I don't know how this is going to go or how coherent this will be so apologies for the rant in advance. Im so pissed right now so spell check is the only proofing I'm doing because as we all know I cant type/spell......
Fellow Owners and GMs,
Let me start by saying it is a sad day for this league. We have all just witnessed, and some even went so far as to participate in the lowest form of fantasy football tactics, a veto. After this travesty, I shudder when thinking of the direction of fantasy football and this league as a whole. I have grown great concerns for my children and grandchildren who someday will be fortunate enough to experience how great participating in a league can be. But if events continue go down like today's veto, I fear that they will not ever be able to play this great game due to the fact that it will no longer be enjoyable, fair, or even exist.
I can not tell you how much I am fuming right now, and it saddens me to think, and now know, that an owner would stoop low enough to veto a trade. Especially a trade for a team that is 1-4. To make matters worse, it was brought to my attention that this veto was a colluded event. The vetoers, and I know who you are, should get off their asses, make deals, and stop bitching and acting like 99%ers. You are obviously too insecure with your teams to the point that you think Pierre Fucking Garcon is a threat to you. A veto really says something about ones GM abilities.
I can not believe I will lose sleep tonight over the small mindedness of this league. How do you owners know a third party wasn't involved? Could this deal have needed to go through to make another work? Only Cory and I know the answers. Trading is what makes fantasy football and once that RIGHT is taken away we are left with nothing but a league full of Joe's (no offense Joe you just have 0 moves and your my example). I fear that this will snowball into a league with complete caps and restrictions on trade. We already have enough owners with little to no moves and those who refuse to deal, and now the owners who do deal are not allowing it either. Something is very wrong.
Everyone thinks they can run a team better than the Eagles, or Redskins, or insert disgruntled fan base here, and fantasy football is their chance to prove it. Fantasy football should be exactly that, a fantasy, but today it isn't as the concept and idea of a fantasy team in which this form of entertainment was built around apparently no longer exists.
All this being said the Ning Dynasty needs to end.
The mystery as to who is Ning is a bigger question than who the infamous Glue Goo was. In my opinion, I think we all know Ning without actually ever knowing it. He is a Commie Bastard who came into this league and brainwashed owners by shoving his agenda down our throat deeper than Johnny Sins ever could. My throat is not open and he never got my vote. That was the only Smoothie King run I regret going on because this would NEVER have happened on my watch. Ning has come into our league and tricked owners into believing that fantasy football is a place where owners shouldn't be held responsible for their own trades, does not endorse free market trading, and does not promote wheeling nor dealing. Owners today are lacking vision and responsibility for their actions and look towards fellow owners and or Ning to bail them out of bad deals. Now they even feel the need to put their nose where it doesn't belong and veto trades. I can not stress enough how disappointed in this league I am. None of us are allowed to be elite anymore.
Today's owners have evolved into protectionists. They are against progress, prosperity, and are fixed on locking in inadequacies of the past. Whatever the reason for the inadequacy may be caused by, injury, bye week, today's owner sees the need to keep things the way they are and restrict fellow owners from trying to get better. They also fail to see long term effects of trades and waiver moves while being stuck in the what have you done for me lately mindset. This mentality needs to change. Once this league moves to a keeper league most of you are royally screwed but this wont happen for decades because we are stuck in a rut against progress.
Owner responsibility in this league should honor and respect the freedom of the owner to trade his players that is the fruit of their own trading and waiver wire labors. A commissioner and league who believes in this would by design protect the blessings of liberty. We clearly do not. If an owner should not be responsible for its trades and moves and leaves these decisions to vetoers and Ning, it in turn subjects its team to high levels of failure that unjustly restrict the liberty of its roster that our league settings should have been designed to protect. The fairness of a trade should not be for fellow owners to decide but a strong and intelligent commissioner who spots certain situations like stud dumping by a team that is out of it. Trading and player abilities are a matter of opinions, needs, and want. I got blasted for wasting a draft pick on Scam Newton but he looks like the next Warren Moon. Everyone told Kurt Beanie Wells sucks and every one of you would kill for him right now
. It is these kind of hunches and vision that make fantasy football unpredictable and interesting. If an owner wants Michael Crabtree and Antonio Gates then who are we to questions the reasons and motives and say that he can not have him if there is a market for said player. For example, John wanted Zac Miller real bad for God knows what reason, and did we tell him he couldn't have him when we all knew that he would never score him a single point. No, that was pre Ning and when this league was based on the concept of ownership freedom. This freedom is gone.
Free trading is the roster consequence of ownership liberty. Fantasy football founders believed that wheeling and dealing freedoms were indivisible. Our current leagues interference and veto power distorts free market trading and inhibits the pursuit of players and your rosters liberty. I pose a question, how can we support a return to the free trading principles on which fantasy football was founded in addition to opposing Ning and jealous owner intervention into the operations of our private team business?
Based on the state and direction of our league. This is the last blog post. I am shutting it down since this league has turned into a joke and have decided to run for Commissioner in 2012. This league means too much to me to just watch it spiral into self destruction. Together we can restore the London Silly Nathans.
It's time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the fantasy football founders.
This is the issue of this commissioner election: Whether we believe in our capacity for free team ownership or whether we abandon the ideas seen in events such as the American Revolution and confess that a little group of so called fantasy football intellectual elite know whats best, who is good, and can plan our rosters for us better than we can plan them ourselves. I don't know about you but I don't want anyone touching my roster.
Ning and I are basically left and right and you and I are told we must choose between a left or right. However, I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to fantasy football owner's dream-the maximum of team freedom consistent with the principles I have described or down to the ant heap of today's protectionism. Regardless of their sincerity, Ning and the Vetoers motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security, have embarked on this downward path. The real destroyer of the liberties of the owners is he who spreads among them vetoes.
Owners say, usually with the best of intentions, "What greater team I could have if only I had a little more at flex and a deeper bench, it could buy me a little more power in the trade market." Forget this though because now we are being told by the Ning and the Vetoers we can not trade because they know what is best for our teams. The truth is that outside their legitimate function, the Ning Dynasty and his henchmen can not do anything as well or as efficiently as a free owner.
Yet any time you and I question the schemes of Ning and the Vetoers, we're denounced as being trade rapists and are simply obstacles in the way of their colluded goals. It seems impossible to legitimately debate their vetoes with the assumption that all of us share the desire to help each others roster needs. They tell us we're always "trade raping" and we are not being "equal". The fact that they have the authority to veto does not make any of us equal and their lies the problem.
I believe for a league where destitution should not be caused by an injury or bye week and we should accept free ownership and free trading as a step toward solving roster problems. However, we should be against those entrusted with veto power and when they abolish ones RIGHT to obtain players based on their charges that any trade be a so called rape. These intelectuals have been wrong on ever trade rape so far and they feel the need to continue to abuse their power. We need to be for aiding fellow owners by negotiating with teams who share our fundamental beliefs to solve roster issues and needs in any given week, but we are against doling out player to teams for the sake of being out of the race.
We need true reform that will at least make a start toward restoring fantasy football for our children and restore the fantasy owner's dream that players should be denied to no one, that each individual has the right to wheel and deal as long as his players strength and ability will allow him. But we can not have such reform while our league is full of collusion, jealousy, and abuse of veto power that is engineered by people who think they are the know alls of fantasy football. We all know nothing and we need to stay curious.
Have we the courage and the will to face up to Ning, the Vetoers, and protectionism, and demand a return to traditional free market trading and ownership? Owner freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp, if it hasn't already.
Are you willing to spend time studying the problems, making yourself aware, challenging Ning's agenda, and then conveying that information to fellow owners? Will you resist the temptation to veto a trade that promotes progress and prosperity? Realize that the fight against collusion is your fight. We can't veto trades without vetoing freedom. We need to recognize that naive and jealous owner's invasion is eventually an assault upon your own team and its business. If some among you fear taking a stand because you are afraid of reprisals from Ning, or the Vetoers, recognize that you are just feeding the crocodile and you are hoping he'll eat you last.
If all of this seems like a great deal of trouble, think what's at stake. We are faced with the most evil enemies fantasy football has known in his long history. There can be no security anywhere in the fantasy football world if there is no ownership and trading stability within the London Silly Nathans. Leagues look to us as a precedent and we need to be the example. They say fantasy football has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. I have those answers.
We have a rendezvous with destiny. We can preserve fantasy football for our children before we will sentence them to a life of Jay Glazer dictating who to start each week. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we we did all that could be done, but together we wont fail.
-Gulf Coast 2012
