AFFL - Deja Vu, Uh Oh

[Glenneration X]

I hate to be the bearer of potential bad news, but I've been monitoring a situation over at the AFFL for about a month now.



For those unfamiliar, the AFFL is a longtime Fantasy Football contest that ran into trouble in 2007 when Neil Wickham didn't pay out any of the prizes.

In 2008, the AFFL was bought out by new owners, Bob Smolarczyk & Wade Golab, who awarded all 2007 winners credits that could be used for AFFL contests and resumed the football contests for 2008. At season's end, all 2008 prize winners were sent checks and in timely fashion.



Fast forward to 2009. I've been keeping up with their message board for the past month or so where I've been reading complaints about non-payments.

It appears that the new owners made some partial payments to this year's prize winners and promised the rest once assets were liquidated. The owners continually stated that all delays were temporary and the holdups were merely that all prize winnings were tied up into non-liquid investments that were taking longer to sell than expected.



Though suspicious, and I'm sure troubling for those who are owed money, I was hopeful that the new owners would make good on the prizes. I played the AFFL this year and Bob & Wade seemed like good guys to me with good intentions. They saved the AFFL, gave all screwed over 2007 winners credits, paid all of last year's winners in full, and though late made partial payments to this year's winners (why do that if your plan is to screw over the winners?)



However in recent days, the message board communication seemed to dwindle, the posts made by winners waiting on money seemed to indicate E-mail communication was dwindling as well, and then a couple days ago the Message Board itself went down. In addition, my personally placed call into one of the owners made a week ago remains unanswered.



I've silently monitored the situation for the past few weeks in the hopes it was just a temporary blip. However, I just read a post on the FFPC message boards by someone thinking about joining the AFFL next year. Time's up.



I am hopeful that I'm reading all of this wrong and the message board being down is just a technical issue, that the prize winnings were actually in a non-liquid account that has now been sold, and that Bob & Wade have gotten their **** together and are in the process of making good on what they owe....for the sake of the prize winners, for the sake of themselves & their contests, but mostly for the sake of the High Stakes Fantasy Sports world we're all part of.....the last thing it needs is another black eye.



We should all be greatful to the contests that we can have confidence in. There will only be a certain few contests that will get my money from this day forward.



Glenn

[Gekko]

"Madeoff stole my money and is now in jail"



"Someone is taking over Madeoff's firm. Let's give him the rest of our savings"



Sounds like a good idea!



[ March 14, 2010, 09:01 AM: Message edited by: Gekko ]