There and Back Again

2022-08-09

So what happened? A league and website that was so full of fun and excitement with a couple of the original team owners that put out a podcast for like ten years. And why still the website?

Speaking for myself, Scott, I became burned out on the NFL, especially from a fantasy perspective. With a busy young family at the time, I had no time to dive into what was happening in the league as I did when we first built things in 2001. Also, the owner turnover became a headache, and a few new owners began to bend old rules, making things even less fun. I cannot speak for Alex, but from the podcast perspective, I assume he was also super busy; we both had kids in the same age range participating in many activities. As it should, family meant more to us.

I believe we ended the podcast in 2013 or so, and I walked away from fantasy football and the BDFL in 2017. I think the league limped on for one more year. Things never felt as fun for me when we lost access to the raw numbers. Sure, Yahoo and the like do a fantastic job; there was just something fun about all the owners visiting this URL every game day and night.

The highlight for me was always draft night, even in the early years when we struggled to get owners on Skype and chatrooms; as stressful as it was in the early years, I had a blast. Like any fantasy league with local owners, a handful of us would get together at my home, drink beer, make fun of each other and laugh, and it was so much fun. But in the later years, that would be the highlight of the fun for me.

I held onto very little; I have no idea where the traveling trophy is. I probably have a copy of the website stored away somewhere, but probably the best way to relive those years is through the Internet Archive. I always wanted to keep this domain. The name has a history with one of my favorite video games of all time, Speedball 2 - Brutal Deluxe. The league initially ran off a subdomain of another URL I had, which I no longer own. I never liked the domain, which is funny because it was my first real blog. But in 2003, I decided to get the league its domain, and since then, I have owned brutaldeluxe.us.

I would have likely left the old website and been typing this post on that page, but since 2016 I have moved hosts and decided to no longer run the old content management system I wrote. I now use new blogging software that generates a static site so that I do not have to worry about keeping things like PHP and a MySQL database secured. So when I stopped running PHP and MySQL, the original site was gone. I think I even hosted the site with Alex’s host for many years, it was a way of splitting the costs of keeping the site alive, and it was the easiest way for Alex to edit and get the podcast live on the site each week.

I want to keep the URL active for old team owners and old podcast listeners just to come out and see that the website lives on in some form. After quitting fantasy football and not podcasting for a while, I had an itch to podcast again. I always felt that if I ever do, or if Alex and I ever have a hankering to podcast anything, I would host the shows on this domain again. The name is versatile.