“If I was a quitter, this is the sort of game I would have quit after my opponent's second turn. By then I was already a score down, a player down, had knocked myself over trying to get the ball and then suffered a blitz on the kick-off after the TD. It's not that I couldn't have come back from here - plenty of opponents have done it to me in the past - but it just felt like a disaster in the making.

And I was right! The tree double-skulled to mess up my next offence, then I lost my star catcher to a SI when anything but a POW would have given him a TD. The the deaths started coming in...

I'm not complaining - fallingdownjoe didn't even have any mighty blow so it's not as if he was trying to destroy my team - and to be fair, I was helping him out quite a bit with yet another display of pathetic gfi rolls but by the half I was basically playing for passing stats and I suspect my second score was because fallingdownjoe was feeling so guilty about how one-sided the game had become.

Anyway, I'm really not bitter. If I'm going to lose so horrendously, I'm glad it was against a coach who actually knows how to play the passing game. Even when I'm slaughtered, it's not often I'm out-passed in a game, but sure enough, fallingdownjoe beat me by 1 yard. Respect!


NOW COMES THE COMPLAINING...

After the mauling, I thought it might be fun to start again and rebuild the team from scratch, except for the passer and the tree, of course. In the end, I decided to keep one of the one-skill catchers as well, just so I had a target who could actually catch (most of the time). So now I have a legendary treeman, a star passer and a veteran catcher, and eight journeymen. It's a pathetic team and won't win anything for a while (not that I was winning much with the old team anyway) but I still end up with a rating of 1490. That's crazy. And yes, I know how the system works, and I know that if I want the team to be competitive I need to fire the tree, but come on, he's a legend. He's one of the oldest players on FUMBBL, has more MVPs than anyone else in R - of course I'm not going to fire him! I'm just bitter because I want to play some easy teams for a while and this is the best I can do.

Okay, rant over.”