As I mentioned above, my first move when I was able to acquire the assets was to reach out to STATS and bring them in as a majority owner. STATS ran the back-end software for the NFBC and NFFC for the first six years of the contest and everyone here knows that they did a first-rate job. The move to the old software for both contests will be seamless and with any luck we'll have our new site up and running early next week. The new URL will be nfbc.stats.com.
I feel that STATS is the perfect partner for our contests going forward and thus we both are now incentivized to grow these contests. In fact, I am joining STATS as the new general manager of consumer fantasy games. We are creating this division to address the need for good, reliable pay consumer fantasy games and together we believe we can expand our menu of offerings beyond the NFBC and NFFC. Look for more details there, but I'm excited about what STATS can provide in the pay games market and I know that the fantasy sports industry needs a reliable game operator who will be around for a long, long time.
But right now we are totally focused on the NFBC and NFFC. The NFBC is the only baseball game we'll be running this season. We are receiving all of the past history, logins, message boards and everything associated with the sites right now. No data was transferred before today, so obviously we have a lot of work to do to make sure everyone's logins remain the same as they were last year and all past history is hooked up to those logins. If all goes well, the new site, Registration and live drafts will be ready to go on Monday.
I'll address all other issues within this thread tonight and over the weekend. I'm just very proud right now and grateful. I'd like to thank Liberty Sports Interactive for working with me right from the start and seeing this through to fruition. LSI has been very professional, honest and straight-forward with me from the start and I appreciate them making this deal with me. They didn't have to. But I think there were special reasons for keeping the NFBC and NFFC together with me and I will forever be in debt to LSI for making this happen. I can't say that enough.
It's unfortunate what happened at Fanball and on Jan. 4th I wasn't sure what my future would look like. 22 years in this industry sure didn't look good on the resume with everything I worked on possibly going away. But LSI kept the hope alive and after 6 1/2 weeks we got it done. I'm ready to take things from here and make this the best event/contest in the industry.
And we're not moving again. STATS is where we are residing from here on out. I'm ALL IN with STATS and STATS is ALL IN with us. This has great, great potential and you'll see that shortly.
Lift a Corona with me tonight (yeah, I'm having one already)!!
It's time to celebrate and then it's time to GET BUSY!! We have a lot of work today, but tonight is a time to celebrate. The NFBC and NFFC lives on and our future is so bright we've gotta wear shades. Thanks for sticking with us folks and get ready for a contest you'll be proud of again.
