When the Commissioner Oversteps
From: The Commish
To: Every Tom, Dick & Harry
Subj: [EZEFFL] The Butterfly EffectIn chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.
All,
Due to unknown conditions one owner was not paying attention to his roster and back in week 9 around 12:30 on Sunday I noticed his team had 5 of the 9 starters on bye, so thinking in the spirit of competition (and if this was the actual NFL, sanctity of the League itself) I made myself a second owner and adjusted the roster by moving the bench players to starters and vice versa. Turned out it wouldn’t mattered anyway as his opponent scored a beastly 144.2 points.
In Week 10 I reassembled the team back to the way it was and this time they won. I continued to make substitutions as needed through out the rest of the season so Team Gregory went 2-2 over the last 4 weeks and is now in the playoffs.
But I’d irrevocably altered our nonlinear system. A quick look back and the two losses would have obviously occurred, and probably one of the victories as well, but this week’s win would have not.
The way I see it is I have four options:
1) Let Team Gregory in the playoffs and keep adjusting the line up as I think best, thereby setting up a possible hoisting on my own petard scenario when they knock me out of the playoffs. Or
B) Go back and reset Team Gregory’s roster to to its Week 8 lineup to see how those last 5 games would have played out differently and adjust accordingly. Or
3) Just have the top two teams from each division play in the playoffs using the last 4 weeks of the season and each game, the semis and the final, last 2 weeks each. Or
IV) Toss out the whole playoff system and declare myself the winner of the Trophy and all acclaim it entails.Let me know what you think.
—Brian Bogardus
Commissioner
End Zone Entourage FFL
Owner/Director of Player & Personnel
Purple Whales
I received a few replies:
- My suggestion: Tar and feather the league president… revolt I say! Since my team is out of the playoffs it doesn’t matter to me. – Jeff
- My suggestion is to allow Team Gregory in the play-offs and give me control of his team. This will ensure that there will be no chance of success for Team Gregory and effectively the top four teams will have a fair chance of winning. Team Gregory’s players will suffer career ending injuries, indictments, suspensions and other forms of disgrace that typically occur among the ranks of my 1-12 team’s players. This may not be a fair or ethically sound solution, but it would be fun to see what happens. – Bob R.
- I agree with Bob!! Give Bob a shot!! – Kevin
- I think first we need to name this travesty…my vote is: Inflate-gate since Team Gregory’s score was artificially inflated the last 5 weeks of the season. – David
So tonight I booked .0276 milliseconds of computing team on IBM’s Watson and did the math on how things would have gone had I not interfered, then composed this email:
From: The Office of the Commissioner
To: All Concerned & Ships at Sea
Subj: [EZEFFL] Countering the Butterfly EffectLets hope my attempt here to nullify my original meddling doesn’t have even greater dire consequences somewhere further along.
All,
I chose Option B. While I couldn’t actually go back and change players playing in past weeks, I could look at how each of Team Gregory’s starting 9 players did for the past 5 weeks and add their scores up to get just what would been the team total for those games.
Turns out that two victories,Week 10 to Team Hofmann and last week against Aiken Ball Busters, would have been losses. So Team Gregory’s record moves down to 4-9 from 6-7. Team Hofmann goes up from 6-7 to 7-6 and the Ball Busters move from 5-8 to 6-7.
My original intent for the playoffs still stands, the top 3 teams get a bye and Teams 4 & 5 play a “Wild Card” game to see who gets to play in the Semi-finals. So even though Team Hofmann moves above .500 at 7-6 his lower points scored during the season drop him to 7th in the Power Rankings. Frank Hanna’s 6-7 record ties him with Mike Lenio, but the Ball Busters scored 23 more points than the Bone Crushers so Frank is the #5 seed in the playoffs and the defending League Champion will not have a chance to repeat.
So, pay no attention to ESPN’s Final Standings and Playoff Seeding Numbers. Because of the way it worked out both Wild Card teams are from the same Division I have set up the playoffs so that the two divisions will not meet until the Championship Game as in the past.
—
Brian Bogardus
Commissioner
End Zone Entourage FFL
Owner/Director of Player & Personnel
Purple WhalesFor reference I’ve attached a zip file that includes two spreadsheets League Standings (with pre and post wing flap data) and The Gregory Variations (which sounds like a Big Bang Theory episode title.)
