Yeah, recognize that the initial rosters are composed of players who weren't in the top 600+ performers in the league the previous season. We want to keep the top players in the veteran draft so people can have control over their starting lineups. Occasionally you'll get lucky and get a good player who was injured the previous year or a good rookie who rode the bench, but the initial roster is by and large going to be the bottom half of your roster. And as smackawits says, you'll have opportunities for roster turnover in the initial free agency.

As background, our initial play testing had everyone draft all 53 players. That sounds fun in theory, but in practice it was exhausting and took a lot of time. We've considered other ways to flesh out the roster, but a random draw was (so far) deemed to be the best tradeoff.