Dear Diary: What Did I Do?

[Black Superman]

Dear Diary: Year 1 as Sim League Commissioner

The clock strikes midnight and officially Josh makes his resignation known. As we sit back and await the fate of the sim league, it seems all but likely that the end is upon us. Roberto gassed out, Josh gassed out, whatever do we do. Thinking to myself, do I want this to end on the brink of Maxwell Lewis’s breakout season? Do I really want things to end while never seeing my guy hit his prime? No way do I accept that as his fate, nor mine. I raise my hand and decide to step up and take on the duties of commissioner. I mean, how hard could it be right? Also, I have my roommate as a previous commissioner, surely he can teach me everything there is to know.

It was this decision that inked my fate for Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays to be eaten up by the sim league duties. Will I have time for drinks after work? Will I be able to go on vacation? What about when I have to work late? I never even had node access, so I don’t have the basic understanding of how the site works. However, I do remind myself, I’m probably a somewhat smart guy. I should be able to handle this…I hope. All of this runs through my head as I decide to take on the responsibility of Sim League Commissioner.

I decided to step up, speaking with both Josh and Roberto about my intentions. I make sure Roberto is okay with doing some of the in person training. I know my learning style, I am a fast learner so long as I get to do things. My memory is stellar, both in remembering things I’ve done, and remembering things said to me. My photographic memory is also pretty amazing, which is why I’m able to trust that doing things is the best way for me to learn the duties. Josh says he will do one more season and then turn over the reins to me. However I have a different thought in mind. Why not just start now? If you’re already burned out, let me start learning now when you’re still committed to doing it that way we can tag team it. Not only will it lessen your load on the final season, it will allow me to get hands on live experience while you’re still doing it. Next season I can take over as commish having already done a season of most of the duties.

All parties agree and we begin right away by having me transition into the new season and I run the Draft Lottery. We hit the ground running and I am enjoying the challenge of learning something new. We eventually transitioned into the draft itself which was pretty easy and I started to have thoughts, “man this isn’t so hard”. Boy was that only the beginning. Free Agency is a different beast of an animal. There are a lot of steps to RFA, and based on the timing of it, I wasn’t able to do it. Josh wrote out notes which I will follow going forward. UFA is much more direct but very time consuming. In an ideal world, the lists for UFA Rd1 would come in throughout the weekend leading up to UFA Rd1 deadline on Monday. That was so not the case, most bids start to come in mid morning to early afternoon. Why’s this problematic? Well luckily I was in a job that allowed me to be able to submit bids while working. I brought my personal laptop into work, connected to my phone’s hotspot and entered bids as they came in. Will this always be the case as I transition into a new job? I’m not sure. The other problematic thing is, bids that come in at the last minute. This hurts the actual timing of the sim as bids were literally being sent in as the timer was buzzing. Training Camp, whew. This was a lot of work. It’s not hard, however it is very tedious work.

The thing that gave me the biggest headache was depth charts. That was by far my most annoyed moment to date. There’s not many things I hate than tedious and slow things. The sim software loads each team's depth charts kind of slow. So not only are you having to do a ton of work to get all players at their positions, minutes assigned, positions assigned. You’re also waiting for the software. It adds just enough annoyance for this to be bar far the thing that I’ve disliked the most. The actual gameplans aren’t too hard but again, just annoying. It’s not so bad to maintain this once the season gets underway, and I do find that I don’t feel that bogged down doing daily tasks now. It brings me great joy to see a team say “same”. Oh man, that is a wonderful feeling lol. It’s all I look forward to on sim day. I don’t even care about the results anymore, I just want to see as many “same” as possible. I definitely don’t say this to discourage anyone from making changes. Please continue to make changes. However, I do understand why those with TV access in the past would do their own. It was very helpful to the commissioner. I already appreciate Josh, and Roberto for doing their own. I guess Doug too if he’s done his own this season at all. It’s a big weight lifted on game day. When I look back on my decision to keep the league going forward, I don’t have any regrets. I am still early on in this process, so I’m definitely not tired of anything yet. I do think having a full desktop setup with dual monitors, keyboard, and mouse helps get things done quickly and makes me less annoyed to do them. I did a lot of UFA from just my laptop at work with a trackpad and it was rough. Mouse>trackpad when it comes to operating through the VNC and in the sim software. I guess I just wanted to give a state of the union of how things came to be with me joining on as commissioner and my thoughts so far. Don’t worry, I’ll keep it going for as long as I can….so you’ll at least get a season or 2 out of me before I burn out….or quit out because of my Tax Bill. Say, it’s kind of an oxymoron for the League Commissioner to be in tax jail….such as life, put some money on my books for me next season folks.

Love y’all

[LazyTitanSmash]

Love the passion for sim league and thanks for putting in the time to keep it rolling. That being said, I enjoy the smack talk and sincerely can't wait for inevitable our playoff series.

[NickMalone77]

You’re doing a great job so far. Keep it up and love the activity. There will be mistakes along the way but that’s how we learn mostly. You got this, Nate.

[greepleairport]

~1100words, +5pts

Thanks for taking the plunge, commish


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