I began this missal last year but held off in case I decided to change my mind. But I’m making it official and posting my farewell to the Liga (for now…).
the guadysburg address
a tribute to the liga guadalupe
For scores in the low 300s, seven years ago our Mothers (of Grendel) brought forth on these interwebs, a new fantasy football league, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all teams should have an opportunity to win every week…
In some cases this required long-shot gambles on no-name sleepers who might find themselves favored by the fickle fates of fantasy football for one phenomenal afternoon—figuratively, a last-second longball, Miracle in Michigan, Hail Mary kind of thing. To this end, the Liga Guadalupe was born.
The Virgen de Guadalupe, of course, is the Mesoamerican Marian apparition sometimes crudely described as “the Mexican version of the Virgin Mary” (although the phrase “version of the virgin” does have a nice ring to it). While no “Hail Guadalupe” prayer exists, the connection between the Liga Guadalupe and a Hail Mary pass is fairly obvious.
Some may find it hard to believe that the best team name ever, the Mothers of Grendel, and the best league name ever, the Liga Guadalupe, sprang from the same fertile mind. Surely most men would have exhausted their mortal allotment of creativity by coming up with just one of those names. Enlightening, as the saying goes, never strikes the same place twice. And yet…
And yet that is the kind of brilliance we have come to expect from the Pigskin Prof., the strategic mastermind who led his team to a grand total of zero championship titles in the Liga’s seven-year existence. The good Professor also invented a number of unique awards: the Best-of-the-Worst Award, the Lucky S.O.B. Award, The Goodbye Bonus Award, the Fibonacci Streaker Award, the Tlachiqueros Award, and the Sandbox Paladin Award, to name a few. And let us not forget the team graphics he created for use in the league’s finest publication, The Liga Weekly.
Here’s a collection of those team graphics, including the previously unreleased graphic for “Victorious Secret!”
Victorious Secret: previously unreleased!
See the end of this post for more graphics from the Liga.
the sad truth
how Thursday Night Football is killing fantasy
It’s been a good seven years, but last year’s flagging interest suggests that a break is in order. Some of the blame falls on the shoulders of the NFL, who has forever changed the game of fantasy football with the addition of Thursday Night Football. Surely they have the players’ best interests in mind (after all, who needs more than three days of rest between NFL games; it’s not like they’re full of violent physical trauma or anything). And if you don’t want to DVR your Thursday night shows so you can watch games broadcast on the NFL Network, you probably aren’t a real football fan anyway.
But fantasy football has changed for the worse. The impact is probably minimal for leagues where everybody drafts a team and just rotates in bench players for byes and injuries. But the Liga is all about adds and drops and waiver-wire acquisitions and long-shot sleepers. There was a build up of tension and excitement over the course of the week. You could read the scouting reports and wait for the news on Saturday when you learn about that lockdown cornerback who won’t be starting and how it might mean a big day for some no-name WR5. You’d go into Sunday morning full of optimism and anticipation because anything was still possible. You could talk some trash, do some back and forth bantering. Your commissioner would have more than two days to try to write a brilliant weekly publication. And Thanksgiving would be a rare wild-card kind of week because it was the one time you had to deal with Thursday games.
All that is gone, and the weeks of the season just blur together like it was basketball or something. Most of the season you can’t go more than two days between NFL games. Yes, the scoring resets after Monday night, but otherwise there’s not a strong sense of when week 3 ends and week 4 begins. Stat corrections come in on Thursday morning, leaving you just a few hours to lick your wounds after a devastatingly close loss. And you can never be completely sure of the answer when you have that fleeting thought: “do I have any guys on Thursday this week?” Unless you’re in multiple leagues in which case the answer is almost guaranteed to be “yes.” But you might not figure it out until you’re watching the Thursday night game and realize that you started a RB who isn’t even playing because he didn’t have enough time to recover from the nagging injury he aggravated last Sunday. He did great for you last week, he didn’t have a bye, and he’s been listed as Probable every week this year. One of those guys who’s always just a little dinged up. And now, because you were busy on Thursday and forgot to check in because you thought Greenbay was playing on Thursday next week you get to spend the next four days wallowing in the inexorable fate of a fantasy loss.
(not that anything like that would ever happen to ME…this is just a hypothetical situation of course…)
So yes, I am taking a year off from fantasy football. And that includes my beloved Liga. I’m sure I’ll bring it back someday. The MOG (Mothers of Grendel) has yet to taste the sweet pulque of Liga champion, and those Mothers demand satisfaction, yo.
Many thanks to all those who have participated in the Liga over the last seven years. I wish you luck in your endeavors (fantastic and otherwise), and hope to be sending you an invite to return sooner rather than later.
—Prof.
liga collections
more graphics from the liga guadalupe
