greg, you have to relize that the guys that play in the ffpc are beyond dedicated to them.....it is almost like an allegiance and devotion to them. not taking a shot at alex or the ffpc but that is what it is.
its not alex's or the ffpc's fault that people go out of their way to defend them. i am sure you guys wish you had players like that....
not all of their players are that way but there are some that treat it like a cult.....i think it is pretty funny. i call them lackeys.
i could use a couple of them..... Loyalty is a good thing, so I'm not knocking it. Heck. it's been said many times that our guys are too loyal to us and would never say a bad word about the NFFC, although that was before the Fanball days.
But I hear ya on the other front and would have to agree with ya. 
I think Tom and I just see things a little differently in this space and maybe it's because at one time we were the "newcomer" to the 800-pound gorilla. We never entered the high-stakes space to be direct competitors to the WCOFF, but we were seen as that in 2004. Instead, we felt we could fill the void in baseball with a first class, multi-city event and in football we felt again that we could do New York, Chicago and Las Vegas with a unique 14-team live event that nobody else was offering. By 2005 I think even Lenny felt that the space was big enough for two good contests/live events and both of us grew the market through 2007.
The market continues to grow, but we've seen a real change in the business side of things since then. Too many shaky business plans and outrageous prize structures that honestly if any consumer was truthful with themselves they knew that something bad could happen there. And it did, many times. And no one should be totally surprised.
So now you still have a growing area of the market with proven contests and yet there's still this territorial mentality on the part of some. I'm just telling you we're not part of that game. We believe you can be loyal to one game and still love ours. You can play with Charlie Wiegert and FFPC and NFFC and Yahoo and all the rest and not offend us at all. This is a HUGE market and HSFF has such a small part of it that expanding this area of the market can still be done without game operators or customers taking shots at each other. Again, I think this is really the only area of our industry that does that and I don't understand why.
We want everyone to play in the NFFC because we think we run a first class contest and we definitely know how to run live events in multiple cities. And you're DEFINITELY going to get paid by us. Of all the things I have to worry about now with STATS, getting paid by a company co-owned by Rupert Murdoch (okay, News Corp) and the Associated Press is the least of my worries. As I said in an email to someone else today, first of all the NFBC and NFFC have been profitable every sport of every year since 2005 and there is enough cash in reserve at STATS and at the parent companies to cover any shortfall we could ever have. But we're not going to get there because we don't have extravagant grand prizes that will ever get us to borrow from the parent company to cover expenses. Our guaranteed prizes aren't over the top and our event expenses can be managed, plus we own the software, so that expense is now gone. We are in great shape from an operation standpoint; in fact, the best we've ever been since we started this in 2004.
Loyalty is a good thing. God Bless their loyal customers and may they expand their participation horizons.
