Posted by hypnotoad on 11/3/2022 9:43:00 PM (view original):
Carney Lansford to Todd Benzinger

Interesting to me that both guys were formerly on my Red Sox roster.

Lansford arrived in time at 3B to block Wade Boggs's path to Boston. Boggs had several years at Pawtucket with great batting averages, and the Sox brass were idiots, so it took an injury to Lansford to give Boggs a shot in the bigs.

Y’all got that quick!!

Reds fans?
Locals?
Historians?
Or are you just googlers?

Posted by npb7768 on 11/3/2022 9:43:00 PM (view original):
Topdogg in his 7:28pm post hit on all great points that i agree with and summed up my thoughts. Thanks.

I edited it so the time changed in it. Grammar police knocked at my door

I'm picturing my recruiting process versus the Smith-A10 groups' former process.

After a couple of cycles of giving 20 or so secondary guys a few AP's each, i tabulate how many AP's will unlock a schollie.

In the notes section for each player, which shows in the General tab on the right, for each player i write the results... 5=12 (42)... 7=22 (31)... 13=18 (72)... 4=6 (67)... 7=15 (47)... etc, for 20 players...

Meanwhile, that was never a concern in the Smith A10. Just another thing that came to mind.

Blows my mind.

Posted by topdogggbm on 11/3/2022 9:49:00 PM (view original):
Y’all got that quick!!

Reds fans?
Locals?
Historians?
Or are you just googlers?

Haha, i was 22 in 1990, and was a big baseball fan. I'm from outside Providence, so i'm a longtime Red Sox fan.

Also, Cincinnati was my favorite NL team in the 70's at least cuz they were fun to watch, and cuz they had "Fred Norman", which is my brother's name (Fred) and my name (Norman) all rolled into one, lol. Loved Don Gullett, great forgotten pitcher who blew his arm out young, which i blame on Billy Martin overworking him, lol.

Reds fan, watched it happen.

Got ya. I watched it as well. But I was only 9. Believe it or not I remember it like it was yesterday

Reds or nearly-Reds trivia:

I took down the Reds (mostly) baseball trivia post cuz it was completely off topic. if anyone is curious about it, i can sitemail it to them, lol.

While I condemn the actions of the "banned" coaches, I think the stripping of all experience from them and reinstating them from square one is too harsh. I coach in Naismith SEC with robinhood and not only is he a master HD coach, but he has always been a decent person in his relationship with his rival coaches. He was winning big in Naismith long before he began using this "loophole". For the record, I will say that in my opinion, he was wrong to do that and that he used that shady tactic to give him an advantage in many battles with me.

But, he had been a model HD citizen and a highly sucessful coach for almost 20 years...that should count for something. I think a 2 or 3 season ban and then a reinstatement with their current resumes would have been sufficient.

Posted by topdogggbm on 11/3/2022 10:17:00 PM (view original):
Got ya. I watched it as well. But I was only 9. Believe it or not I remember it like it was yesterday

Nine! Jeez, I feel old...

I had snuck into the Oakland Coliseum with some friends to see that game. I was 22 too np. I got a few rows behind the Reds Dugout for the 9th inning, shook Norm Charlton's hand in the tunnel leading out of the stadium after the game.

Back then it had been a whole 14 years since the last Reds WS win, and that seemed like a super long time.
Ugh.

Posted by topdogggbm on 11/3/2022 9:46:00 PM (view original):

Posted by cimmy426 on 11/3/2022 5:43:00 PM (view original):

Posted by topdogggbm on 11/3/2022 5:02:00 PM (view original):

Posted by gillispie on 11/3/2022 3:54:00 PM (view original):

Posted by topdogggbm on 11/3/2022 3:49:00 PM (view original):
I think robinhood410 has made me feel great about the circumstances with his words. I’m all for him returning. Based off what I see in the discord. But I feel like cimmy is still combative and I’m not as much on board with him as I am Robinhood. I know they are of the same bunch. But they are reacting totally different to the situation. And that’s fine.

just throwing my thoughts out there

people tend not to react well to being called a cheater, yelled at, berated, etc... i know you and i don't see eye to eye on this, but i have found more success personally winning hearts and minds with calm discourse than confrontation.

i agree that this situation here was too serious to handle offline between coaches, without involving CS. i'm not saying we should have done that here, at all. but one should only expect a cimmy-style reaction to come with the territory. i suspect he will come around some in time, when emotions have cooled. that is one more problem with the pitchfork style you encourage. it doesn't give time for emotions to cool and for heads to level.

If you don’t think I’m being more fair then I normally am, you’re not reading. You’re right that you and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things (but honestly that’s more for the show than anything). I’m being VERY open minded about this. I put myself in their shoes……
1) i get ****** back at first
2) I think about it a bit more
3) I listen
4) I view what dozens of others had to say
5) I make a judgement.

in this case I’d feel like, ok I get it. I see why the community is mad. I’d like to apologize, explain, and ask for forgiveness somewhat. Do I owe that to anyone? Of course not. But you guys are my gaming peers and you’re throwing fire at me. I now see why.

next step is to let others know that I get it.

cimmy is not on that at all. He’s still being defensive. So is the entire community wrong? Is CS wrong? Or is 2-5 people wrong? You tell me. From there, if one doesn’t know what to do and how to act, I don’t know what to tell ya.

if a Top-style answer comes with a pitchfork as some of you say, the fact that I can say ‘my bad’ guys if I screw up, should hold a LOT of weight with the community. Be human. Admit wrong. Move forward. Doogan’s post about ‘I disagree it was a big advantage’. Get real. We’ve documented 1000 reasons why it IS compared to his ONE that it isn’t. OWN UP, and it all ends. But the problem is, those who don’t, can’t fake it. They really can’t grasp why it’s an issue. And that’s fine. But they won’t get much love from us if they feel that way

Would you admit wrong if you didn't feel like you were wrong? I honestly don't think robinhood thinks it was wrong either, but he's a people pleaser, and the mob needs a sacrifice, so he's ready and willing. All 3 of us have truly been very open and honest with our statements about all of this, even as the accusations drifted from hacking the website for unlimited APs to being the same people to hiding that we know each other to colluding and hiding secrets from people to whatever the other outlandish things were. If you choose not to believe us, that's obviously your prerogative. If you choose to believe us and disagree, that's cool too. If you want to hate us and/or attribute all of our successes at this game to this one thing, go ahead. It's just wild how this whole thing went down.

It’s very rare for me that in a circumstance like this, where I see dozens of others freaking out, to not stop and think about things, and view thru their eyes. I just don’t see how you can actually feel that you weren’t wrong in any way shape or form. It does happen but it’s rare when 1 person is right and the other 99 are wrong. And after hearing all parties, I just don’t see a way to stand your ground THIS much, in your situation. I’d clearly see how I affected others. Doesn’t mean That you cheated us so bad that we all lost hundreds of dollars. But your decisions caused an impact. You just choose not to see it I am assuming

and again to be clear, I’m not pitchforking. I don’t think you’ve been ‘rude’ which I appreciate. And I’m glad you’re communicating with us. And in this case I’m not screaming out loud. I’m trying to be reasonable. If it’s life or death situation, I can tell you’re the type of guy I’d pal up with and we’d conquer the task at hand. But in a “game”, with people of all sorts and incomes of all sorts, I can’t paint a scenario where I don’t feel it’s wrong.

Definitely don’t hate you. I’m looking for a little understanding from you. I think it’s no secret that all you guys were at the top of the Smith world, and all “together”. However you’d like to word it. You don’t think it’s odd that in Smith, maybe the best 4 teams in the entire world are you 4? 4 that are connected, doing the same thing that no one else is doing? Do you really feel like you guys are the 4 best coaches in HD and that’s not a coincidence? (I’m really asking. Not being a jerk. If you feel that way, then why aren’t you the 4 best in all other worlds? Another coincidence?). You don’t find it odd that shoe has publicly questioned what’s going on in that A10? Or Mully left HD entirely because something is different about the A10? You don’t think it’s odd that I’m ‘decent’ everywhere else in HD but where I’m right next to you guys at UConn, I can’t even get an A+ team up to par after like 10-12 seasons? (Wow reading that one out loud, I’m terrible!)? You don’t find it odd that everyone else in the room thinks similar things, and then when a loophole is discovered, the ONLY people doing it are the 4 of you? THAT’S ODD.

I’m not actually debating how good or bad you guys are. I know you’re very good. And I’m not focusing on “IF” you feel you were allowed to do it. I don’t care about that. I’m talking about the actual action of the ‘trick’ you were doing, that only 4 of you were doing. If I was in a conference (or a household) and there were only 4 of us coaches doing the senior redshirt (as an example), and we happened to be the best 4 teams in a given world and likely talked about it at the dinner table, my guilt would say “geez guys, something about this is ridiculously powerful. And we look odd right now”. There’s NO WAY I could have the mindset of “welp it’s in the game and no one else figured it out, that’s on the other 300 coaches in this world, not us”. Play basketball! Don’t do weird stuff. Don’t try to find something new that others don’t know. Just play normal.

sorry Gil, I wrote one as long as yours!

I was one of the 4 best teams in Smith? cool. There's a lot of great coaches in that world so glad you considered me at that level with my limited resume before using this action. I took SLU to its first Final Four in that world and think I may have done it again beforehand, but not much else. Can someone give an objective assessment of Swenske04's success from using it? I assume we were able to do it since the 3.0 roll out. We know for sure cimmy discovered it in February of 2020. Can anyone ballpark when Swenske04 did and have an idea of his before and after success?

I agree with the others in saying that it was a not silver bullet in recruiting. We still had to battle for the top recruits. We had the same impactful battle resources as everyone else. I acknowledge that there was an advantage but so are some of the other features that don't make sense. I've felt that the effect of it was that it helped sustain success, minimized us from coming up empty in a recruiting class, to give us a good chance to land some mid-tier players if we lost all of our rolls on the top guys. The flip side of allowing us to front run on the top players is that everyone could see it and it displayed tremendous weakness in defending our targets.

I regret using it now knowing that there was actually no one else that knew about it. I thought that there was 1 or 2 other coaches that knew about it with some patterns I would see, but it turns out that they may just be really great coaches.

Posted by trojan4309 on 11/3/2022 1:30:00 PM (view original):
Personally, if I knew damn well I had a steroid-like advantage with recruiting and kept it secret from the HD community for 3+ years while knowing it negatively and unfairly impacted other coaches (including financially), then I would issue an apology. NOT defend my actions which is all I’ve seen from the violators.

That’s egregious.

Bingo. And since part of CS's reasoning about letting these guys return is that they have taken full accountability, it looks like CS is going to have to reevaluate their decision. bdash in his post above this, and especially cimmy and doogan are far from accepting accountability, minimizing what they did, denying that they did anything wrong. Maybe slap their wrists a little harder, since that's all CS seems inclined to do. It's a shame that CS missed an opportunity to uphold the integrity of the game.

And I have to wonder how many more zemedlin's are out there, stirred up like he is to look for every exploit they can find, now that it looks like CS will allow the cheaters to remain on the site.

BTW, can anyone mention a site like WIS but where cheaters are actually kicked out? I'm looking for one.

Felt compelled to chime in on my old conference mate robin. Without comment on the current issue, I just wanted to state that, to me, he was a great conference member who always tried to help others when they came into conference and throughout the Naismith world. We've battled throughout the years and personally, I hold no ill will toward him regarding this glitch. In my personal opinion, he will be missed.

Now onto the know glitch that is baseline prestige, the real team success/recruiting advantage that we have accepted in this game that is wholly unfair on every level ;)