Bigmike's Minor Football League
Hey guys, after completing my NFL concept series, I had inspiration strike to recreate a former “Fantasy Football” league that @raysox created back in 2008. From here on out, I'm going to list a few different things that I will put in spoilers. I want this project to be very in-depth but in order to explain all of the stuff that went behind it requires a lot of writing. At some point I am going to make a website that will explain this stuff but for now I am just going to keep here as a directory. There are a lot of different factors going into this so if you wanna read up on all of the history and such I will put here for you to check out but if you aren't interested in reading it all just don't worry about it. After seeing what @Veras was able to do with his fictional football league, I wanted to do something similar with this league and really give the entire backstory and create this as a fictional universe of football. I have created logos for 7 of the teams used while the other 9 logos I have carried over from our previous league. I will do my best to give the people who created them credit when I get to each team. I know that @elliott, @Firefly, @HarperK, @BJBerthiaume, raysox and Neil Lommel (formally known on here as TC, I'm pretty sure he was banned though) all created these logos and possibly some uniforms as well.
Concept Backstory/Summary
The rundown on our old league goes like this. Raysox pm’ed me and told me about his idea to create a “Minor League Football” fantasy league in which we would use Madden to create teams with rosters filled with Madden’s free agents or created players. Next thing I know, he makes me the co-commissioner, I am spending tons of free time along side raysox creating ratings and lists of players and before we knew it our league took off with all of the teams created on my ps3 Madden game and myself simulating CPU v. CPU games in which I watched and provided commentary for on our website. We had 8 owners overall in the first season. Raysox tried to make it a point to keep the guys in the league around our age and we all were very involved with it. It was a lot of fun and very complex and creative. We were all around 13-14 years old at the time which let to some completely uncalled for arguments and some really poor use of grammer (I was one of the worst offenders, I cringe looking at how much I used “tomarrow instead of “tomorrow”) at times but overall we were able to go strong for about 3 years as a Madden/NCAA simulation league. We decided to expand to 10 teams in our second season which almost doomed the league but we cut that season 4 games short and ended it in a winner takes all tournament. The next season was arguably as good or better than our first season. NCAA came out with TeamBuilder before our second season I believe and that was a huge help because we based our rosters off of the game’s template and were able to manually create the teams ourselves online instead of on a gaming console. We had a cap system created, a free agency week in which we all bid on players, a 4 round NFL-like draft. It was all very well thought out even though our execution was poor at times. That being said, I’m glad our execution was poor and we all gave up on the league before it’s 4th season. Why am I glad that this happened? I was in my last few years of high school and my real life took over which is the best of those two options by far IMO.
Concept Information…how this thing will work.
Before I dive into the spoiler tag, let me just start off by saying this. For this project, I am turning the old fantasy league into a alternate reality league. So the more we get into it, it will basically serve as a league that would be (in my mind) going along side the NFL each year as the NFL's own farm system development league.
- I call this an Alternate Reality league because of this. What if our league was actually real? Let’s say that this “Minor League Football” was a independently run Semi-Professional league which was founded in 2008. They had a deal with the NFL to use it’s players but they did not compete directly with the NFL and the NFL wanted to see if it had legs before they completely absorbed it and turned it into their own official farm system. The first season was a huge success but the NFL only allowed the league to grow gradually to ensure that it kept it’s legs. The second season ended early due to a coach’s/player’s strike but the league rebounded by creating the MLFCPA and was able to end the season on a high note single elimination playoff-styled tournament. The third season picked up where season one left off and became more successful. So what happened after that?
- In this alternate reality, the league grew in popularity and revenue and would eventually be absorbed by the NFL for the 2016 season. The league will have 16 teams total for the 2016 season. One team is considered a farm system for 2 NFL teams (AFC & NFC). I will present all of the original teams first as well as a uniform history and timeline of historic events. I will also be presenting a season rundown for the past seasons starting at the beginning. Since the first 3 seasons were actually simulated and ran on our website which is still alive today, I will only give brief summaries of what happened in those seasons.
League's Fictional Timeline
The timeline will go like this...see in spoilers.
2008 – League Formed
2009 – League kicks off first season (Winter/Spring) Already Simulated
2010- League kicks off season season* (Winter/Spring) Already Simulated
2011 – League kicks off third season (Spring/Summer) Already Simulated
2012 – League kicks off fourth season (Spring)
2013 – League kicks off fifth season**(Spring)
2014 – League kicks off sixth season (Spring)
2015 – League kicks off seventh season (Final Spring Season), NFL officially buys out the MLF and decides to run it alongside NFL in the Fall as an official farm system.
2016(Now) –
So there are a couple of ways I could present this. At the moment, I am just planning on releasing Information Sheets for each of the 16 teams that would be playing in the 2016 season. There are probably some logos that could use some work but I am just going to go with what I have for now. I have uniforms completed for 12 out of 16 teams so far but I would like to give the original teams info sheets out and then talk about the league's previous history by each season in which I will also show the former uniforms of each team. I will have to figure out a way to put together a full roster for each team for the 2016 season although I'm not sure I am going to go super in depth with it. My plan would be to show you guys the big name players for each team which will lead to a overall grade for each team which I will use to "simulate" games that they would play in the Fall instead of running an actual video game simulation. Depending on how well this takes off though, I may go more in depth or do some type of video game simulation for Championship games, etc.
So that is about it. I will get into uniform guidelines, the alignment with the NFL and all that stuff when I get there but for now here is a presentation slide I made with the new logo and all of the old photoshops I did for our league in the background.
