Building a franchise online
Like a lot of fantasy football competitions, the UV2RL’s core is a bunch of mates who met at University — kicking off their online ‘careers’ on VNRL.
It is a common theme. But how many of those are keeper leagues?
Photo: The UV2RL competition prize night at some pub they rented in Sydney (too blurry to remember the name…)
By JOSHUA WELLS
The UV2RL – which refers to their tertiary days, referring to University Village 2 – are a keeper league where coaches can keep up to 10 players for the following year.
A lot of fantasy competitions are based off short term success, but this one is all about long term planning according to UV2RL’s Geoff Adams (aka the popular NRLCEO blogger the Workhorse Watcher).
“It [keepers] makes it hard to rapidly improve from one year to the next I’ll admit, but it also rewards good CEOs who can keep a core of players together for longer and not have the side gutted the following year,” he said.
“And some might say it’s harder to get good quickly, the time frame to go from cellar dwellers to contenders is about two seasons which is closer to what it would be like in actual NRL.
“It also gives you an affinity to certain players. Certain players become synonymous with certain fantasy sides because they play their whole career with that one team.”
Photo: Geoff, aka the Workhorse Watcher is a champion fantasy guru from waaaay back!
The UV2RL came together in the early 2000s as a 14 team competition based around 14 friends who lived together.
In the early days, the competition would draft their players with a bidding war, of sorts, with each coach tensely waiting as the clock ran down.
This lasted for a couple of years while they played on VNRL, but when that become a moot point in the fantasy world, they moved to their own website – uv2rl.net.
“We then had one or two people each week manually updating the scores,” Adams said.
“Eventually one of our more tech savvy players was able to make it a bit more automated.
“The idea of turning it into proper fantasy site catering for more than just ourselves never occurred to us. None of us would have coughed up the $40K anyway.”
Following about five years on their own site, they came across NRLCEO which held all the same scoring conventions.
They have now been happily trying to outwit and outplay each other on NRLCEO for the past six years.
“About five or six years ago another participant mentioned NRLCEO to the rest of the group,” Adams said.
“As it was exactly like the scoring format and team set up we were used to we thought we’d use it and stop the hassle of having to run a site manually.”
Photo: the inaugural presentation night had ‘The Casks’ rocking their first and possibly last ever gig…
The Fantasy: Player drafts, sex lines and the Maldives
Every fantasy competition has one of ‘those’ stories.
This has got to be right up there:
“Because we are all spread out we do the draft via Skype, everyone takes their turn picking and either one person or these days everyone selects their player on the website once they’ve declared their pick. One year Cheyne was living in the Maldives, and with no internet access stood at a pay phone with me telling him the picks as they were being made so that he could keep track in order make his pick when it came time. Unfortunately, he kept running out of credit. So, every 20 minutes or so he would run back into the corner store to buy more. The story goes that the guy behind the counter kept giving him dirty looks thinking Cheyne was calling some sort of sex line to be burning through so much credit.” – Geoff Adams.
Photo: Cheyne (left) a few years before his Maldives experience…
A brief chat with UV2RL’s Geoff Adams
Joshua Wells: What is the history behind your league?
Geoff Adams: We started with 14 teams and currently have 12. It makes for a very tight league and having a good draft is vital. There is still the opportunity to improve during the year but most of what is left on the free list are rubbish forwards who average low minutes. When we first started we had 14 teams and there were only 15 NRL teams so some weeks even if you just could name a full 17 or if your opponent was missing their kicker you were a pretty sure thing.
We maintained 14 teams for several years and even when players left (usually due to family commitments or living overseas) we could replace them with other friends that had a UV2RL connection.
Photo: UV2RL Founder Andrew “Hulk Hogan” Jones makes his entrance at presentation night
JW: Gone are the days of bidding wars for UV2RL. How do you draft now?
GA: We hold our draft in reverse ladder order of the previous season. So if you get the wooden spoon it means you also get first pick the following season. Several teams have gone from bottom of the ladder to contenders in two seasons. Let’s say you finish last, the following season you retain 10 players (some will be rubbish) but then you draft some good players which might get you middle of the pack that year. The following year with a few shrewder recruits you can then be among the top teams.
That happened to me a few years ago. I finished dead last. The following year Dallas Johnson returned to the NRL and so was my first pick. Also, that year, a change in kicker points meant Corey Parker couldn’t be retained (the CEO opting to keep Jarrod Croker) and with everyone else not needing a kicker, I was able to use my last pick to get a workhorse and kicker than made my side infinitely better. We finished in the finals that year, getting knocked out by the eventual premiers before picking up a few handy players the following year and making the Grand Final followed by back to back premierships.
JW: What happens if someone leaves? Do all the players head back into a pool?
GA: The system makes it interesting for when someone leaves the comp and a new person comes in. Essentially, they take over that person’s “franchise”. That’s the only way you can get in to our comp. Usually the side isn’t very good and there is a challenge there to rebuild the club (and re brand if you want) which is how a lot of club administrators in the real world get given a job.
JW: So, you all started out at the same University. What are the circumstances now?
GA: The thing that comes to mind about our comp is the length of time we’ve been doing it and how spread out we all are. We started in 2003 so this is our 15th season. We all know each other from our time in Canberra but over the years have had people as far and wide as Cairns, Perth and even the Maldives.
JW: What does the comp mean to you all?
GA: The best thing about it is that many of us probably would have fallen out of contact years ago if we didn’t keep this up. We don’t see each other often but whenever we do catch up we try to see how long we can chat before bringing up fantasy. Sadly, we are all tragics and it is never long!
Josh Wells
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