There is a cliche that goes something like “Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me.”

 Shame on me.

ESPN has proven, once again, to be the biggest collection of brainless idiots in the fantasy sports industry. I say this especially with some great sorrow, since one of my favorite people in the business, Matt Berry, recently signed on with them to oversee their fantasy operations.

ESPN has always been a laughing stock in the fantasy world. Their leagues are always screwed up, you can never make the changes you need to make for your team, and during prime time, forget about logging in to see what is going on.

Two years ago they offered free fantasy football and, in their typical blunderous fashion, completely under-estimated how many people would take them up on it. Even guys like me, burned back in the early to mid 90’s when they first launched their fantasy service, signed up for a free league.  The end result was, of course, that they crashed their servers and while trying to pull their collective heads out of their equally-collective rear ends wrote a series of letters to the users, groveling with apologies and “it will never happen again’s’.

Foolish, foolish us. We believed them. 

Fast forward to this year, one of my truly fantatical fantasy bretheren comes to me saying he wants to run an AL only league to try out ESPN’s new league manager. Not even my most dire warnings could dissuade him, and so as a fellow fantatical fantasy fan I dove head first into what I was certain would be a doomed endeavor.

There are times I really hate being right. This is definitely one of them.

Again, ESPN has had nothing but problems, and of course, have continued to provide a string of worthless apologies and of course more groveling.  They are in serious butt-pucker mode right now hoping to stem the tide of refugees fleeing en mass from their faulty and obviously poorly planned league management system, to say nothing about the dismal failure in planning, again, for sufficient server space and bandwidth to accomodate the surge of interest.

Today they struck the final blow.  A searing, mortal wound to their aspirations of ever winning over the hard core fantasy gamer.  They announced that sometime this evening all leagues will be reset to their original draft, all waiver wires rescinded, trades revoked and worse, no way for the league commissioners to straighten things out.  We had a flury of trades after our autodraft that will be completely wiped out. The strategic intent of each of the owners is exposed, and the shrewed pre-season manuevers destroyed.  Stats will be collected for the first eleven days based upon that original draft.

Someone asked me why I was bent out of shape on this. After all he quipped, the season has barely begun.

I doubt anyone will ever find the body.

It isn’t as if I haven’t played this game before. Quite the contrary. I was this close to writing for ESPN a couple of months ago, but decided I wanted to go a different way.  I play at least a dozen leagues each season…in fact I am down from a record 21 fantasy baseball leagues last year to a bakers dozen this year…I figured I need to relax a little.  So while I am trashing ESPN over their ineptitude, understand that I do so will the full knowledge and experience of previous mass faux pas on their part.

ESPN needs to fire the team that is responsible for this. From upper management to the team that implemented their disasterous plan.  They need to scrap the entire set up and start from scratch.

They won’t, because they have too much invested…at least that will likely be the excuse.  The reality is they’ve cost themselves much, much more by their consistent string of stupid server tricks, poor planning and lousy league management system. 

ESPN is an old dog.  A one trick puppy.

Roll over and play dead now, there’s a good boy

[tags]ESPN, Fantasy baseball, sports[/tags]