*Transparency on Chicago

[Jiggly_333]

I'm making this for the case of full transparency. There is a legitimate power vacuum on top of the Chicago Butchers at the moment. Valor's gone and Steelsound just quit. So let me tell you a quick story of how I've spent my entire fucking day.

Yesterday, when Steel opened up applications for CoGM, I sent one in just because. I figured he wouldn't pick me and if he did I'd just tell him that he should probably reconsider. Anyway, later that night I see that I have mod perms again in the Butchers LR and had the GM role again. Weird, but ok. I thought that Steel had just skipped the process of talking to me about being GM and just made me GM instantly.

I went to sleep at around 3:00AM and woke up at 10:30AM.

I wake up, check my notifications while half asleep and notice a conversation in the war room that I didn't think much of the day before. It's Valor talking about how we should get AdamS to come be our GM. I swiftly realize while lying in bed that Steel hadn't just given me the CoGM job, he was fucking off.

Pretty much, Steel's problem involved the fact that our strats weren't inputted properly and there were some HO members that were dismissive about it. I don't want to get into the legitimacy of what he was talking about because strats are something I'm completely out of my depth about. What I do know is that there were a couple of people in GM chat being a dick about it and Steel couldn't take it anymore. This, compounded by the fact that the entire league seems to love talking about how shit this team is, just made him press the eject button.

I don't blame him, I wish I had the willpower to do the same.

Anyway, it's around 10:30, I just woke up, and now I'm trying to control this situation before shit gets too out of hand. I message Bex about the future of the team and who was going to be in charge. I then messaged Oles about the situation since I knew that both of us had already been working on plans to fix the Butchers on the side and now things could finally happened. All the while, I tried to make sure that things didn't get out. Valor tried doing his usual bullshit of "I know something, tee hee," and I squashed that shit immediately. It looked like we could calmly handle this situation behind closed doors.

No one knew at the time about Steel's resignation. He had yet to say anything publicly.

I find out that Steel had transferred control of the LR over to me, so I figure I might as well bring in Oles to the war room so we could discuss this shit properly with the other couple of bewildered war room members. We put together a sell list of players to dump the moment we had a chance this offesason. We also tried to evaluate what we wanted out of these players in terms of value.

See, the rulebook says that if our GM is in a draft, you need to use your second round pick on that player. If you do not have a second, you need to use a first. The Butchers do not have a second, a first, or even a third. If we wanted Oles as GM, we would have to either trade for at least a second round pick or we would have to negotiate with HO, which can't feasibly happen unless we had a real GM instead of whatever I am right now (chairperson?). So we rate some of these players. Most of them we can't see us getting much, but there's one player we believe that we can get a solid first or second out of: Ahri Espeeyeeseetee.

It's about 11:40AM. I've barely been awake for an hour. I'm trying to have breakfast as I'm doing all this.

Steel announces his player's retirement.

Well fuck.

Our main ticket to getting a draft pick just fucks off. Once again, I wish I had the strength to do this.

We continue to try and put plans together until we realize that HO has told us nothing so far. The only response I'd gotten is that they might be thinking of bringing in a completely new GM. All this work we're doing is both crucial and meaningless at the same time. All these lists and plans of action that we're trying to form are all meaningless if someone else is just gonna walk in and do their own thing instead. But it's still important to do because maybe the new GM might listen to us or even better, we're the new GMs. Meaningless and crucial.

The NSFL General Discord chat is surprisingly slow to find the news. I'd kept it down as best I could, but Steel making a very public statement forces our hands. Well, my hand at least. It takes a solid twenty minutes after the announcement, but we get the people talking about Chicago imploding.

I believe in transparency. It's one of the guiding tenants of my heroes in the non-player sports world (and my favorite drunk uncle): Peter Wilt. Be open and take responsibility. There was no way to get this done quietly anymore, so if we're going loud, I will be as loud as I can about how we're trying to fix things. I will give you guys all the information I have because it's truly meaningless and a lot of it is obvious. It's better to hand out facts than deal with a bunch of misinformation. Make sure that if they attack you, it's not with a forged weapon.

So, that's been the rest of my day: dealing with people in general chat questioning everything and calling for heads. Like they've been doing for the past goddamn month. The same way that drove Steel out of the entire league.

I want to get one thing clear as I move on: I don't like the fact that I've become this de facto figurehead for the Butchers. I'm the wrong face for people to be looking at when they want hope. But at the same time, I'm not going to walk away. I have failed too many times in this league because I put trust in others. I put trust in people so many times to do the right thing and I keep having it backfire.

I don't want to be that person to someone else.

I feel a sense of duty and responsibility to keep this team moving. I could easily just finally fuck off and be done with this. Get some time to work on schoolwork, music, and my other writing shit. But, I made a commitment. There are people counting on certain things to happen and if no one seems to be stepping up, I'll step up for as long as I need to. And as soon as I feel like I'm leaving it in better hands than my own, I step back and let them carry it on.

But, you know, that seems to always backfire.

Anyway, my big point is that I've done all I could today to keep Chicago from spiraling any further than it already had. I've tried speaking with the team, but it's hard to say anything definitive about the future without any communication from HO. I haven't heard from them and I genuinely don't know if they even see me as someone they should speak to about this. I'm just the guy who spent the entire morning pulling together a crew to discuss the transition into a rebuild and then the afternoon trying to keep people from causing any more damage to the team.

Because all the hate that's been spewed has caused real, genuine, and tangible damage.

Some shit trades were made. I made some gambles that didn't pay off on their own. That shit happens. The fact that it happens so consistently to this one team is honestly impressive at this point. To have all this misfortune just piled onto one team is something that I don't think I could've even written. It'd feel like overkill from a narrative perspective.

But at the same time, to continually point that shit out, to talk about how trash the team is and no one should want to be there makes it even harder to fix things. When a rookie walks into a discord of people insulting a singular team, they'll join in to feel like a part of the group. Hell, it happens on a personal level as recently there was a user who within minutes of finding out who I was began insulting me like he's been around for years. It's just in the culture and you can't scrub it out easily.

All the articles on "How I'd Fix Chicago" are insulting and patronizing. They're not helpful. It sounds counter-intuitive, but being helpful does not actually help in this case. I remember some psychology study where they found that when being presented with a friend having an issue, women would empathize and try to relate to the friend while men would attempt to provide solutions. I'm not saying that it's a bad thing, but when you're flooded with 10 different articles saying the same fucking thing, it gets to you.

And the belief that a rebrand will help the team. That's just a fucking coat of paint. The "stigma" around the Butchers will be around whatever team would take its place. Because it's the same team. And if that team can rebuild, I don't think there's any real emotional payoff. It's essentially just an expansion team that started on hard mode. The Butchers wouldn't have found redemption, it'd just be something completely different. You didn't "fix" anything, you just colonized and industrialized.

Here's the way that the team's image can be "fixed": Just pushing on.

The best pitch to a new player isn't "we're already champions, come grab a ring with us", it's not even "we're finally making our playoff push and you can help us get there." The best pitch is "We're shit. You can help make us better." It's a very romantic ideal. I don't believe the idea that most of the rookies don't actually want to join the Butchers. It's much more fun to be a part of the build. It creates stronger bonds. It's a very American thing to wish to be the underdog and the Chicago Butchers are every bit that underdog, being kicked on by everything.

So yeah, these are my unfiltered thoughts. This is what's been happening and my take on it. It's important to talk about shit like this openly so it doesn't become another thing where I get accosted by a bunch of assholes saying "BuT JiGgLy, YOU TRAded fOUr FirsT RouNd pIcKS for BEX!1!" when they don't know shit about what happened and refuse to listen to the truth since the truth was never available at the time.

When HO posted the Choosing Kindness piece, it was about shit like that. And all you who went in it and talked about how great the community is need to look at the people who say it isn't a good community. And instead of ridiculing and dismissing them, look at what they're talking about. Look at yourselves. That's what Steel was just doing. You all pushed him to that point. So instead of circling the team like vultures, try out some introspection.



PS: I'M NOT FUCKING DONE

I have spent the past five years or so of my life involved with covering a sports team in which every single person on the planet seemed to have their own opinion on how to fix it. One of those common solutions: a rebrand. A pointless fucking rebrand. And then they did it. And guess what? The team's image actually got worse. Fucking imagine that.

I'm very used to people giving useless opinions on things they only understand from the outside. It's a normal reaction from sports fans. It's just usually that those opinions don't get massive focus and pile up in news coverage. That's what journalists are for. So they can just make one well thought out article and be done. Instead of fifty people with their own thoughts.

[Warner]

how’s this transparent bro i cant. See through it

[Oles]

I don't know whether HO is gonna make me GM of the Butchers again, I want to help right the ship and fix the team, doing what I can to give it a better future. Chicago shouldn't be rebranded, I think that's the cowards way of trying to fix the team. I hope HO lets me rebuild and bring a bright future to Chicago, but if they don't I absolutely do not want them rebranded. We've had 1 rebrand in NSFL history and that stemmed from a mass retirement and many other problems in a very quick time frame. It took many more issues than Chicago has had to get the Legion to rebrand, and ultimately I think rebranding should only be used in the worst case scenario. I want to help the team in any way that I can while I can, knowing if I'm not the GM there's no way that I go to Chicago in the draft, I want to provide insight and help whoever takes the team if it isn't me.

[Billybolo53]

[nickyvmlp]

I'm really rooting for the Butchers to pull themselves out of this hole they're in. I believe in y'all, even if I'm in the minority. You guys'll turn this thing around, I know it.

[gucci]

Lmao this is gold

[infinitempg]

Definitely appreciate getting a bit of an inside look at this. Just want to set the record straight on a few things here:

Pretty much, Steel's problem involved the fact that our strats weren't inputted properly and there were some HO members that were dismissive about it. I don't want to get into the legitimacy of what he was talking about because strats are something I'm completely out of my depth about. What I do know is that there were a couple of people in GM chat being a dick about it and Steel couldn't take it anymore. This, compounded by the fact that the entire league seems to love talking about how shit this team is, just made him press the eject button.

So I was the one interacting with steel, and I want to say that the reason we were dismissive was because he entered his strats in the incorrect order, and as such it wasn't caught to be corrected when simming. To be clear, the color was changed to red as regulation states, but because the listing of LWR/RWR/Slot was not in the correct order it did not get changed. Ultimately I felt that it wasn't 100% the fault of the simmer, and some fault should be placed on steel for not following the template. Whether that is fair or not is up to you.

Was I a bit dismissive? Sure. But I thought I was being respectful and tried to put what was a simple mistake behind us. What was returned to me were accusations of being lazy and incompetent, which I again tried to take the high road with. That didn't work so well.

What I know for sure is that this was the last straw for him - he had mentioned earlier (when our simmer asked him about not seeing any changes despite things being in red because again, they were out of order) that if he saw the file was incorrect after the game he would quit. Which he did. I can't blame him - people have been ragging on Chicago for a long time now and, in my opinion, quite unfairly. That can take a toll, and if steel feels it's better for him to leave the league, more power to him.

--

We continue to try and put plans together until we realize that HO has told us nothing so far. The only response I'd gotten is that they might be thinking of bringing in a completely new GM.

I've tried speaking with the team, but it's hard to say anything definitive about the future without any communication from HO.

I just want to say that through the last 24 hours (steele quit about 1am last night central time) we've received nearly a dozen messages/applications for the Chicago job. Seeing as to some extent we're stuck picking the new GM, we're going to take a bit of time discussing it. I was planning on reaching out to you guys actually (you guys specifically being @CDub2 and @Jiggly_333 since you are in the war room afaik?) to hear your thoughts and the team's opinions as to what is going on and how to move forward, but IRL thesis work got in the way and I apologize for that - please hit me up so we can talk!

---

Okay now taking off the HO hat and opinion-ing on other stuff

All the articles on "How I'd Fix Chicago" are insulting and patronizing.

I know this will come off as insulting and patronizing, but I was on the other side of the fence earlier this season - I genuinely thought Chicago had a play at the playoffs and if just a few games went their way, they'd sneak in as a 3 or even 2 seed. I even made a bet on it, since I was reasonably convinced that it could happen. Heck, in like 30-40% of season simulations I did around W4, Chicago made the playoffs.

ALSO, I spent a long time on the worst team of all time. I'm still there. The Colorado Yeti have a history of just being baaaad. And man oh man did it bother me to see people saying they'd come right in and suddenly fix all the problems.

And the belief that a rebrand will help the team. That's just a fucking coat of paint. The "stigma" around the Butchers will be around whatever team would take its place.

I find myself agreeing and disagreeing here - on one hand it worked for Las Vegas. On the other hand, I found myself refusing to relocate Colorado because I wanted to bring a dead franchise back, stigma be damned. I don't know what the best option for the Butchers is, and I could certainly get behind a rebrand if the opportunity presents itself, but ultimately that is up to the team and its management.

[caltroit_red_flames]

Butchers bad

[thevoicelesscreator]

I appreciate the transparency, and I am sorry this got lumped on to you.

You're right, sh*t happens. It's how we deal with adversity that defines who we are. Pointing fingers aren't going to fix problems, but boy do people love to point fingers. The coming days are going to be tough, but I'm sure you and the team that is assembled will be able to navigate those waters.

Best of luck, no matter what happens :)

[Oles]

Butchers bad

that's it, OL bad