CRL NEWS

March 1, 2022

“The waiting is the hardest part.”

- Tom Petty

Gang,

I waited an extra day to see if the owners and players could actually close the deal. Silly me. Those idiots sat around for months doing absolutely nothing, didn’t do much for the first four days, and then expected to get everything hammered out in a couple of days. Now opening day has been postponed to some to-be-determined day in the future.

We have multiple issues that we will need to work out and probably less than a month to do them once an agreement is reached.

Issue #1 – We have paid for a conference room at Harrah’s for Friday, April 1. I do not know if Glenn can get out of that or not or if we could secure another room on a different date. Given the fact that we book and pay months in advance, I’m not optimistic. We could end up doing the draft from someone’s hotel room like we did in the old days. I’d like to think that they would take of us from a financial standpoint because we’ve done this for a lot of years, but that’s not up to me.

Along those same lines, I know an online draft would have been feasible last year given the quality of the wireless internet in the Caesar’s conference rooms. Unless they have upgraded the internet in Harrah’s, however, it will be unusable for an online draft. Last year’s three consecutive conference calls, although it worked, took way too long and was very wearing – even I got testy by the end of it.

If these guys can bridge the gap this week (I don’t even know if they have any meetings scheduled or if they are tired of looking at each other), it’s possible that they could start a week late and we could save the April 1 draft date – we’ve drafted before opening day many times in the past. Two problems with this, however:

I have not even looked at flights or checked room availability. I don’t know if we can all find/afford to book at this late date.

No free agents have been allowed to have discussions with prospective employers. I find it hard to believe that they could all find new homes in three weeks.

That leaves us with the probability of drafting later in the year. Issues with this:

We have all set aside the first Friday in April for the draft for years. After that, life gets in the way – work, kids, vacations – and it may be next to impossible to get everyone together for a draft at a later date. There is one thing I need to look into – Amazon chime. It is our home-grown video/audio conferencing system and works better than Zoom. The app is readily available online (I used it to interview), but I don’t know if I can set up a chat room for personal use. I will take it as an action item to look into.

With everything up in the air, this is not something I can decide by fiat. We need a consensus. Given that, here are league email addresses:

So let’s get some ideas floating around. I suggest you BCC everyone so you can avoid spam filters.

Let me know what you think.

Disgruntled in Texas.

Jim