01-17-2023, 02:50 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-18-2023, 06:21 PM by Aneeqs. Edited 1 time in total.)
Intro
Position awards are a backbone of the ISFL. Even at the very beginning the powers that be came together to reward the player at season’s end on stream for the entire league to debate about. Players that were able to break a record, perform the best overall, or that had a fiery start/end to the season manage to grab the spotlight on their own to take home after awards night. It would at one point be nearly impossible to imagine the league working where positional award trophies, that were once a centerfold to the offseason streams, are now not even a part of the ISFL anymore. The issue can arise in multiple forms now with players that were basing careers off of the award pursuit. It was the ultimate chase between some to see who would get Quarterback of the Year that even those outside the position were rooting for their favorites. Were the awards always done right? Were the awards always fair? Were the awards a vital piece of the ISFL as I have described them? Time to get informed and see if we can answer these questions.
Were Positional Awards Done Right?
To begin, we should look at just how well the awards were done. I have been a long time user in the ISFL and have been in the first attempt at an awards committee for about two seasons back when positional awards were still done. The discussion for awards is always a wild debate where the emphasis on certain stats are given to some players while others are never given the light of day despite breaking records in key areas related to the position. That just brings in the human element into the voting that will always be debated until the end of time, especially with the General Managers, Awards Committee, and Head Office all being made out of users that control the players going for awards or are tied to specific players. Have a grudge with a user that was top three in pass break ups but didn’t have that many interceptions? That player sometimes got left out if enough people did not value those stats equally or bent the argument against that player and that will happen. It is completely human to do this which might cause the issue to the awards being done “right” or correctly.
For example, S20 Quarterback of the Year award race went down to a discussion between Jay Cue and Rose Jenkins (or at least I hope it did, this was admittedly before my time in the Awards Committee). Rose Jenkins played the Chicago Butchers who were still in their early days of struggling as a franchise with plenty enough drama to have its own article. She managed to still throw for 333 more yards and two more touchdowns than Cue. The issue with Jenkins’ season was that she had three more interceptions than Cue. Surely that wouldn’t be enough to ruin the chances of a quarterback doing more with less? If you know how much emphasis is put on what I like to call the “Double Digit Interception Threshold” then you’ll know that no quarterback is ever discussed highly if they have double digits in interceptions. It is a guarantee that people will look toward anyone else but someone with double digit interceptions regardless of other stats. One of the only times that a quarterback was ever considered in the conversation for the award was in S25 when Dexter Banks II had ten interceptions. The only competition he had for the award came from Wolfie McDummy, but Wolfie missed out on getting thirty touchdowns like his fellow NSFC counterpart. In our original case, Rose also happened to be controlled by a user not well liked by the league and so despite having great stats with a defense that would get blown out by a Pop Warner team, Rose did not get the award. Things out of the player's hands ended up taking the award from them.
There are no ballots from this time period so we cannot attest to how the voting went out but suffice to say that there are very hard limits to what it takes to win certain awards. Looking at some awards you can see certain races where this scenario is repeated and the player had less stats in certain key areas you might emphasize but not where someone else will. All of this giving awards plenty of reasons to be debated and turned into some rather heated arguments in the post-stream time.
Were The Positional Awards Fair?
That leads into debating if the awards are fair and just how well the positional awards have been treated in seasons’ past. To begin our exploration into the fairness of positional awards, we need to establish a very key moment in the timeline for awards. The most impactful moment being the offseason after S20 where a brand new rule was introduced to the league that caused a major schism between awards given prior to and after this rule was approved. Our new rule prevented players deemed as Inactive from being in ballots altogether. That activity was based on the final regular season week officially which meant that some players with great stats now had to also be evaluated on their activity as well. There are plenty of people that hated this rule and deemed it stupid to put some asterisk on some awards, but as the father of this rule, I felt that it is important to reward active players and so far it has not run into many issues with splitting hairs. Regardless, that is a key season to know for any of those wanting to look back and debate positional awards.
Returning back to our points, awards were not always so transparent to the average user. If you wanted to see how a vote went down then you needed to be in Head Office or someone tied to the voting process directly. Some General Managers were not given full information on who voted for who. That changed when the first Awards Committee was introduced around S23 for users to join in and begin to represent their team’s best players. It gave more power to individuals set on a more average user engagement level to be able to argue themselves about who to even put on the ballot. This is where arguments quickly boiled up on who the elusive top five players per position were. You would have players with record breaking numbers get left off because someone could not argue for them hard enough or others that got on with less than spectacular numbers because the ballot needed a fifth player. It all added up for plenty of intense discussion and would be repeated seasonally because the Awards Committee members were not solidified with them being rotated out every season for some teams. The actual Committee we have today that operates as a real league job is still very fresh and has a much higher level of entry than a general manager deciding to push players in.
Another key date for our discussion of fairness goes to the first few times that the award ballots were released. Some consider it common practice but for a long time it was left between only the powers that be to know who voted for who. It created some arguments among users about who should or should not be voted on while a user that avoided putting the best player on their ballot got to sit back quietly as their decision’s consequences unfolded. Our first couple of times seeing the ballots led to that anger now being directed solely at users who were wasting votes on players nobody had nominated. Usually we saw this in the form of users only voting for players on their same team for all three of the top spots. It broke the league finding out that this was not just a joke people made but that it was actually happening. No major punishment went to users showing this level of favoritism either so the accountability to avoid making these types of ballots were solely left on “good faith” for everyone. The problem with that being, how do you prove someone is actually voting for the people they actually believe are worthy and just a favoritism vote.
Does Anyone Even Care About Positional Awards?
Our final question has been tested since S36 and is currently how the awards are run without positional awards. The ballots are still released, the Awards Committee still exists, and the entire stream feels more like a NFL awards show than an internet football league or college football awards show. There are users who have never seen a positional award in the league and often might have no clue just how tight some of the races have gone down to. Award shows have transitioned the focus to the All-Pro Team which usually never got too much focus from the average user which I do have to applaud with the new streams. However the streams end up losing some of the charm of debating in the stream about certain awards. Now a player is only able to collect awards with very confusing standards. Before it was the same stats competing against each other but now how well can you debate a wide receiver or tight end against a quarterback for Offensive Player of the Year? Entire positions are almost wiped from awards night now due to the removal of positional awards. So now we have seen the seasons without them and does anyone else feel like the awards night is missing something?
Position awards are a backbone of the ISFL. Even at the very beginning the powers that be came together to reward the player at season’s end on stream for the entire league to debate about. Players that were able to break a record, perform the best overall, or that had a fiery start/end to the season manage to grab the spotlight on their own to take home after awards night. It would at one point be nearly impossible to imagine the league working where positional award trophies, that were once a centerfold to the offseason streams, are now not even a part of the ISFL anymore. The issue can arise in multiple forms now with players that were basing careers off of the award pursuit. It was the ultimate chase between some to see who would get Quarterback of the Year that even those outside the position were rooting for their favorites. Were the awards always done right? Were the awards always fair? Were the awards a vital piece of the ISFL as I have described them? Time to get informed and see if we can answer these questions.
Were Positional Awards Done Right?
To begin, we should look at just how well the awards were done. I have been a long time user in the ISFL and have been in the first attempt at an awards committee for about two seasons back when positional awards were still done. The discussion for awards is always a wild debate where the emphasis on certain stats are given to some players while others are never given the light of day despite breaking records in key areas related to the position. That just brings in the human element into the voting that will always be debated until the end of time, especially with the General Managers, Awards Committee, and Head Office all being made out of users that control the players going for awards or are tied to specific players. Have a grudge with a user that was top three in pass break ups but didn’t have that many interceptions? That player sometimes got left out if enough people did not value those stats equally or bent the argument against that player and that will happen. It is completely human to do this which might cause the issue to the awards being done “right” or correctly.
For example, S20 Quarterback of the Year award race went down to a discussion between Jay Cue and Rose Jenkins (or at least I hope it did, this was admittedly before my time in the Awards Committee). Rose Jenkins played the Chicago Butchers who were still in their early days of struggling as a franchise with plenty enough drama to have its own article. She managed to still throw for 333 more yards and two more touchdowns than Cue. The issue with Jenkins’ season was that she had three more interceptions than Cue. Surely that wouldn’t be enough to ruin the chances of a quarterback doing more with less? If you know how much emphasis is put on what I like to call the “Double Digit Interception Threshold” then you’ll know that no quarterback is ever discussed highly if they have double digits in interceptions. It is a guarantee that people will look toward anyone else but someone with double digit interceptions regardless of other stats. One of the only times that a quarterback was ever considered in the conversation for the award was in S25 when Dexter Banks II had ten interceptions. The only competition he had for the award came from Wolfie McDummy, but Wolfie missed out on getting thirty touchdowns like his fellow NSFC counterpart. In our original case, Rose also happened to be controlled by a user not well liked by the league and so despite having great stats with a defense that would get blown out by a Pop Warner team, Rose did not get the award. Things out of the player's hands ended up taking the award from them.
There are no ballots from this time period so we cannot attest to how the voting went out but suffice to say that there are very hard limits to what it takes to win certain awards. Looking at some awards you can see certain races where this scenario is repeated and the player had less stats in certain key areas you might emphasize but not where someone else will. All of this giving awards plenty of reasons to be debated and turned into some rather heated arguments in the post-stream time.
Were The Positional Awards Fair?
That leads into debating if the awards are fair and just how well the positional awards have been treated in seasons’ past. To begin our exploration into the fairness of positional awards, we need to establish a very key moment in the timeline for awards. The most impactful moment being the offseason after S20 where a brand new rule was introduced to the league that caused a major schism between awards given prior to and after this rule was approved. Our new rule prevented players deemed as Inactive from being in ballots altogether. That activity was based on the final regular season week officially which meant that some players with great stats now had to also be evaluated on their activity as well. There are plenty of people that hated this rule and deemed it stupid to put some asterisk on some awards, but as the father of this rule, I felt that it is important to reward active players and so far it has not run into many issues with splitting hairs. Regardless, that is a key season to know for any of those wanting to look back and debate positional awards.
Returning back to our points, awards were not always so transparent to the average user. If you wanted to see how a vote went down then you needed to be in Head Office or someone tied to the voting process directly. Some General Managers were not given full information on who voted for who. That changed when the first Awards Committee was introduced around S23 for users to join in and begin to represent their team’s best players. It gave more power to individuals set on a more average user engagement level to be able to argue themselves about who to even put on the ballot. This is where arguments quickly boiled up on who the elusive top five players per position were. You would have players with record breaking numbers get left off because someone could not argue for them hard enough or others that got on with less than spectacular numbers because the ballot needed a fifth player. It all added up for plenty of intense discussion and would be repeated seasonally because the Awards Committee members were not solidified with them being rotated out every season for some teams. The actual Committee we have today that operates as a real league job is still very fresh and has a much higher level of entry than a general manager deciding to push players in.
Another key date for our discussion of fairness goes to the first few times that the award ballots were released. Some consider it common practice but for a long time it was left between only the powers that be to know who voted for who. It created some arguments among users about who should or should not be voted on while a user that avoided putting the best player on their ballot got to sit back quietly as their decision’s consequences unfolded. Our first couple of times seeing the ballots led to that anger now being directed solely at users who were wasting votes on players nobody had nominated. Usually we saw this in the form of users only voting for players on their same team for all three of the top spots. It broke the league finding out that this was not just a joke people made but that it was actually happening. No major punishment went to users showing this level of favoritism either so the accountability to avoid making these types of ballots were solely left on “good faith” for everyone. The problem with that being, how do you prove someone is actually voting for the people they actually believe are worthy and just a favoritism vote.
Does Anyone Even Care About Positional Awards?
Our final question has been tested since S36 and is currently how the awards are run without positional awards. The ballots are still released, the Awards Committee still exists, and the entire stream feels more like a NFL awards show than an internet football league or college football awards show. There are users who have never seen a positional award in the league and often might have no clue just how tight some of the races have gone down to. Award shows have transitioned the focus to the All-Pro Team which usually never got too much focus from the average user which I do have to applaud with the new streams. However the streams end up losing some of the charm of debating in the stream about certain awards. Now a player is only able to collect awards with very confusing standards. Before it was the same stats competing against each other but now how well can you debate a wide receiver or tight end against a quarterback for Offensive Player of the Year? Entire positions are almost wiped from awards night now due to the removal of positional awards. So now we have seen the seasons without them and does anyone else feel like the awards night is missing something?