Welcome back to the Dumpy (Little) Football League. This will be my second year as commissioner (and honestly, most likely my last).
This year we have quite a bit of turnover in the league. Please welcome Emilio, Erik, and Raymond. It is fortunate that we didn't need to restructure the league, due to fulfilling the eight-member threshold that I think is ideal. They truly helped save the league, and I think we've got a good group.
Discord
This year I've decided that all league communications should be done through discord. I'll send out a discord link (if I haven't already) and everyone needs to make sure they can log in. This is where we will lock in spreads (if you choose to do so) and generally talk a lot of shit. Like, the most. But it's all good-natured and please, keep it semi-decent. The last thing I need to do is babysit a chat forum. Keep it clean (ish). I can't tell you exactly where the line is, but it's sort of like the definition of porn:
you know it when you see it.
Rules
I have a rules page up on the site (navigation buttons are in the top left corner). Generally, the league uses spread to help even out odds and to make each week more akin to a coinflip. That isn't to say there isn't skill involved (or, in my case, a lack thereof), but it will be harder to beat the spread as oddsmakers adjust to reality as the season progresses. This is by design. Theoretically, the top 6 players have a chance to win the top prize until week 15. The parity, added with the low barrier to entry, makes this league unique.
I like to think of the league primarily as a way to talk crap, and the picking of games is secondary. Obviously try to win--but please enjoy yourself along the way.
As for the buy-in--that's collected at the end of the league year. The top three players automatically have their fees forgiven, but the rest of the league will owe $50.
Website status
This week, we will be conducting a test run for the league. There are a bunch of disparate moving parts that I've sort of forced to work together. I mainly want to make sure that the
- (picks survey is working),
- the tables are updating (spread, scores)
- the discord is running smoothly
- we can smooth over any major issues before week 1.
The website is about 75% done. I haven't really touched too much of it from last year, aside from migrating to a a cloud-based server over the one in my home, and changing the domain name. I did have to re-write the scraper that gathered the spread information since the one from last year is somehow broken. As a result, the spread info comes from a different part of the same oddsshark website. I also added the computer prediction on the far right column, just for the hell of it. The computer is just as wrong as us humans, but I thought it would be fun to have a second opinion readily available. It basically represents the predicted point spread according to oddsshark simulations for the home team (e.g., +7.5 means on average the computer expects the home team to lose by 7.5 points).
Test Run
So here is the test run for the league. Go forth and break the site into tiny pieces so I can put it back together again!
Thanks y'all for participating. It's going to be a good year.
Peace
