Welcome Back
Welcome to the 6th year of the Dumpy (Little) Football league. Thus begins the title defense for last year's champion, Sal. Will his reign of terror continue, or is the Copa Mario destined to return to it's rightful home? Only time will tell.
The preseason week 3 survey is up on the PICKS page. Feel free to check it out if you've forgotten the mechanics of the league. Or not, it's up to you. The first week survey will go up at 0900 on Tuesday, September 5th.
League Expansion
Welcome to Hani and Erin. Thank you both for agreeing to participate in this year's run, and hopefully you both enjoy your time here. I try to keep the league pretty casual, while injecting enough real stakes to keep members engaged. It's very rare that there are disagreements, but it is very frequent that shit is talked. I think that's probably the best mix to have, honestly.
The rules are largely unchanged from last year, with the exception of the prize money. With two additional members, the top prize is $300. After dues, that's $250 free and clear. Second place gets $150 ($100), and third place gets $50 (breaks even). The buy-in is still $50 due at the end of the season.
Maintenance Fee
Please fill out the Fee Survey if you have not done so. This will determine whether there is a an up-front fee to help pay the maintenance costs of running the league. This fee would go toward: Typeform (the service that powers the surveys), Digital Ocean (the VPS upon which the website is hosted), Apipheny (an add-on for Google Sheets to interpret scraped data from Oddshark and Yahoo, enabling near real-time updates of the odds and scores), and the annual domain fee from Google Domains (soon to be Squarespace), and TIME (I've spent many hours basically learning how to be a full-stack web developer).
I have gladly paid for these things out of my own pocket for two years, but I've been told that I should offset those costs with a buy-in. I am truly neutral on the matter. I would happily continue things as they are, but I realize that it's not sustainable for the league if I step down (which is honestly pretty likely after this season).
Once again, please fill the survey out so we can figure out where we stand as a league on the matter.
Discord
I believe everyone is signed up for the Discord at this point. If there are any issues please let me know, as I'm sure most of you only use Discord for this league. For those of you wondering, my thinking behind using Discord is to:
1. Ensure delivery of messages. Sometimes the exchange of messages between different phone brands and carriers causes SMS messages to drop. Or the format of the message causes a drop. This happened the other day when I tried two times to send the discord link to Erin. It's why the group message had all the links broken up by parentheses.
2. Organize messages. Group chats can get messy and chains-of-thought lost.
3. Allow for more control. I made the discord group, and I can ban anyone or add anyone. Also, announcements won't get buried since I'm the only one that can post on that channel.
Review Rules
This is mostly review for most of you, but please review the Rules. Most logistics questions were worked out last year.
Also, the Picks, Standings, and Schedule are your friend.
Good Luck
Without being too rah-rah, let's have a fun season and talk a bunch of shit along the way.
Peace, y'all.
