Eg one may plan for a 4-0-0 def and 4-0-0 Fwd but only 2 def cash cows are named in round 1, so what do you do?
It's a bit hard to compare to the early years of SC to these days as so much has changed to both the SC rules and the AFL game. Firstly in the early years of SC all draftee's were based at the same low price, i.e. no premium price for the early draft picks. Hence picking the early draft choices from the bottom teams were almost a no brainer. Two other factors that were different was SC only had 20 trades and there was no rolling lockout. Further with the Tigers/Blues R1 game on a Thursday night and team selections for all other games being announced at 5pm there was only a couple of hours to make last minute changes, which would invariably lead to the SC site crashing! Hence compared to these days back then I personally used to put a bit more focus on selecting rookies with good Job Security that I felt would definitely play a large number of games in the first half of the season. With less trades available you really wanted to make sure every starting rookie went from 114k to 300k odd by mid season, the speed at which they made cash was not as important as it has been in recent years, plus with no sub rule if they played they generally always went up in price. It was rookies who suddenly were no longer getting games that really stuffed your ability to raise cash, because with just 20 trades you were hesitant to use a trade on a rookie swap.
So a practical example of the difference between SC in the early days and more recent times. In 2008 I was confident that Rhys Palmer would play plenty of games early in his first season, he cost 114.2k, so I had him in my starting team. However despite most of us expecting him to play immediately he was not picked for round 1! Rather than risking the SC site crashing on me while trying to replace him with a different rookie that I was not as sure on, and not wanting to waste early trades if he were to be picked soon, I decided to keep him in my opening squad. He played round 2 and become both good cover and a good cash cow. Whereas if this happened in in more recent years, firstly he would have been priced at about 160k due to being draft pick 7, and with the rolling lockout I would have swapped him out. Hence after scores of 87 and 90 in Rounds 2&3 it will now cost a trade to bring him in for R4.
Anyway in preparing for this year I think I will budget that one may have to spend around 150 to 200k on a rookie or two in def/fwd in case the number of 117k rookies playing early on a particular line is near non existent.