DISCLAIMER: These are just my personal opinions in response to Dave's State of the League
I am not going to try not to include the responses of others, however similar or dissimilar they may be. Starting from the top of his post, I took out the pieces I would like to address and put my comments below. Onward we go.
I am not going to try not to include the responses of others, however similar or dissimilar they may be. Starting from the top of his post, I took out the pieces I would like to address and put my comments below. Onward we go.
Jack gave me "a week or two", so I'm still within his timeline, and have not been ignoring him, just formulating my thoughts.
It would have been good to know that you weren’t ignoring us. Even after we accused you of ignoring us, you still said nothing. Also, it’s not good to bottle up everything and explode it onto one post. There are a lot of sub-issues that are going to take some discussion and if we were to begin to cover them when they arose, this process would have been much less messy to deal with. Just take it as a note.
1. Stopped doing weekly reviews.
I fully acknowledge I have not done the week in reviews in many weeks. I do want to say however, that since when has this become a duty of the commissioner? This has always been Jack's thing that he does, and this summer I decided to try my hand at it since I was bored.
If we wish “to go there”, I do recall that these reviews started with you (and you obliged to continue every so often, by my requests). You did them off and on for awhile, and I liked the idea so much I tried my hand at it, albeit more regularly. Then this past summer it seemed to me that you were a regular contributor, which also carried over to this fall. It’s most certainly not the duty of the commissioner (Joe/Luke never did weekly recaps, and I’ve never been commissioner).
HOWEVER, as the commissioner, the members like to know that you’ve got control of things and are involved in the league. When you stopped doing weekly reviews, we could have figured maybe your desire for this league left you. Heck, T-Mac could have been the commissioner those 5 or so weeks before your State of the League, and the only difference would have been that you updated your team and he didn’t. And we also figured if you’re going to check your team, why not write some responses or at least say you need time, but will eventually respond to us.
But our curiosity about why you hadn’t written for the majority of this year could almost be taken as a compliment rather than negativity. We ENJOY having your recaps around and we WANT you to write them. We’re all busy in college, so we know this. And it’s not as if anyone’s going to be at another’s throat if a weekly blog gets published on a Thursday or something. Heck, this past summer I stopped doing it entirely after a certain point because I couldn’t get ASS 2.0 to work. But I was still active on the message boards and told people why I was done.
2. Not answering the questions in the reviews.
Here is my answer finally. And half the time, they're not questions. They're just constant insults directed towards me.
The only questions that I have seen on the message board or posted on the blog regarded the lack of a response to the following questions:
1) Fantasy baseball money (Me, Back on Oct 5)
2) Your opposition to fractional points (Me, Sept 29)
3) Why you haven’t been writing (Mike, Oct 21)
3. Mishandling of money.
It would be virtually impossible to collect league fees when we don't all meet at one time, especially when people were leaving so early, and in some cases going abroad. I recognize I still owe money to some members, and I will make sure to get that money to them.
I understand the difficulty of collecting money when we’re not around (Plus, no one likes to be that guy that asks for money). I also understand the difficulty of money distribution when people aren’t around. But are you aware of who still needs to receive what? Or who needs to pay what? Do you have a piece of paper with a distribution list on it or an excel file? Could you tell me how much the wagers were for our past 3 Armchair seasons? Do we need an Armchair accountant?
Some of the above questions were rhetorical, so if you are going to provide a response to this post, don’t answer all of them individually. But they are things to consider. Things are going to get a little uneasy if you say “yeah I got it covered” without anything more.
4. "Un-Goodell like" ruling
This really doesn’t concern me. Though, it would be nice to know what the rules state. No cursing? What constitutes a curse word? No attack other peoples mothers? (Or is just Joba Chamberlain’s mother fair game?) Also, what kind of penalties do we have in place? Should we sign something at the beginning of each season? Again, they’re just rhetorical questions that we can consider.
5. The Request of a New Commissioner
Joe was the commissioner for baseball two years ago, and although there were no speedbumps, it had to be one of the most boring season of all our fantasy leagues. There was no interaction with the commissioner, no week recaps, no debates over what stats should and shouldn't be included, etc.
Dave, if you are referring to the 2008 baseball season when Joe was the commissioner, we had 114 message posts compared to 156 from the 2009 season. On the message board list here, from the 2008 season, it seems to me that Joe was an active participant on there, contradicting your claim that there was a lack of interaction with him. Also, that was the year I did the weekly RPI recaps from Week 1, so the weekly recaps were also very present. And you claim there weren’t any debates about what stats to include/exclude, but wouldn’t that mean that we were content for the most part with which ones were in place? I personally enjoyed this season particularly, because I won both regular season and playoffs.
Luke had attempted to organize a fantasy basketball league if I am not mistaken, and that had not gone so well.
I also enjoyed this league, and not just because I was in the championship. It’s a bit less demanding than baseball, but more than football (And a bit less luck involved). I’d be game for a hockey or basketball or premier league winter fantasy league if anyone wishes. You name it, I’ll play it.
Jack is the only candidate who has yet to have the post, but if i had to guess I don't think he would enjoy it as much, because he would not have a higher power to constantly gripe about and argue with.
Let’s not put words in other people’s mouths. Just because Mike proposed three candidates, doesn’t mean you need to put up (untrue) criticism toward each of them. Though, you have a great skill-set to be a politician …
Now onto Mr. Ries's litany of inquiries:
About these 6 or so stances I laid out, they weren’t necessarily a compilation of everything you were doing wrong they were just a bunch of satirical hot button issues if we were to hold upcoming elections (Which was also a satirical proposal). There were only a few things that I had inquired about to you personally, which were on that list. But there were also things on that list that didn’t pertain to things you did that I did not dislike.
For these next stances, I’m not going to comment on them all. For the most part, the following things in my opinion should be decided by a) Discussion or perhaps voting by league members and then b) Action by the commissioner. Just my opinion.
1. Which stats to incorporate in non-Football (meaning baseball) leagues:
2. How much each football stat is worth (leaving the big one until the end)
3. How to order the draft and keeper leagues
In the future, I would like to expand to three or possibly four keepers, as it brings more strategy into play when making trades both in and out of season.
I think two is fine at the moment. Fantasy football drafts are already heavily dependent on how the draft turns out. If we have 4 keepers, the champion will probably keep 2-4 of those keepers he already had on his championship team, so he’s already in a great position to win the next year before the draft even starts. Just my opinion.
4. Stance on which managers to allow in/out of leagues.
5. Health Care (I mean fractional points)
Who knew this would be such a controversial topic. Before I address my objections for fractional points, I do want to state the fact that I did allow a vote on this premise for this season, not enough votes were cast, and thus it was not allowed. I refuse to change things when we don't get at least 8 votes cast out of the 10 members of the league. I don't think that's too much to ask. Now, my objections to fractional points are as follows:
I guess that’s your own opinion about how many votes need to be cast. But what about if 7/7 people don’t like an idea, hypothetically? It can’t pass legislature? Or how about we wait until everyone can vote? Via texting, calling, etc.
a) It ruins part of the fun-Part of the fun of fantasy football is sitting there watching a game and yelling and screaming for your running back to get five more yards so you get that one extra point. Fractional points completely ruin this aspect of fantasy football (which I believe is why fantasy football is so addicting).
To paraphrase Step Brothers:
“[I] literally have never done any of those things.”
Am I less enthusiastic about fantasy football than the next guy because I’ve never yelled for a guy to get 5 more yards to round out a fantasy point? Fantasy football would still be addicting if fractional points were implemented. That, you cannot refute. If they ruined fun, why do many leagues use them?
b) It ruins the ease of scoring- I enjoy being able to hear a guy's stats and being able to calculate his fantasy score on the spot. If someone has 92 yards rushing, I like being able to know he scored 4 points, not 4.6 points and trying to integrate that into my team's points for the week.
I just use my computer, where we have free stat updates. Maybe this will help you brush up on your math skills. But also you can make a very educated guess knowing that if a guy has 92 yards rushing, he has at least 4 points plus 12/20 of a point. Especially if we keep 20 as a denominator we just say every additional yard is .5 of a point. I mean yes, it is additional work if you’re ever stranded without a computer and simply cannot wait to know a player’s score. But other than that, it’s all taken care of on Yahoo!
c) There are not fractional points in any other league-you don't get half a run if a guy reaches second base, or gets two thirds of a strikeout anytime a pitcher gets two strikes on a batter.
Fantasy football is different. No other fantasy sport is like football. Other leagues we have category wins. Football, we do not. You’re almost comparing apples to oranges. One could argue that for how many categories we have in other sports, a player is being assessed by an assortment of things he does. If a guy steals a base, it counts. If a guy gets an additional RBI, it counts. So here, if a RB gets an extra 15 yards, I think it should always count.
d) Ties are a part of football- The NFL has ties, and since fantasy football is supposed to (somewhat) imitate real-life football, why can't there be ties in our league? If there were someway to pick two players from your bench as tiebreakers, I would be all for that method, but Yahoo! doesn't allow for that. Fact is, ties happen, and it's part of sports.
Yes, the NFL has ties. Where you’re wrong is that Fractional points also allow for ties. And if we want fantasy to imitate the NFL, we need to cut back on the number of ties we’ve had this season. There have been a total of 17 NFL ties since 1974. (it even has its own Wikipedia page)
Let’s just consider the seasons 2002-2008 (the last year of new franchises up until last season). So there have been 32 teams * 16 games per team / 2 teams per game * 7 full seasons = 1792 regular season games. Over that time there were 2 ties. 2/1792 = 0.1% of all games that end in a tie. For our league, we’ve had (through week 10) three total tie games. We’ve also had 10 teams * 10 games per team / 2 teams per game = 50 games. 3/50 = 6.0% of all games that end in a tie. We’ve played 97% less games than they have, yet have had 50% more ties. Hardly imitators of the NFL.
e) We have already voted on it as a league- As I have already stated earlier in this column, we voted on it as a league, and not enough votes were cast. It's funny I get tarred and feathered for a taking a couple of weeks off of participating in this league, yet we couldn't even get 80% of our members to vote on something that some think is so crucial it needs to dethrone the leadership of the league. What is this, the French Revolution?
Just for a reference, when was this vote? I’m not saying it never happened. But I vaguely recall it.
Anyway, that’s all I have to say for now. This took for too long to cover. Dave, the biggest favor you could do right now is to not sulk or say something like “Fine since you all have so many problems I’ll just give up and you guys can do whatever you want” or something along those lines. I’m not saying that’s what you’ll do or would have done necessarily, but you ARE the commissioner of this league right now. You also clearly wanted to have that title. So, in conclusion, listen to your members when necessary and state true, clear facts always about why you feel the way you feel. I’m all for listening to your reasons for not wanting fractional points. Hey, it might help everyone to hear both sides of this debate if we were to vote on this again. I’m not saying you’re not fit to have your role, but you’ve made statements that I hold different stances on and I’ve laid them out above. Haha maybe we should have a roundtable meeting over Xmas or Turkey break to straighten anything out since it’s tough via message board. But what do I know? You’re Da Commish.
‘I see great things in [the Armchair League], It will [keep] our people [in]doors, fill them with oxygen , give them a larger physical stoicism, tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set, repair those losses and be a blessing to us.”
-Walt Whitman … mostly
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