Task 1
After having heard several renditions of it over the last handful of seasons, I'd like to give my inside perspective on the so-called "Communist Chicago" rebellion. This recap isn't about opening old wounds or pointing fingers, but is merely a summary of the events through my own eyes. At this point, everyone in the league has more-than-likely heard the story about how a Chicago Butchers team in shambles lost both of their GMs in about a week and then refused Head Office's handpicked candidate to find one of their own. While that is basically the truth of the matter. It really is an over-simplified version that calls for more context.
Let's begin by examining who the key players are here, and what their roles were. The GMs of Chicago at the time were Steelsound and Valor. When I first agreed to the trade that sent my original player, Thorian Skarsgard, from the Orange County Otters to the Chicago Butchers, it was because of some very successful discussions with Steelsound. He seemed driven and motivated to turn a Chicago team that was a laughing stock at the time, into a contender. I hadn't conversed much with Valor, but had heard of him from around the league. Steel confirmed almost immediately that bringing my regressing player into a losing team situation was more about getting me in the locker room to help change team culture than it was hoping Skarsgard would turn things around for the team. It seemed like a perfect match to me. I get the payday that I wanted and that I knew the Otters couldn't afford, and Chicago got someone to come in and help reboot things. I was immediately added to the war room, where I came into contact with two other key players in the story. The only other members of the Chicago war room at the time were Jiggly and CDub. Everyone seemed pretty optimistic both in management and the locker room in general about the team's direction. This is where the problems begin.
Steel was the first GM to pull the plug. His moves, including bringing my player in, were being panned constantly by everyone in the league. The "Chicago sux lol" movement around the league was strong, with even players on other pretty awful teams taking shots. Most of those shots were directed at Steel. Some of them were fair, and others definitely weren't, but at the end of the day, he just got tired of being lambasted by every member of the league on a seemingly daily basis. With just a short message to the Chicago war room, he retired his player and to my knowledge has not been heard from since. This put co-GM Valor in the hot seat, and that last very little time. Valor had been vocal about the fact that he wanted his player, Ryan Leaf Jr., to have a shot at winning a title before he retired and it was seeming more and more like that wouldn't happen in Chicago. To reach his end goal, Valor decided to step down from the role of GM and immediately requested a trade. At this juncture, the war room of myself, Jiggly, and CDub were in a difficult position. We were trying to keep the locker room unified and also stay in contact with Head Office about what the situation was with the team. These events directly led to the situation in question.
A few Head Office members were brought into the Chicago war room so that a private conversation could be held between them and team leadership. Of course Bex was involved, and I remember infinitempg and terriblehippo being there as well. (If I missed anyone else, my apologies. I'm doing this completely from memory.) While I won't directly repeat anything that was said there, the general gist of it was that Head Office was assembling a list of candidates to interview and would decide amongst themselves who the replacement should be. I don't remember exactly how long it was between that conversation and finding out that TubbyTim had been chosen as the replacement GM, but I do remember thinking that it seemed like an awfully short period of time to properly vet a whole list of candidates. We discussed this amongst ourselves in the war room, after all the HO members had left, and decided that our ideal candidate would be someone with a long history of sim league management. We felt that such a person would come in with the tools necessary to turn this team around. The second reason we ended up rejecting Tim's appointment was that he stated to us himself that he planned to rebrand the Butchers to give the team "a new image". This was unpopular among both the war room and the active locker room members. We took these concerns to HO, and things admittedly went downhill from there. There was obviously jockeying on both sides. Jiggly, as the team's longest tenured member and default leader of the war room, felt strongly that the team should have a say in who was going to end up leading them. It was a popular sentiment among the players in the locker room, which brought myself and CDub on board.
Jiggly and myself were appointed "interim GMs" in order to conduct the search for the team's new GM(s), and were given the initial list of candidates who applied. The first thing we discovered was that multiple people told us HO never even approached them about their application, which was concerning. We did our due diligence with everyone on the list, first seeing if they were even still interested or not. This is how we landed on the tandem of Bayley and Muford. They had applied together and I had remarked to Bayley that I didn't even know they were in the running. Both of them had ample experience as GMs across multiple sim leagues and we felt like they were the pair to move the team in the right direction. Upon finding out that they were both still interested in coming to Chicago, we brought them in to talk to the players and vet any of their concerns. After it was agreed upon by everyone, we took our choice to HO and were then tasked with coming up with the plan to bring their players in. Bayley took the lead on this, as his new player would be in the upcoming draft and we could easily take him with our second round pick. This left acquiring Muford's player, John Smirh, from Colorado. I could get into the debacle that this became, but it's really not a part of this story.
To wrap this all up, Bayley and Muford did indeed become the new GM duo in Chicago and have now led the team to their second playoff berth in a row, contending for a conference title. Even though the route to get to this point was extremely messy, I feel like the goal was accomplished, which was simply to find the people capable of turning around a struggling franchise.
After having heard several renditions of it over the last handful of seasons, I'd like to give my inside perspective on the so-called "Communist Chicago" rebellion. This recap isn't about opening old wounds or pointing fingers, but is merely a summary of the events through my own eyes. At this point, everyone in the league has more-than-likely heard the story about how a Chicago Butchers team in shambles lost both of their GMs in about a week and then refused Head Office's handpicked candidate to find one of their own. While that is basically the truth of the matter. It really is an over-simplified version that calls for more context.
Let's begin by examining who the key players are here, and what their roles were. The GMs of Chicago at the time were Steelsound and Valor. When I first agreed to the trade that sent my original player, Thorian Skarsgard, from the Orange County Otters to the Chicago Butchers, it was because of some very successful discussions with Steelsound. He seemed driven and motivated to turn a Chicago team that was a laughing stock at the time, into a contender. I hadn't conversed much with Valor, but had heard of him from around the league. Steel confirmed almost immediately that bringing my regressing player into a losing team situation was more about getting me in the locker room to help change team culture than it was hoping Skarsgard would turn things around for the team. It seemed like a perfect match to me. I get the payday that I wanted and that I knew the Otters couldn't afford, and Chicago got someone to come in and help reboot things. I was immediately added to the war room, where I came into contact with two other key players in the story. The only other members of the Chicago war room at the time were Jiggly and CDub. Everyone seemed pretty optimistic both in management and the locker room in general about the team's direction. This is where the problems begin.
Steel was the first GM to pull the plug. His moves, including bringing my player in, were being panned constantly by everyone in the league. The "Chicago sux lol" movement around the league was strong, with even players on other pretty awful teams taking shots. Most of those shots were directed at Steel. Some of them were fair, and others definitely weren't, but at the end of the day, he just got tired of being lambasted by every member of the league on a seemingly daily basis. With just a short message to the Chicago war room, he retired his player and to my knowledge has not been heard from since. This put co-GM Valor in the hot seat, and that last very little time. Valor had been vocal about the fact that he wanted his player, Ryan Leaf Jr., to have a shot at winning a title before he retired and it was seeming more and more like that wouldn't happen in Chicago. To reach his end goal, Valor decided to step down from the role of GM and immediately requested a trade. At this juncture, the war room of myself, Jiggly, and CDub were in a difficult position. We were trying to keep the locker room unified and also stay in contact with Head Office about what the situation was with the team. These events directly led to the situation in question.
A few Head Office members were brought into the Chicago war room so that a private conversation could be held between them and team leadership. Of course Bex was involved, and I remember infinitempg and terriblehippo being there as well. (If I missed anyone else, my apologies. I'm doing this completely from memory.) While I won't directly repeat anything that was said there, the general gist of it was that Head Office was assembling a list of candidates to interview and would decide amongst themselves who the replacement should be. I don't remember exactly how long it was between that conversation and finding out that TubbyTim had been chosen as the replacement GM, but I do remember thinking that it seemed like an awfully short period of time to properly vet a whole list of candidates. We discussed this amongst ourselves in the war room, after all the HO members had left, and decided that our ideal candidate would be someone with a long history of sim league management. We felt that such a person would come in with the tools necessary to turn this team around. The second reason we ended up rejecting Tim's appointment was that he stated to us himself that he planned to rebrand the Butchers to give the team "a new image". This was unpopular among both the war room and the active locker room members. We took these concerns to HO, and things admittedly went downhill from there. There was obviously jockeying on both sides. Jiggly, as the team's longest tenured member and default leader of the war room, felt strongly that the team should have a say in who was going to end up leading them. It was a popular sentiment among the players in the locker room, which brought myself and CDub on board.
Jiggly and myself were appointed "interim GMs" in order to conduct the search for the team's new GM(s), and were given the initial list of candidates who applied. The first thing we discovered was that multiple people told us HO never even approached them about their application, which was concerning. We did our due diligence with everyone on the list, first seeing if they were even still interested or not. This is how we landed on the tandem of Bayley and Muford. They had applied together and I had remarked to Bayley that I didn't even know they were in the running. Both of them had ample experience as GMs across multiple sim leagues and we felt like they were the pair to move the team in the right direction. Upon finding out that they were both still interested in coming to Chicago, we brought them in to talk to the players and vet any of their concerns. After it was agreed upon by everyone, we took our choice to HO and were then tasked with coming up with the plan to bring their players in. Bayley took the lead on this, as his new player would be in the upcoming draft and we could easily take him with our second round pick. This left acquiring Muford's player, John Smirh, from Colorado. I could get into the debacle that this became, but it's really not a part of this story.
To wrap this all up, Bayley and Muford did indeed become the new GM duo in Chicago and have now led the team to their second playoff berth in a row, contending for a conference title. Even though the route to get to this point was extremely messy, I feel like the goal was accomplished, which was simply to find the people capable of turning around a struggling franchise.
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