The Offseason - Hello Darkness, My Old Friend
- Thomas
- May 30, 2017
- 9 min read
“How much has spending most of the offseason in prison affected Jamal Lewis’ poor start”
– Chris Collinsworth
This is the best quote about the off-season of all time… also, the offseason is a prison in its own so it’s doubly relevant.
First things first; If you’re reading this (it’s too late) then the offseason project is finished… Welcome to the Jimmy Parrot Footnugget League website. We got lots of cool shit so take a look around. This will be updated as the seasons go on so feel free to check in from time to time. Don’t be that guy who thinks this is replacing ESPN as the host for our games though, I will not be accepting that as a valid excuse for not setting your lineup (because there isn’t one… fantasy is life bitches).
We’re in the middle of the offseason, OTAs have just begun and we finally have the beginnings of football trickling down to satiate our thirst. Picture us as the commoners in Mad Max and football as the GodKing with a weird mask who nourishes himself off breastmilk as he slowly opens the valve to give us water/life. Soon we’ll be in full blown minicamp mode and the news and hot takes will be flowing like the river Nile. Can’t wait. Until then you can hold yourself over by going over last year’s stat sheets or something productive.
Hopefully, this site will lead to a ramping up of the cool shit in the league. LM note will be back with in full force next season and I really hope to include some cool things granted they don’t take up too much of my time.
Pat and I are working out the fantasy schedule as we speak (or read or whatever, euphemisms don’t always work in text form). We will be releasing them on primetime television hopefully. Get excited.
For 9 of you, hopefully coming up short last year has left a hunger in your belly for greater success. Brian, Fuck you. JK fam. Coming this August we may or may not have a super shitty homemade trophy for you to call your own for a season… Depends on how productive we here at JPFL HQ feel.
This Thursday we have plenty of…… darkness…. There is no football now, only darkness.
AWARDS:
Dennis Price MVP Award
The Dennis Price was actually named before he announced his retirement, so don’t give me any bandwagon bullshit, I honored the man before anyone even knew it was time to do honoring. But to be real for a minute, the man was a complete legend and total non-asshole. Maybe having a Dean to be the jerk for you helped but whatever, the guy was cool which is a rare thing to say about your schooling administrators and this league makes CHS references whenever possible so this was a clear opportunity for another.
This year’s Dennis Price MVP award goes to:
Aaron Rodgers - QB, Zee Bear Jew
4,428 passing yards, 369 rushing yards, 44 Total TD = 413.3 points
Bechelli Flex MVP award
This award celebrates that there are many ways in which one can be an MVP.
I had a big write-up ready to go here, breaking that down into more detail but let’s be real, it's perfect to just leave it at that one line. It goes to the top scoring non-QB if you want “specifics.”
This year’s Bechelli Flex MVP award goes to:
David Johnson - RB, Red Wedding
1,239 rushing yards, 369 receiving yards, 20 Total TD = 364.8 points
Owner of the Year Presented by Sage Dining:
This year’s Owner of the Year Presented by Sage Dining goes to:
Nick Leon - Kings of Leon
Honestly, this was well deserved for a couple of reasons
1) Nick made the playoffs
2) He made the playoffs despite:
2A) This being his first year of fantasy football
2B) His team struggling to find production all year and essentially being dead in the water if left to its own devices.
Nick beat out a lot of “stronger” teams this year by managing his roster week by week and cucking everyone on the waiver wire (seriously he was the most active and most benefitting from the waivers and it wasn’t even close). This award should serve as a reminder to everyone that fantasy football is full of luck based events and anyone can win no matter what their level of football dedication/prior knowledge is… all it takes is a couple of minutes each week and the ability to pay attention and use your damn brain. Also, worthy of note, Nick was the one out of two of us able to beat PLo’s monster this year… the league got cucked twice by the same guy.
Congrats Nick, I hope I take your playoff spot next year… guard it like a child or something else precious if you don’t value children (I’m a Penn Stater I know a lot about “not valuing the safety of children*”)
*allegedly
Unfortunately, I can’t really get a sage dining cookie or sponsorship to give with this award or it definitely would come with one, but if you’re ever around CHS just tell them I said they owe you one and it should be all good.
No games for the next 14 Thursdays… September 7th will be here soon enough (or August 25th if you like superior college football).
Without further ado.
Finals Review
This game was very exciting to watch. Especially if you went out to a bar and watched it happen with some of the league (if not you missed out fam). This game went back and forth at the end, coming down to a pretty intense Monday night, but Brian ultimately pulled out the victory. David Johnson capped off an MVP worthy fantasy season with a clutch 30-point showing to help seal the deal. It’s been a while since this happened and I don’t remember it a ton, so that’s all you get.
(this last one really sums up what it was like to finally see the juggernaut go down)
WINNINGS!!!
Brian: $100.00
Pat: $35.00
Charlie: $15.00
Hunger Foul of the Year
Real Life Football Champs: 122.5 Points (Week 3)
So, we’re making one big change to this award next year in that it can only be claimed with a loss on the week. So no longer will a team be taking home the Hunger Foul with a W. You get the hunger foul for leaving meat on the bone when you go hungry, not when your belly is full of fantasy victory. In a nice dash of irony, I take home the ultimate crown for an award I created. 122.5 points would have been an impressive starting score. I almost think it’s more impressive to find a way to leave that much production on your bench (in a bad way). I managed to fuck things up so bad that my bench for week 3 outscored 116 out of 158 team performances this year (73.4%). I’m going to pull a Kirk Cousins and tape this post in my locker to motivate myself to suck less. Watch out.
Waiver Move of the Year
Skittle Monster
Add QB Matt Ryan. Drop QB Brock Osweiler (week 3)
SCALE 1 to 10:
2 years in a row the biggest waiver move of the year has been a team picking up a dynamite UDFA QB off the waivers. In 2015 I snagged Cam Newton in a very “fuck it” move, taking BPA to back up Drew Brees. Several weeks later he was league MVP. This past season Pat decided to claim a top tier QB who made it through 17 rounds of draft unclaimed. Topping things off, he dropped actual piece of shit passer Brock Osweiler in the process. This is like trading your flight on 9/11/01 and extending your vacation a day instead of taking that earlier flight back to NYC because you made a random gut decision. As we all know from 20/20 hindsight, Ryan would go on to lead the greatest Super Bowl choke of all time and Osweiler would be traded to Brown for negative return JUST TO GET HIM OFF THE ROSTER. Who has it worse, I dunno, they both probably want to die so neither I guess.
Bad Luck of the Year
Harrisonburg 21-16
Brian Hoyer Thursday Night Mix Up (week 7)
If you all remember this one from week 7, Jacob was still operating on 2007 time, when we didn’t have Thursday night football and spaced out about the early lock times for 2 rosters worth of players. He accidentally left Hoyer in his lineup past his lock time, while meaning to swap out starting QBs for Sunday. Things would’ve been fine if Hoyer went on to have average production. He broke his arm instead. Jacob ended up losing the game and missing the playoffs by, you guessed it, 1 game.
Offseason At A Glance
We just finished the NFL Draft a month ago, so the offseason is still young. We’ve got about 3 months until we start warming this beautiful beast of a league back up to run again, enjoy the time off from having to care about sports.
Draft Order
As we voted on last year, draft order will be the inverse of the final standing. The first shall be last and the last shall be first.
Here is the draft order as it currently stands:
1. Palting
2. Simmons
3. Butler
4. Wild
5. Bridenstine
6. Belka
7. Leon
8. Gaskin
9. Lockett
10. McAvoy
*remember the draft will snake (reverse order) each round
Draft pick trading is open now so hit those phone lines. We'll set a draft date (for late August) sometime in early August.
Keepers
This will be a new rule for the 2017 season but we’ve gone over how keepers work in the past so most of you probably have an idea of how it works. A keeper is a player from your previous year’s roster that you can keep on your roster for the new season.
The keeper method we will be using is keep by round selected, with a seventh-round cap (nine starting spots minus two for Kicker and D/ST). Essentially, you will be keeping your player by sacrificing the draft pick you hold in the round they were drafted. If your player was drafted in last year’s first round, you will be selecting that player with your first round pick… if they were taken in the 5th then you will use your 5th round pick… if they were a free agent acquisition or taken later than round 7, they will be treated as a round 7 pick and you will pick them in the 7th.
A couple of quirks within the system:
If you acquired a player via trade, we will go based on what round that player was drafted in by his original owner (same rules as explained above).
If you have traded the pick(s) you have in the round in which that player was acquired (i.e. you’re keeping a player you took in the 4th but have traded your 4th round pick for this year) you will lose the closest prior pick to the round your keeper would’ve been (in that scenario the player would lose their 3rd round pick)
If you have acquired an additional pick in your keeper round (i.e. keeping your third-round player and traded for another 3rd round pick) you will lose the earliest pick you have in that round.
You will first have to announce your keeper prior to the draft beginning, and then when the appropriate round/pick comes we will allow you to take that player Obviously, this requires a bit of a “gentleman’s agreement” to not draft someone’s declared keeper, but if someone goes rogue, Pat and I can always pause the draft and correct the issue. This may not be an issue if we use a better draft tool this year. I’m looking into “ClickyDraft” since it’ll allow us to run the draft on our own terms and use our own keeper rules. Plus, it works on mobile for those of you who might be one the go for draft night.
This isn’t something to worry about until next August, but just something to have in mind if you ever glance at your roster/ want to make a trade.
Rule/Structure Changes
This will be something we look at every offseason, making minor tweaks to scoring or rules in general. Usually, nothing major is changed but this offseason we may finally ink out the league “constitution” just to lay out in hard print exactly how discrepancies and debates will be settled moving forward. Other than that, we’re open to any suggestions you may have for how to make the league more fun/more accurate/fairer.
Some things to look at:
- Possible scoring tweaks.
- Increasing League Buy In/ Payout Structure.
- Changing free agents/waivers to a "free agent auction bid" system
- Im a huge fan of this because it turns waivers form less of a luck/rewarding a loss system into a skill competition
- Other things that I didn’t think of
League Constitution
This isn’t going to be a huge deal, or very impactful to you guys; but, at some point this season I will be putting into firm writing most of these rules we’ve agreed to and posting them online so we have a reference. Most of the stuff will be pretty obvious but since there is actual money at stake here I think it’s important to have the ins and outs laid out clearly so no one can claim ignorance or confusion moving forward (not that this has been an issue yet). Ultimately, this will mostly include things like playoff seeding and draft rules and trade vetoes, things that we could easily forget and would like to be able to reference just in case of dispute.
That’s all for now fam. I leave you with this: a collection of gifs I found throughout the last year of making LM notes but couldn’t find a way to utilize because they were either way to specific or way too weird. Enjoy
Bye, for now.
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