Adhering to the tradition of "don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness" that all cultural endeavours in the country follow, I'd like to announce my intention of forming a
Talossan Football Board (
Cußeglh del Futbol Talossan) with likeminded enthusiasts of the sport (https://wiki.talossa.com/Talossan_Football) to pick up the reins and establish a new authority over its ruleset.
The short-to-medium-term goals I have in mind are as follows:
- Fix errors in the existing ruleset (https://wiki.talossa.com/Rules_to_Talossan_Football#Player_Capabilities), specifically allowing Runners to catch, hold and carry the ball
- Establish Talossan translations of the terminology used (e.g. how do you say "touchdown" in Talossan?)
- Look into running a proper Talossan Football fantasy league instead of just an NFL one. It would have to be multi-sport, which appears to be theoretically possible but more research and more imporantly support from people familiar with fantasy sports leagues is required
If anyone here is interested in joining, or has questions or suggestions, please feel free to post in this thread!
I am compelled to join in by the TCAT-driven moral imperative of supporting all other fantasy leagues, and by this endeavour just plain sounding fundamentally Cool and Talossan.
Here are some details on my fantasy league idea, since that's by far the most ambitious of the three goals outlined in the main post.
The premiseTalossan Football has 6 different types of players, each roughly corresponding to the ruleset of one of the major international footballs. During a match, a team would ordinarily consist of:
- the Keeper, playing like a soccer goalie,
- a Quebec, playing like an American quarterback,
- two Runners, corresponding to American eligible receivers,
- two Backer, following Australian rules,
- two Nomads, following soccer rules,
- and eight Protectors, playing like American ineligible receivers; or rugby players -- the point is they can score touchdowns but may not catch forward passes
which makes 16 players total.
For a fantasy match then, a team would draft the appropriate number of players from three or four different leagues (one for soccer, one for American football, one for Australian football and maybe one for rugby), and then have them battle it out with another team via their ingame stats. Intuitive enough, I imagine.
The executionWhile multi-sport fantasy leagues are no unheard of (e.g. I've found a couple of combined NFL-NHL-NBA leagues through a cursory Google search), separate teams are drafted for each sport, and leagues span an entire year. Doing things this way would, in my opinion, undermine the spirit of the whole exercise. Instead, players should all be playing at the same time, and be drafted as one team.
This runs into the problem of mismatched season schedules. As an example, the NFL's regular season spans September to January, while the AFL (Australian Football League) spans March to September. What this means is that we would need to find leagues for each of the sports whose regular seasons overlap for this experiment to work, the more overlap the better.
The setup I've found the easiest to work with so far is as follows:
- the UFL for American football,
- Major League Soccer for soccer,
- the AFL for Australian football,
- and optionally Major League Rugby for rugby.
All of these leagues start their regular seasons sometime in March, and comparing the length of each season for this year yields the following overlap, from Week 13 (late March) to Week 22 (late May-early June):
(https://i.imgur.com/aIkqCD8.png)
Aside from the AFL, all these leagues are kind of obscure, and if anyone has better suggestions please let me know.
The challengesThe UFL's regular season of 10 weeks is by far the shortest of them all, and the main bottleneck for a Talossan football fantasy league, whose regular season would thus also be at most 10 weeks, depending on the league structure (playoffs, yes or no?), even less than that. I don't know what the demand for a Talossan football fantasy league as I am describing it here is, but fitting an entire double round-robin tournament into that timeframe would be a huge problem even with only a few teams participating.
Scheduling aside, a scoring system that is properly weighted between the four different sports would need to be devised. I don't know how to do that, but luckily I have till March next year to figure it out...!
The third challenge is the question of actually running the thing. Since this would be a custom-made hybrid league, I doubt that any of the popular fantasy sports sites would be of use. If all else fails, a league could be run manually, but that sounds extremely daunting, help.
As always, feel free to ask questions and share suggestions!
Quote from: Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP on September 29, 2024, 03:21:24 PMAside from the AFL, all these leagues are kind of obscure, and if anyone has better suggestions please let me know.
Premier league, Bundesliga and Serie A all end final weekend of week 21. It'd be one week shorter, but any of these probably has more big name players than MLS.
Quote from: Glüc da Dhi S.H. on September 29, 2024, 04:30:16 PMPremier league, Bundesliga and Serie A all end final weekend of week 21. It'd be one week shorter, but any of these probably has more big name players than MLS.
The Premier League and Premiership Rugby don't play every week, especially Premiership Rugby's schedule is really spotty, which would cut down the length of the fantasy season even more, so I don't know how feasible that would be.
Yeah the Premiership doesn't schedule matches during the Six Nations window. Top 14 and URC (both arguably superior anyway) both do.
As one of the resident sports nerds, and the erstwhile commissioner of the AFT/TFA, you can count me in.
The schedule you have is ten weeks, which will be a crunch for scheduling:
- A three-round playoff with a seven-week regular season. This could allow for a single round-robin between eight teams, or four-team divisions doing double-RR with a week of randomly-matched cross-divisional play.
- A two-round playoff with an eight-week regular season. This could allow a ninth team, or two five-team divisions doing a double-RR within themselves.
- A single championship game allows a nine-week regular season, so eight teams on a single-RR, or the five-team divisions with a single cross-division week.
- No championship game at all -- league table only -- could support six teams on a double-round. Not awful, all things considered.
Quote from: Sir Lüc on September 30, 2024, 04:17:00 PMYeah the Premiership doesn't schedule matches during the Six Nations window. Top 14 and URC (both arguably superior anyway) both do.
They don't play every week either.
(https://i.imgur.com/RxcHh6g.png)
(AFL fixtures for 2025 havent been published yet as far as I can tell, hence the question marks)
Super Rugby however does:
(https://i.imgur.com/BDWwIK5.png)
The resulting season would still only be 8 weeks because of the Premier League (and the theoretical maximum of 10 is already a crunch), but it's better than four...
Quote from: Glüc da Dhi S.H. on October 01, 2024, 07:54:03 AMhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss-system_tournament 8-)
I've been thinking about that as well, actually... Assuming there'll be tons of teams participating, it's worth looking into.
Most of the discussion until now has been about scheduling, but the questions of 1) how such a league would actually be run and 2) how scoring would work are still open. Especially the first question is a problem for me since it would probably(?) require making our own program or website to run the thing and I don't have the know-how or the server space to do that.
As an aside, would it be possible for Talossan Football to get its own special interest subforum?
Quote from: Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP on September 29, 2024, 03:21:24 PMScheduling aside, a scoring system that is properly weighted between the four different sports would need to be devised. I don't know how to do that, but luckily I have till March next year to figure it out...!
Yeah, I'm not sure if I can set everything up in time this year. Sorry about that.