So you've taken your favorite team to the promised land in a couple of years and you wonder, "now what?" That question seems to be one that comes up often for the majority of us who post our dynasties on DSM or even just play them in our spare time and don't report on them. Many people simply have trouble maintaining interest from time to time. After all, maybe the commentary has gotten stale, or maybe your team has become too good and you rarely get a challenge anymore. Whatever the reason is for the lacking interest -- don't fret -- because here are a few ideas to help you avoid the dynasty doldrums and instead take a dynasty well into the teens.

First of all, consider posting your dynasty on avidmanager or another similar dynasty tracking site -- I don't know of any other good ones, but they may be out there. This lends a historical aspect to your dynasty that would be very difficult to keep track of in an Excel spreadsheet. You can look back through any game in any season, see your best performances at the push of a button, and coolest of all (at least in my opinion) it creates player pages for each of your players where you can view every game they've ever played. Yes, it takes a few minutes (usually 15) to enter your team stats and a summary of the other team's top performers, but it saves you a lot of time on the back end. Things like season stats, game report formatting, and other drudgery are a thing of the past.

Another suggestion is to mix it up. Have you played with your alma mater for 5-years in a row on the different iterations of NCAA and you just can't stay interested? The reason might be that playing as the same teams over and over again can, naturally, get very repetitive. Hell, I guess that's repetitive by definition.  

In college football some conferences are easier than others to take over, due to the fact that they may not have divisions, or good recruiting areas, etc. Choose another team that interests you from a conference that you're not so familiar with, and take the opportunity to become a fan of a new team. Learn about their traditions; Google their stadium or team Wikipedia entry for information about the team's history.

For a true example of the geekdom that has befallen this writer, I will admit that I sometimes Google map the locations of players that I'm recruiting to see how far they are from the college or what high school they may have played at.

Also try to create "storylines" that lead to difficulties for your team. Take a couple of years and stop recruiting 4-star and 5-star players (chalk it up to the poaching of a great recruiting coordinator) or go further and don't renew that contract. Or maybe sign with a low-rated team that plays in a great conference if it's a challenge that you want. However, in my opinion, a change of teams doesn't always make things more interesting but is a nice fallback option.

Don't go too in-depth on the reports. It takes a rare individual to be able to report every single tidbit of information about the season and remain interested in the whole dynasty process. Typing up scores from around the country and Top 25 lists week in and week out can become about as interesting as your inbox at work, so why be anal about posting them? People reading your dynasty typically only care about how your team is doing, and if you're spending more time actually PLAYING the game then it's less likely that the process of posting a dynasty will fall out of favor with you.

Possibly the most important tip that I could give would be to find settings that give you a solid in-game challenge and help you to get realistic results. Along that same thread of logic, I also recommend staying away from money plays you might have found, or nano blitzes you might know about. A dynasty is unlikely to remain interesting if you're just turning it into a cheese fest -- winning the national championship every year as a result. On the other hand, if you have a great team and it's fun for you to win the big one every year, well do that then! We all paid our $50 to $60 and can play the game however we want. But for most of us a challenge will be beneficial.

 It will be beneficial because if you lose a game to a bad team, there really should be a silver lining there. It means your team still isn't perfect and there is still more recruiting or perfecting of the system to accomplish; it means you're playing on the right settings; it means your dynasty essentially has some character to it.