The first NFBC “Beat Chris Liss” league is scheduled for Wednesday, Feb 7, noon ET.
I know at least one person asked me to alert him when I was doing this, and as promised, here it is.
Before I get into what’s particularly interesting for me about this draft, I want to follow up on my post about why I still trust the NFBC after the employee cheating scandal came out.
That post was about how long I’ve known and worked with Greg Ambrosius and why I trust him. All that still applies, and while as a fallible human being, I could always be mistaken, I stand by what I wrote 100 percent.
The follow-up is just to say a week later I really don’t give a shit about that one bit. I get why some customers care, and why Greg and the NFBC definitely have to care and take it very seriously, but just personally, subjectively, I don’t. Maybe Darik’s cheating cost me money in a contest — I doubt it, but it’s possible. I just don’t care.
I’ve won my share, I’ve enjoyed it, and I trust them going forward. My biggest, selfish concern is just to be able to play this year as usual. Of course I care about Greg’s business continuing to thrive, but that’s his job to worry about, not mine. I just want a place to enjoy playing what in my opinion is the best version of fantasy baseball. That’s really it.
Hopefully enough people feel the same way, so we can have a proper season. I still view winning the NFBC Main as the Holy Grail of fantasy sports.
. . .
This will be a unique draft for me in that I’m not even looking at ADP. The only thing I allowed myself was a peak at Ryan Rufe’s closer rankings on RotoWire (which is not ADP), only because closer depends on managerial whim, and I wanted to make sure I hadn’t missed some info. It turns out I was missing two possible scrub closers from the list, but nothing important, especially in a 12-team league, and I added them, but didn’t change my rankings of any established closer on account of it, even though it didn’t hew to mine entirely.
I researched the player pool deeply from RotoWire’s depth charts, and sorted them by position (based on NFBC eligibility rules), but that was it. I’m going to draft off my instincts, at least for this first one.
The best baseball draft I ever had was a Yahoo Friends and Family one about 15 years ago where I was woefully under-prepared and just went off instinct and what I remembered from the previous year. It was a 14-team league with strong owners, and I got 133 out of 140 points — think I got Justin Verlander and Justin Upton’s breakouts and a lot of other peak seasons. I remember looking back, and virtually every round was a hit.
Eventually, just from drafting and seeing where players go, I’ll pick up on ADP, but for this first one, especially in early February, I’ll be mostly doing it from an unbiased, blank slate.
If any of you are interested, please consider signing up. Normally, I fill these pretty easily, and if I’m having trouble, Greg gets the last few to jump in, but I imagine it could be tougher this year.
Here’s the link.