Do I screw myself somehow by turning “Auto Progress Players” to off in Dynasty?

So I hadn’t played a football in over 10 years (Madden like 15 or something) but had friends that moved out of state that were doing a dynasty and I figured screw it I’ll try it out. In prep for the 8 dude league, I did a couple practice ones. 1 solo, 1 with my roommate so we can know the process.

Both of those are about season 5, and our 8 person league just got to end of season 1 training results.

In every single other season for the other two leagues, pretty much every player got boosts to overall between like 2-5 with a few 5-8 overall up.

I had seen to be able to spend player skill points I like literally just turned it off for the big league in prep for next season cuz I wanted to be able to choose what to spend.

But now on training results for this 8 person league, not one single player on the entire roster went up even 1 overall point. Not one.

Was this cuz of my change?? Am I just crazy or made some other mistake? We pumping up the difficulty for season 2 and no one going up is really really demotivating in a tough league.