+- International Simulation Football League (https://forums.sim-football.com)
+-- Forum: Community (https://forums.sim-football.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=5)
+--- Forum: Media (https://forums.sim-football.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=37)
+---- Forum: Graded Articles (https://forums.sim-football.com/forumdisplay.php?fid=38)
+---- Thread: *The Honolulu Hahalua vs. The Worst Teams of All Time Pt. 3 (/showthread.php?tid=42916)
*The Honolulu Hahalua vs. The Worst Teams of All Time Pt. 3 - nickyvmlp - 01-17-2023
We’ve discussed the teams going into the collapse. We’ve discussed the moves that led to their winless seasons. Now it’s just time to talk about the seasons themselves, and show how and when it became inevitable that they’d be on the wrong side of history. Before we get started though, I should point out that there have been other winless seasons in NSFL/ISFL history. Off the top of my head, the inaugural season of the Austin Copperheads resulted in an 0-13 season, but they rebounded strongly and quickly. Thanks to a strong draft, an active team, and good leadership, they got their first win after just 14 games, and they’d be champions in just five short years of existence. That is the best case scenario for what these teams want. Five years is the perfect amount of time for the players you bring in to reach their prime, develop a culture, and for them to take a team they built to the promised land. Let’s go.
Part 3: The Winless Seasons
So we begin at the start of Season 38 for the Hahalua. People are already recognizing Honolulu as a team committed to the future, and are writing off this season as an unfortunate part of the tanking process. They still have to go out there and compete though. While a front office can decide to tank, the players and coaches are still out there fighting for their jobs. So let’s see who is left on this Honolulu skeleton crew.
Rookie quarterback Adrian St. Christmas led the way for Honolulu, hanging around 520 TPE by Week 1. Not bad for anyone besides a starting quarterback. For perspective, Roque Santa Cruz, the rookie starting quarterback for Berlin this season had about 800 TPE at Week 1, and that’s still putting him in the bottom third in the league among starting QB’s TPE. Luckily for Adrian, the highest rated player on this team was most likely his top target, Leek Mai-Heinous, who was just over 800 TPE at the start of the season. Not bad at all, but as the best player on the team, that's worrisome. The defense was even worse, as their best player was Lip Gallagher in his tenth season, and hadn’t even been active to see Honolulu’s S36 championship. An inactive player on a slow march toward destruction would be leading this ragtag corps on defense. Good luck everyone. (Upon closer inspection, they did have a higher rated player, FS Miles Weperom, but that’s about to not be the case in a few minutes, just keep reading and it’ll make sense.)
Before the season started, they actually picked up a couple of depth players in WR Troy Abed and CB C.J. Sonjack from New Orleans. Both of them were 11th year players who were about to be retired, and it was done probably just to make sure they could actually field a complete team. But still, it’s a move that happened. They opened their season hosting Orange County, and we’re actually leading the game 14-3 at halftime, thanks to touchdowns by John Riggins and Bean Delphine Jr. They probably should’ve called the season right there. Two Zane Cold touchdowns bought OC back, and after tha,t Honolulu just couldn’t keep up, falling 31-14, and dropping to 0-1.
Honolulu actually contended pretty well for a team that was openly tanking, and provided some much better teams with some real challenges. In Week 2, they led over Arizona, the eventual champions, in the third quarter, 20-17, before giving up 13 unanswered. In Week 7, they took a 10-win San Jose team down to the final drive, and were in Sabercat territory before time ran out on them. In fact, there was a four-week stretch there where the Hahalua kept the games to one-score affairs. A few lucky breaks in any of those games, like Mabel Pines not committing unnecessary roughness on New York’s final drive that sealed the game for them in Week 6, or a bit better clock management in the San Jose game, and we’re not talking about this team right now, because they wouldn’t have a 24-game losing streak anymore.
Of course there were some bombs here or there. This was still a bad team at the end of the day, so there were always going to be weeks like Week 4, where they got blasted by 35 to the Second Line. Or Week 5, where they lost 35-13 to Chicago. This was also around the time where they traded their GMs player, Miles Weperom, to Yellowknife. His player was recreating anyway, so Yellowknife got a one-year rental on a player with a position change still in his back pocket who was still around 1000 TPE, pretty easy deal to make there. The trade deadline came and went without Honolulu making any other big moves, so they settled into whatever fate this team would bring them.
Down the stretch though, it felt like this team was running out of fight. Their games became a lot less competitive. After the four-week streak of close games, the closest match the rest of the way was a seven-point loss to San Jose, and they lost their final seven games by an average of more than 17 points. In Week 6, they were one ill-timed penalty away from victory against New York, but by Week 16, that same Silverback team took them behind the woodshed, and finished them off ruthlessly with a 42-14 drubbing that sealed Honolulu’s place in history.
On to Baltimore. It feels like people knew this team would struggle, but I don't think people were expecting this team to bottom out as hard as they did. If I could compare them to another team, it might be this season’s Colorado Yeti (I know the Yeti are alright this season, but preseason expectations were pretty low. Like S39’s Yeti, the S27 Hawks had the highest rated QB in the league (Fujiwara), an elite tight end (James Lewandowski), a beast in the secondary (Eldrick Avery), and not much more. This felt like a team that would struggle a bit, but could still get wins here and there. Maybe four wins, and another high pick in next season’s draft.
However, the losses started, and they just wouldn’t let up. Every loss seemed to be either a soul-crushing one-score loss or a 20-point curb stomping, with nothing in between. In the first nine weeks of the season, they suffered losses of 35 points to Berlin, 44 to Chicago, 27 to Colorado, 26 to Sarasota, 20 to New York in a shutout, and 31 to Arizona. A couple of games were exciting, like a game of the year candidate in Week 2 against San Jose where they lost 45-40, in a game where there were SIX TOUCHDOWNS OF MORE THAN 55 YARDS IN THE SECOND QUARTER ALONE! Just thought that was fun. And there was also a four point loss to Philly, where they actually led 31-14 late in the third, but a furious Philly comeback resulted in a 35-31 loss. Aside from that, happiness in Baltimore hadn’t been this low since BronyCon got canceled.
But as I said in the last part, behind the scenes, things were getting a little fucky. Starboy and Squanch were ready to move on from their GM roles, and put in their formal resignations from their position early in the season. However, the head office wouldn’t sign off on their hand-picked replacement, and the process dragged and dragged. It took until Week 10 before their replacements were finally found, and ironically one of them was already on the Hawks, CLG Rampage, aka Mathias Hanyadi. Ironic, since that was the big hang-up that kept them from putting their own picks in. It was a big old fustercluck, and two days later, they pressed the big red button.
All four players who were linked to the Hawks GM position before the league office made them look elsewhere were shipped off for a bunch of picks to turbo-charge their rebuild. They were already 0-10, no point in pulling a Houston Texans and accidentally winning too many games to screw up the tank. Chika Fujiwara got flipped to Honolulu for an S28 fourth round pick and an already inactive Luke Skywalker, who was at this point one of the lowest rated QBs in the league, and would never be around to see another down of simulation football again. Similarly, Joshua Campbell was also moved for a S28 4th from Chicago. It’s worth noting that those picks were not good, as the S28 Draft only had about 4 1⁄2 rounds. These guys were good players and both still growing in TPE, but this whole situation left a bad taste in peoples mouths and they were sold off for pennies on the dollar. Chika would still have two more good seasons, maybe even her two best seasons, and Campbell would hit the millennium mark in receiving yards in literally every single season of his career. It was just a big, regrettable mess.
Felix Archstone and Annie May also got flipped in the mess as well, I suppose they also wanted to be out of this whole Baltimore situation. Austin was willing to give them two first-round picks for both players, as well as a free O-line bot. (I didn’t know you could do that.) And with the big fire sale, they also managed to ship off their elite tight end, James Lewandowski. San Jose was willing to give them an S28 second, an S29 first, and the lesser of either team’s S29 second (so Baltimore could make a pick swap happen there, if they wanted to).
The team that came out of a Week 10 match with Philly on the short end of a close 24-21 loss was a shell of itself in Week 11. They got absolutely bopped by the Yeti, 40-7, and it was all downhill from there. Their closest loss over the last six weeks of the season was by 20 to Sarasota in Week 14. This was a team that was emotionally and physically dominated, and by the time Week 16 rolled around, they just turned over and died. A 31-0 dismantling, where Baby Yoda scored on them four times. This was heartbreaking to watch.
That was sad, and let’s keep it sad. The S6 Colorado Yeti. So what can we expect from these guys? Well, I remember a long, long time ago, I briefly talked about the Season 6 Yeti when I wrote about scorigami games, and I highlighted two Yeti games from this season, 69-17 against Orange County, and 66-6 against Yellowknife. Care to guess which side of the scoreboard the Yeti were on. Also, at the time, 69 and 66 were the most and second most points scored by a team in a single game. And it happened to the same opponent, seven weeks apart. God this team is something special. The other two teams were bad, but these guys are like the S39 Yellowknife Wraiths, but like the reverse kind.
The most points they scored in a single game was 24, and the fewest points they gave up in a game was 23. Sadly, those two games did not coincide. The closest they would ever come was a one-score game in Week 1, where they took a tie ballgame into the fourth quarter, but it was just not meant to be. Avon Blocksdale Sr. hit Trey Willie for a 37 yard touchdown. Colorado’s ensuing possession went nowhere, and that was the ball game, 30-23. They’d never have a better chance than that. There was another game where they only lost 24-21 to the almost as bad Second Line (who were only a year removed from being the equally terrible Las Vegas Legion), but it didn’t feel as close. The Yeti squandered a 14-0 lead, and once that lead was gone, it felt like it was already over. They did trade away one player midseason, maybe because there honestly wasn’t much that other teams would want from them. With Micycle taking over kicking duties, Peg Leg was flipped to New Orleans for a S8 4th, and brutally, Leg would come back and kick the game-winning field goal that beat Colorado when they faced later that season.
And that was it for Season 6 for Colorado. A winless season where honestly people probably expected that to happen. That’s all for this part, but in the finale of this series, I’ll examine what happened in the aftermath of these awful seasons, and see what the future held for these teams, and holds for the streak that just ended.