mbsports
Posts: 275
Joined: 1/7/2007 Status: offline
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Yes a guy refers to me as "THE" MB Goes back to the days of MBMLB, MBHL, MBF1, MBBA, etc. etc. God I've simmed too much sports... I wanted to take a quick few moments to do one of my rambling and quite frankly long emails to give everyone an update on what's going on in the world of MBFL. As is my custom lets go league by league and give that update! MBFL The Flagship starts Season 5 Preseason in 2 weeks - big thumbs up there. Everyone's roster is legit for the start of the season so there are no emergencies that I'm aware of that have to be addressed prior to the start As is customary for MBFL there will be no injuries in the pre-season. Call it the Schmucky Rule if you'd like this helps out a ton long term for all the GMs. We keep the injury settings fairly low because nothing is worse in a league like this then losing 4 or 5 players to season ending injuries and having your season done by week 4. Yes it is a little more kind then the real world but we still see the injury that hurts and it still ends up biting someone each year who doesn't have a solid backup at a critical position Indianapolis has moved into their new stadium for Season 5 Some uniform updates and revisions occurred - nothing too dramatic but you'll see a little bit higher quality out of them I know for a fact that there are teams out there looking for Receivers, Running Backs, and other positions. Make yourself available and you can get a good deal or a player that really fits your team still Free Agency will move to the open phase where you won't be bidding against everyone else on Sunday. Until then the standard send em' in rules do apply Preseason will be only a single week from here on out. This fits better with the schedue. Dates of note for 2009 MBFL: MB Vacation weeks are January 11th, May 3rd, July 12th, and November 1st Season 5 Postseason Draft is April 12th Season 6 Postseason Draft is October 11th MBCFA The college league has some additions for the first time this year. We have FCS which a few of you noticed awhile back. What you didn't see and what you haven't seen yet and won't see for a few days is that we also have Division II out there in the MBD2 directory of the site. Don't feel obligated to take part as a GM if you're not interested in doing so but FCS and Division II are more like MB Solo leagues that I'm asking if you want to take part in them. They're more under the radar and you won't see nearly the amount of detail out of them but they're for my enjoyment and if someone else wants to give them a shot I'm all in favor of that. I'm still creating all of the drafted players - we had a larger draft this year because we wanted to make sure every team got more then a single player this year. It's worked out well so far but they are time consuming. My goal is to have them set by November 23rd as weeks 1 & 2 will be run that week. I'll be working on schedules later this week and getting those all set. As with everything in the collegiate sim it does take more time - the reason I can't just let the cpu have at is because it doesn't do a good job of setting 12 game schedules, only 11. I work hard to get you that 12th game! Heh. Key Dates for College would be Recruiting the week of March 8th and the draft on April 5th. We also have a recruiting session on September 6th and a draft on September 20th. MBCFL The Canadian League has our 3rd Grey Cup game coming up this weekend between the Ottawa Renegades and the Saskatchewan Roughriders. In the old days it would be an all Roughrider affair with these two cities. Congrats to the GMs: Koz runs Ottawa and Rod Anello recently inherited the Riders. I'd be remiss if I didn't note Bobby Lantaigne's Halifax Devils made a terrific switch in direction this season. Nice work Bobby in sticking with this team and getting them going. We have 2 new teams to the league with David Harvey taking the New Brunswick Whalers and Mykal Buckle has brought his Yellowknife Sabercats into the mix. Few of you here know of Mykal but the guy is fantastic with graphic editing and designing uniforms particularly on the Maximum Football platform. Mykal's site is at www.maxmykal.com and if you ever wondered what kind of graphics for Max FB were out there this is a spectacular place to take a look. Max FB is more user responsible for the actual gameplay so you have to do some things to get a good game of football out of it. Mykal is one of the guys that makes that happen This upcoming CFL season will be a bit of a quick scramble as it gets on track and onto it's normal spot on my calendar. If we had begun everything the way I would have liked years ago the CFL would be on about week 12 right now. As it stands it is behind by a season from the start and we want to synch these up as soon as possible. I won't be rushing 10 weeks into a single day or anything but it will likely start with 2 weeks simmed each week and will continue until completion. Expect the season to end in a similar time frame to the NFL season but then another abbreviated off-season and a start up on March 15th for the 5th season of MBCFL. MBCFL seasons will assume a traditional start time immediately following the MBFL Super Bowl and will have the Grey Cup championship around Week 10 of the NFL simulation. This keeps it nicely staggered with a reasonable off-season that hopefully isn't too long. I'll monitor it to make sure we're not having too much downtime. All MBCFL players who were inked to a MBFL contract will be coming off of their roster - start booing now those of you who built NFL light teams. The Expansion draft is currently on my calendar for November 15th-16th but I will make sure that both GMs are avaialable so that we can take care of it properly. Mykal I know is a little bit East of us<England> so I will make arrangements based upon both schedules to make sure we can get things set. The MBCFL draft will be held on November 22nd if we are able to get the expansion draft handled by then. It will be a live draft, however lists will be accepted and no shows will be auto drafted. Please note that teams that have Arena Football League players will not lose those players automatically despite our starting of an Arena league. The 2 schedules will not overlap however when a player retires from the CFL league they will continue to play in the AFL league and vice versa. Speaking of retirements - retirements in the CFL league will be handled by the simulation, not based upon real life CFL retirement. And injuries will be coming to the CFL league next season as well. Roster size will be 42 for game roster, and 45 overall not including season ending injuries. MBCIS MBCIS is the most fun league that you're not participating in really. We're just about to wrap up our Vanier Cup playoffs with Semi-Final games for the Uteck and Mitchell Bowls tomorrow and then the Vanier Cup this weekend. The CIS is the Canadian University schools - we've made some allowances to make it a little more similar to NCAA while retaining a more Canadian style Our scheduling for CIS will be similar to the CFL schedule where we're off kilter right now but will be making some adjustments to get things back on track As with the CFL league we're adding in Injuries for the next season where we'll have a 55 man game roster and up to 65 on the squad. This season it was 65-65 and most players rode pine Recruiting will be run on November 15th and is not a draft style of recruiting. Each GM can choose which players to recruit and will then be able to extend scholarships to the players who decide to attend their institution of higher learning. Other Stuff I have 2 things in the hopper that I'm not even mentioning because they're about 2-3 months off but know that there's some things that will be added that I think will be interesting. One is the aforementioned Arena League that most of you know I've been working on tweaking for it for about 14 months now. The other is more developmental in nature and will exist as an avenue for MBFL teams to bring players along that aren't ready to compete in MBFL. You will get some benefit out of assigning players to that league. It won't be extraordinary but you'll see low tier players progress to the point where they're capable of playing in MBFL without being totally out of their league. That is all I have. As always if anyone is interested in a football league that delivers in terms of being there relentlessly let me know. We may not have every detail you want in a league but what we try to do is to maintain a level of functionality that is sustainable and broad while keeping it boiled down enough so that we aren't going out of business and we're consistently able to provide on the promises made. Part of that is the scheduling noted above. We're setting it up with MB Vacations planned, we're setting it up so that we don't have 50 things on a single day. As I work thru the initial set-up of everything, I'm finding that I have what I need to work with and that makes it fun for me and rewarding. The league structure is daunting and I'm working on a final solidification of what we do that will drop early next year. Expect the following as the final lineup MBFL, MBCFL, MBCIS, MBCFA FBS, MBCFA FCS, MBCFA DII, MBAFL, MBAF2, and MBUFL<Spring League for us to give teams the opportunity to develop MBFL talent> That is quite simply a football universe that I think anyone can get behind something in. It also means that a player from Grand Valley State can put a college career in the books and join an Albany Firebirds and maybe progress to the San Jose Sabercats someday or to the Saskatchewan Roughriders. The goal is to make it a series of leagues that correspond with one another and allow for a rich and robust history to develop over time where we have players who the GMs can say "remember so and so". We're starting to get some of that now. Gary Novak is a name that comes to mind. Novak played for a horrific Bowling Green team in Season 1 of MBCFA, he was sacked 27 times, threw for 2,519 yards in a run based offense. He ran for 450 yards in that season and although the team was bad he took over in Ottawa in his rookie year and led them to a Grey Cup championship. As time goes by we'll see if they continue to be a leading team and they'll continue to grow. I always come back to a trio of running backs as well. Levi Bernard out of Notre Dame, Antonio Pitts from Syracuse and Joseph Ornelas out of Iowa. These 3 just tore up defenses in MBCFA and they're now moving into the CFL's upper echelon of running backs. With the simulations that we have available today in Max FB, Madden, and Bowl Bound we have so many opportunities that I get somewhat giddy thinking about it. Focusing on Ornelas, who as a created player can't go into MBFL he had 360 rushes for 2,149 yards as a senior and added 66 catches for 852 yards and 17 total touchdowns. He lost 1 fumble all season for Iowa. I love having a full history of a player from high school recruiting all throughout a professional career and as I build up the MBFL sites into what they need to be I think the end product will be one that GMs rally around and see that their input, feedback, and efforts are shaping a football world. Now we always need people who want to run teams or really do anything in the league, one thing we'll start to have happen is as players retire we're going to have a Hall of Fame - currently no one really leaps out as being worthy but in a few years we'll see players from around the leagues go in as true legends of the simulated leagues. Quite frankly it is a huge undertaking, probably the largest thing I have going except for my career and marriage. I find myself enjoying little pieces of it more all the time and I really like sharing it with the community and I hope others can share some of the enthusiasm for a fake football world that has so many moving pieces but remains grounded in the love of the game.
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