Loserball has returned, as founder Jonathan Gruber likes to say, “to embrace the suck.”
And this time, he’s confident the woefulness will be even more wonderful to watch, with Loserball’s tongue-in-cheek wink at our national obsession with fantasy football.
“We think there’s a movement there,” Gruber told InGame. “We think there’s something there. We’ve got to build it.”
Launched last year by Gruber, a regional Emmy-Award-winning filmmaker and entrepreneur, Loserball upends the traditional fantasy football paradigm by tasking users with correctly predicting upcoming futility by NFL players. Get it right, earn points, win as your players falter.
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Gruber sees a public service of sorts here. Correctly forecasting failure can be salve for football fans and disgusted fantasy players alike. Backers of wobegone NFL teams can passive-aggressively benefit from another sad Sunday by drafting members of their team. Or they can fade a rival and double their schadenfreude factor.
“It’s a twist because you have to think counterintuitively and differently,” Gruber said.
The idea for Loserball germinated in a reverse-eliminator (where one picks a losing team each week) in 2017, when Gruber rode the winless Cleveland Browns to “victory.” He even attended the Browns’ wake for the team in five-below winds off Lake Erie. A seed sprouted that winter’s day.
Gruber said the debut season went well, both in terms of gathering interested players and learning what they wanted from what he deems his “subversive” fantasy league.
“What we learned is that because it’s so different, it’s a little bit harder for people who are playing, scouting or strategizing for their normal fantasy teams to kind of think about all these other new stats and categories,” he said. “So we decided to simplify.”
Loserball simplifies embracing futility
Gruber said that the platform was tweaked for this season from 16 hoppers of hopelessness to six after he conducted an extensive survey of users. Key among the findings was users wanted to speculate on individual players performing horribly instead of teams.
“The [Loserball] players were more like, ‘I want players. Teams, I’m not as into it,’” Gruber explained. “So we’re adding four player categories now [with] just two team categories because I still think it’s fun to pick teams for stuff.”
Several respondents described their favorite part about Loserball as “funny banter” and “opposite rooting” and the least as not understanding the old handicap system.
How it works
Each week players will be presented with five choices in six categories and will pick their expected most successful failure from a group of:
- Five quarterbacks (most turnovers)
- Five running backs (least amount of yards)
- Wide receivers (least amount of yards)
- Tight ends (least amount of yards)
- Five kickers (who’ll miss the most kicks)
- Five teams (most points allowed, most penalties).
Several respondents described their favorite part about Loserball as “funny banter” and “opposite rooting” and the least as not understanding the handicap system.
The site is scheduled to be ready for drafting on Sept. 1.
“So it’s still in that same world [as last year], but we’re trying to make it simpler, less categories and less choices within the categories,” Gruber said. “And I think that could be kind of fun.”
Each week, users will have a team budget of 1,000 Sparkets — a nod to Loserball’s new tech partner — to allot to a lineup.
“You budget and decide,” Gruber said. “If I’m not so certain which kicker is going to miss the most kicks, I’d rather be like, ‘I know for sure that this running back is going to play against a tough defense. So I think they’re going to have the least amount of yards.’
“And we’re not just going to do terrible players. I think for quarterbacks, because they’re more known, it’s more fun to take quarterbacks of teams that aren’t doing as well. But I think for running backs, it’s actually just as interesting to take known, solid running backs who play good defenses and ask who’s going to do the worst. Same thing for wide receivers.”
A handicap system makes successfully predicting good players to blunder or underperform more valuable.
Loserball will remain free to play, but the top two finishers will still earn cash prizes and the third-place-finisher will collect a football jersey. Among other changes, Loserball will be a web-only application.
Counterculture fantasy football lives
The site peaked at 1,500 users last year, but Gruber admits the tally was fading by the end of the season. With an email database banked from the inaugural season — the boot-strapped company did no mass marketing last year — Gruber thinks he can reach 10,000 subscribers by the end of September.
Gruber said most of Loserball’s base has “some familiarity with fantasy football” and nearly 60% revealed that they would play for money. That’s not an option for now, he said.
“We don’t want to have a cash contest be a barrier to entry, at least right in the very beginning,” Gruber explained. “We’re a venture here to generate revenue at some point. We think that’s where we’re going to head, but for right now, we just want to build a movement and get people excited about what we’re doing.”
