The level of whining over this whole exercise is incredible. We've got people whining over almost every step of the process. People whining about the whiners. People whining about somebody whining about one thing while benefiting from something other people whined about. People whining about people whining about people......
The draft absolutely IS random. It's fixed based on record, which itself is composed of a set of (weighted) random occurrences. Any given Sunday and all that. There's a reason that the best teams on paper don't finish with undefeated records. In short - that's why you play the games.
Since we didn't go through the whole process of simulating the schedule game by game, we shortcutted the process by randomly picking the draft order - which is essentially randomly assigning the final W/L record instead of doing each game individually. Unless somebody wants to put in the time and effort to hold polls for each of the 500+ regular season games so we can appropriately handicap and figure out each teams record; OR setup a full-fledged Madden simulation (each of which have their own flaws which I severely doubt would eliminate all the whining). Otherwise how about we all stop bitching and work on how to constructively make this process as effective as realistically possible?
As for the draft ordering, I agree that it might have made more sense to either a) handicap each team within each strata and randomize the order accordingly, sort of like the NBA lotto or b) hold polls to determine which teams were worse and would have had lower records and simply order accordingly. However, neither approach is perfect (again - the IRL actual order depends on the cumulative results from a series of randomized events) but, given how long it's taken us to do each step of the process, I don't fault MMS for taking the shortcuts he did. Sure, we can pick out a few outliers (like ElCab's Fins or SSF's Steelers) who's draft position doesn't make much sense; but by and large I think we did a pretty good job getting to where we are.