Ok so, my idea

This idea is what blossomed into what we now call Fake College Football. These words ushered in the birth of the game we all know and love. It took a lot to get the game to where it is now, it almost crashed and burned on multiple occasions. This story is about how the game we love, Fake College Football, almost never came to be, and about how it overcame these challenges and doubts. This is The Game that Almost Never Was.

Birth of an Idea

So how did get here? How did the idea for game come to fruition? Basketball. It’s an odd notion, but basketball is the reason behind this game. It can be traced back further to baseball, but the most direct reason is basketball. As many know, Fake College Football is not the only Fake Sport, nor is it the first. From Fake Baseball, Fake Basketball emerged, headed by /u/darthvader1521. The point of the game was simple, Fake Baseball, but with basketball. There was sentiment to add other sports other than baseball to the list of fake sports, and /u/darthvader1521 was a perfect fit. It was a great idea, expand the fake sports universe and the two sports can interact. The new subreddit needed some CSS, or subreddit design, so /u/akick31 offered to help, most may know him as Dick Nutter, or at the time the GM of the Fake Colorado Rockies. Dick went to work on the subreddit CSS, which can still be seen today and bears striking similarities to the Fake College Football design.

Fake basketball died, and why is up to you to decide. Many have their opinions on the matter, was it the structure of how the game played out? But that’s not what this is about. Nutter saw this idea, that seemed to be thriving at the time, and thought he could do the same but with college football.

Why college and not the NFL? It’s quite simple, he puts it, “the issue with using football as a fake sport is that you can’t utilize individual players. In baseball, you have a specific lineup and an ordering of things, so individual players works for the MLR [Major League Redditball]. Meanwhile, in football, you don’t have a specific order, the play can go to any which player and it would lead to some players getting left out. I ended up choosing the collegiate level partially because I more thoroughly enjoy collegiate football, however, mainly because if we were to go the route of coach versus coach, we’d only be able to have 30 players in the NFL while the collegiate level offers many more teams.”

Nutter’s idea quickly came to life in his head and he quickly went about writing the rule book before the idea slipped his mind. He posted the discord channel in the MLR discord server, inviting anyone to join, and you’d think the rest is history, right? Wrong.

A Southward Trend

Almost immediately, a few of the users mocked the idea, claiming there was too many fake sports, however, most of these jokes were in good fun. However, it was clear that regardless there was a daunting task ahead for Nutter. How was one supposed to promote the league when /r/CFB refused to allow promotion? Is there ways to improve the subreddit design? Are the rules any good? Taking signups and manually adding them sure seemed daunting. The list goes on and on.

Wherever Nutter looked, it seemed to be uphill both ways. On top of starting up the subreddit, he had to take care of GMing the Colorado Rockies and everything that came with that. The more time and effort he put into Fake CFB, the less time and effort he put into the MLR, and that caused a strain on his relationship with the other GMs of the MLR. He did what he needed to do, but he was never around. This issue would continue to grow, but it wasn’t the biggest issue at hand.

That issue was officiating the game, and is the biggest reason that Fake College Football almost crashed and burned. The plan from the beginning was to utilize a bot to do the officiating. It was very clear that using human referees, much like the human umpires in the MLR, just wouldn’t cut it. The games would not start until the entire 130 team FBS was completely full (and waiting for that alone took a lot of time), that meant that there would be 65 games going on every single week that would need to be reffed, with 130 users. That would be slower than Tom Brady scrambling. Thus, Nutter recruited Watchful1 from /r/RequestABot to write a bot, as he didn’t have time to write one due to school.

Nutter was insistent on waiting for the bot to finish before starting week one. There was a lot of adjusting to the ranges that needed to be done after test games (for example, there were about 8 turnovers a game per team). Writing that bot was painstakingly slow, so much that a lot of users ended up leaving to pace of play. However, it became very apparent that if something wasn’t done that the game would lose more members than it would gain. Thus, after a couple of weeks of waiting, week one began with human referees on January 19, 2018.

Week One

Week one was a mess, with the lack of volunteers to referee games, there was a huge issue with pace of play. Many games didn’t start until two weeks after the “week” actually started, even then when there was gameplay, it was terribly slow. Another reason that human umpires work in the MLR is that they don’t have nearly the amount of play-calls that Fake CFB has. The very first game finished on January 30, 12 days after the first games started. #2 Arkansas defeated South Alabama, 40-37 in 2 OT. The very last game of week one finished on March 28, 2018. It doesn’t take a keen eyed observer to see that this week took over two months to finish. No one should complain about pace of play after how slow that week was.

Week one was absolutely brutal: there are no statistics that show how many people lost interest waiting for the week to finish once their games ended. There are no statistics that show those that lost interested waiting for their game to start. If there was a guess, it’d be about 50 users left, and that’s a generous guess.

After two in-real-life weeks, people started claiming that the game would never be successful and even finish the week. There was some validity in that statement; it didn’t look promising. Nutter recalls, “Yeah, I remember going into the MLR Discord and seeing people trash the game. It was kind of disheartening, seeing something you’d spent a month putting together just get ripped to shreds. I remember attempting to convince a lot of users that when the bot came that pace of play would pick up significantly. I don’t blame them for losing interest and proclaiming it as a lost cause. I about did a couple of times, but I was insistent on waiting to see what happened when Watchful finished the bot. Every now and then I’ll see comments on that channel talking about how slow the sport is, and I hope they end up checking us out because it’s nothing like that anymore.”

The bot actually finished a few weeks prior to week one finishing, but at that point every game had started, so it was impossible to utilize the bot. However, there was a lot of fine tuning to be had, so it’s probably for the best.

It became very apparent to Nutter after starting the season that he needed assistance, and badly. He recruited /u/Inkblot9, or Rhule D. World, as the NFCAA Vice President.

Dick Nutter on Rhule: “I think without Rhule this game crashes. He ran most of the show for a good while there when school picked up for me. I frankly did not have the time for Fake College Football and had Rhule not been there to shoulder the loud, we would have crashed, hard. It’s a shame he had to resign, but his efforts are precisely the reason we survived week one.”

A Brighter Future

When week one concluded, Nutter knew that the league was going to survive. Week two kicked off shortly afterwards with the ref bot. It was clear immediately how much of a lifesaver this program would be. Users were immediately hooked, now instead of waiting all day for your referee to respond with the result, you knew the result of the play immediately. Nutter puts it, “it’s kind of like that game Civilization. With the bot you know the result immediately and you can’t just walk away. You just want one more play, you’re constantly refreshing your phone or laptop, you want more. With the human refs, you would call your play and walk away knowing that you might not hear back on what happened until tomorrow.”

Instead of games finishing in 12 days, games were finishing in a day. Week two still took quite a bit, around two weeks to be exact, but it was much quicker. The more the entire commissioner’s office got into the swing of things and became comfortable with how things should be run, the smoother things went.

The subreddit exploded, it went from constantly looking for FBS teams in March to having the FCS almost completely full 8 months later. After Rhule resigned, Nutter decided he needed two vice presidents to lighten the load on himself and the other VP. He hired Yellow Skarmory and Havatunde Oladotun, who kept the sub afloat while he was away at his summer job.

Nutter had comments on his two vice presidents as well, “It’s almost the same with them as with Rhule. I was afraid to practically disappear for the summer and what that meant for the subreddit. They kept the sub alive and it grew more with them than it ever did with me. I’m forever thankful to them for not complaining that I’m not around as often as I should be. This summer is going to be more of the same and I’m much more comfortable going into it knowing that the subreddit is in fantastic hands. Words cannot express how thankful I am of the effort that they put into this game.”

The Game that Was

The subreddit turns one on January 3rd. It has overcome a lot of adversity, but it’s now growing as fast, if not faster than it’s predecessor, the MLR. It survived the rise and fall of Fake Basketball and Fake College Basketball. It survived the horror that was week one, it survived losing a Vice President. The future looks extremely bright for the game, with traffic being higher than ever and the FCS being almost completely full. The game has turned into something that is more than just a Reddit game to most of us. It turned from a boring game where you type in numbers into something exciting. If you tell anyone you meet that you play a football game where you play by trying to guess the number of your opponent, people will think you’re crazy. They don’t understand, they won’t. This game is more than that.

This is the Game That Was.

This article is based on an interview with Dick Nutter VI, the NFCAA President

A special thanks to Watchful1 for everything he’s done for the subreddit, this game wouldn’t be what we love without you. Thanks for everything. Another special thanks to Rhule, we miss you.