I can’t imagine being a GM for a professional football team. Actually, I shouldn’t say it like that. How about this: I can’t imagine how badly I’d run a team into the ground if I was a GM for a football team.

Yeah, that’s more appropriate.

I think about this often, how well I could run a team. After starting playing fantasy football in the early 1990s, when fantasy football wasn’t even really something you did but more something “those weird stat geeks do”, I have a lot of experience managing rosters, so in a way, I feel like I could do it. I’m good with people, I know how to read people and I can motivate them as needed. Everyone is motivated by money, so at that level you learn to deal with expectations and decisions being made in a different way. Easy.

But that stupid old saying, “Proof is in the pudding,” tends to pop into my mind every time right after I think again, incorrectly, that I could run a pro franchise.

I know how it’d turn out. I’ve been there before.

Sure, my fantasy teams have been to the playoffs a fair amount. We’re currently aiming for, I believe, our fourth straight playoff appearance and seventh in nine years. In the 20 years I’ve been in the CCMP FFL, which appropriately has been renamed from the FFL since the later, incidentally, came before the former, I think I’ve  been in the playoffs about 12 or 13 times.

Is that great? No. But it’s not bad. That’s about 60 percent of the time I’ve been in the playoffs, give or take. In the NFL, I’d expect that over the life of a franchise, not many have been in the playoffs six of out 10 years over the last half century or so. (As a note, I don’t feel like looking things up to be factually correct here, and besides it’s my damn blog, so I’ll just go with what I want to think and we’ll call it even, okey dokey? Good).

So maybe I’ve got a chance. But then again, days like today make me realize where my shortcomings are and how terrible I’d be doing it for real.

Today is the NFL trade deadline. There probably won’t be any blockbusters, because there hardly ever are any blockbusters. At least not many in the past three decades.

Sure, there have been exceptions. I remember hearing about Herschell Walker getting traded to Minnesota and thought it was ridiculous that they’d give up so many draft picks. And I have a somewhat fuzzy recollection of the Eric Dickerson trade a couple years before. But other than those, there haven’t been many.

Except 1998. That was the year rule changes in the CCMP FFL started getting handed down by the barrel.

That was the year I finally got Emmitt Smith.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY0vDNoBfWo

Now, Emmitt was then as Adrian Peterson is today. The guy I covet. The one person I’d love to have on my team, almost at any cost.

I’ve actually tried each of the past two years leading into our draft to get Peterson. I’ve offered multiple 1st and 2nd round picks, players, everything legal in a trade to get him, but the Minnesota homer who drafted him out of college and has kept him ever since won’t budge. Well, good for him. The dude’s worth it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-8FUIxIkvo

You may notice above that I said I’ve done everything “legal” to try to acquire Peterson. That’s because I have to stay within the CCMP rules on trades, fondly known in some circles as the “Two cases and a tin” rule.

That’s one of my lasting memories for the CCMP FFL. I think there are at least three rules in the league’s bylaws that are directly linked to me, and this one is my favorite.

Back in 1998, after two long years of fighting and prying to get him away from Dick, I was able to pull off a trade to get Emmitt on my team. Now, back then, I’d do anything to trade. I didn’t really care about winning, although in this case, it was a win-win all around for me.

The only problem was that I got major shit for the way the trade went down and the means of the transaction.

At that time, there weren’t hard and fast, stated rules about trades, so I improvised. I got Dick drunk and convinced him that he should trade me Emmitt and I’d give him a running back and wide receiver, who if my memory serves me correctly was Robert Smith from Minnesota and Ed McCaffery of Denver, along with 2nd- and 3rd-round picks for three years.

Oh, and I was to throw in two cases of Budweiser, $10 and a tin of Copenhagen long cut wintergreen.

The chew was what put it over the top because 1) we were drunk, 2) he was out of chew and 3) even though I was, at the time, a Kodiak guy, I happened to go buy a tin of his favorite kind when I was buying the beer. Just call me a good planner.

So the transaction went down, and people bitched. Wow, did they bitch. But, hey, there weren’t rules for it saying I couldn’t buy him beer before or after the trade and that I couldn’t entice him to trade him with money. Sure, maybe it wasn’t the most ethical, but it wasn’t outlawed either.

That was then. Now, it’s totally outlawed. And here are the bylaws from our CCMP FFL website that state, in part, the rules of a trade.

  • Trades may only involve players and draft picks. Money, services, or other material goods cannot be traded.
  • You may only trade future draft picks involved in the next two drafts. For example, during the 2005 season, you may make trades involving 2006 and 2007 draft picks.
  • Once you have traded a player, you may not receive that player back in trade for one calendar year. You may not make a trade that involves giving a player back at a later date. Trades may be made where the draft pick involved is based on a statistical measure.

As a sidenote, I’m listing all three of these because at one point or another, I contributed to all three of them being implemented. There was a time, let’s say 1997, when I had stock-piled draft picks for trades that I gave up players in that ranged all the way out into 2000, just so I could have the first extra draft picks past the centennial New Year.  And I also swapped a player once for another player on the condition that a week before I played a certain team I would get that player back in a four-player trade, that would then turn into a six-player trade the following week to give him back to that other team for the rest of the season.

So anyway, today being the NFL trade deadline may make me understand my limits as a real-life GM, but it definitely brings back the good old days and fun of the old-time FFL as we knew it.