8. With awards season upon us, make up an award for your player to win for something not on the football field.
It started as a silly idea for Dane Johnson Jr. to put up a little concession stand featuring one of his favorite foods: pancakes. The term 'pancake' obviously holds a special place for linemen, as it's one of the few countable statistics tracked for the position and signifies total domination of a play for that player. When you pancake a defender it completely takes him out of that play, and can allow the offensive player to engage in a second block downfield. The implication is obvious and the play on words is easy to see.
But the clever wordplay was not what actually drove Dane to pursue the business opportunity. Pancakes are a big reason he was able to play football in the first place. For many linemen the most difficult part of playing the position is keeping enough weight on your body to effectively move other large men. For some, that's not a struggle at all, but for Dane choking down in excess of 6000 calories per day was the most difficult part of football. His trainer at the University of Toledo came up with the option of pancakes as a supplement to Dane's diet to add caloric value. Dane ate a stack of six every morning and often a second in the afternoon following practice, and learned the tricks to making the same daily food different enough to remain appetizing. By the time he graduated Dane really was a master of pancakes in both senses of the word.
The same dogged determination on the field has become evident as a business owner. With franchises springing up all over Northern California, Dane's House of Pancakes has become a household name and a favorite of breakfast-loving families. It is with great pride that we present the ISFL's Entrepreneur of the Year award to Dane Johnson Jr. of the San Jose SaberCats!
13. Expansion Expansion Expansion! Tell us why you think the league should expand / not expand or include any ideas (in words) for team branding ideas you have or team locations.
Always a hot topic for any professional sports league, expansion in the ISFL is a spectacularly poor idea. For one, expansion cities are rarely competitive in the first decade of their existence, so you are already looking at adding a pushover franchise that adds little to the product on the field. In the same vein, expansion requires teams to send players to the new franchises and expands the draft to snatch up what little talent is coming into the league. There are more than 60 bots on active rosters in the current ISFL, particularly along the offensive line. Filling out two more rosters would require significant bot additions to complete rosters, which only makes the players even less valuable and the product that much less watchable. It also requires an entire staff of front office personnel, media coverage, and more production time and effort for a league that can't keep its rosters full of players. At least two teams would need to be added to keep divisions balanced, which adds only one game per week. That is not worth making the other 14 teams in the league worse, nor is it worth the significant investment of management resources that would need to be brought to bear to achieve expansion. It is not as though the teams would get better television deals or significantly add fanbases to the broadcast footprint, and even if that were the case I would argue that the reduction in quality of games is simply not worth the effort.
So for any league personnel reading this, My argument is to focus on improving the teams and product you have right now, rather than sacrificing a quality product in favor of greater quantity. History has shown what happens to leagues that get greedy, and it is not a pretty picture.
It started as a silly idea for Dane Johnson Jr. to put up a little concession stand featuring one of his favorite foods: pancakes. The term 'pancake' obviously holds a special place for linemen, as it's one of the few countable statistics tracked for the position and signifies total domination of a play for that player. When you pancake a defender it completely takes him out of that play, and can allow the offensive player to engage in a second block downfield. The implication is obvious and the play on words is easy to see.
But the clever wordplay was not what actually drove Dane to pursue the business opportunity. Pancakes are a big reason he was able to play football in the first place. For many linemen the most difficult part of playing the position is keeping enough weight on your body to effectively move other large men. For some, that's not a struggle at all, but for Dane choking down in excess of 6000 calories per day was the most difficult part of football. His trainer at the University of Toledo came up with the option of pancakes as a supplement to Dane's diet to add caloric value. Dane ate a stack of six every morning and often a second in the afternoon following practice, and learned the tricks to making the same daily food different enough to remain appetizing. By the time he graduated Dane really was a master of pancakes in both senses of the word.
The same dogged determination on the field has become evident as a business owner. With franchises springing up all over Northern California, Dane's House of Pancakes has become a household name and a favorite of breakfast-loving families. It is with great pride that we present the ISFL's Entrepreneur of the Year award to Dane Johnson Jr. of the San Jose SaberCats!
13. Expansion Expansion Expansion! Tell us why you think the league should expand / not expand or include any ideas (in words) for team branding ideas you have or team locations.
Always a hot topic for any professional sports league, expansion in the ISFL is a spectacularly poor idea. For one, expansion cities are rarely competitive in the first decade of their existence, so you are already looking at adding a pushover franchise that adds little to the product on the field. In the same vein, expansion requires teams to send players to the new franchises and expands the draft to snatch up what little talent is coming into the league. There are more than 60 bots on active rosters in the current ISFL, particularly along the offensive line. Filling out two more rosters would require significant bot additions to complete rosters, which only makes the players even less valuable and the product that much less watchable. It also requires an entire staff of front office personnel, media coverage, and more production time and effort for a league that can't keep its rosters full of players. At least two teams would need to be added to keep divisions balanced, which adds only one game per week. That is not worth making the other 14 teams in the league worse, nor is it worth the significant investment of management resources that would need to be brought to bear to achieve expansion. It is not as though the teams would get better television deals or significantly add fanbases to the broadcast footprint, and even if that were the case I would argue that the reduction in quality of games is simply not worth the effort.
So for any league personnel reading this, My argument is to focus on improving the teams and product you have right now, rather than sacrificing a quality product in favor of greater quantity. History has shown what happens to leagues that get greedy, and it is not a pretty picture.