It recently came to my attention that PB showed up as 0 or not at all on some peoples' menus. Apparently, there have been issues with some of the directory servers and the working one was not in PB's server config. I have added it now so if you are having issues try adding sscentral.com to your directory servers and redownloading the zones.

Here is the schedule for the remainder of the year and a discussion of the future. This is tentative of course cause it depends on the number of teams and whatever else may pop up in the future.

Proball ends 2/21
Open League 1 signups/team formation begins 1/30
Smallpub 4 signups begin 1/30
Depending on team formation, Open League games begin 2/28
Open League 1 Season 2/28 through 4/18. Championship 4/25 and 5/2
Smallpub 4 Draft 3/21
Smallpub 4 Season 3/28 through 6/27(Championship weekend depends on # of teams)
Open League Season 2 begins 5/30(3 week break between seasons)
Open League 2 Season 5/30 through 7/25. Championship 8/1 and 8/8
Smallpub 5 Draft 9/19
Smallpub 5 Season 9/26 through 12/19(Championship weekend depends on # of teams)
Open League 3 Season begins 9/5(3 week break between seasons)
Open League 3 Season 9/5 through 10/24. Championship 10/31 and 11/7

The only real unknown is a time period between 7/11 and Smallpub 5 Draft for the Sunday night league. Might be a Scramble league or just time for Open League games.

I have mentioned Open League before but I will explain again.

Open League will be a free form team formation league which means you can play with anyone you want(up to the max player limit). Teams will then challenge each other instead of having a set schedule. In addition, the league will use multiple game types instead of just one. This will be run concurrently most of the time with a primary Sunday night league. Why? For several reasons.

1. I think both methods of team formation have merits. The free form method lets players play with their friends and develop the squad ties we need. The controlled formation(draft) helps to balance teams and lets people play with players they might not normally.
2. By allowing teams to play whenever they want, we can hopefully get the euros and those with busy Sunday nights into league thus increasing our player base.
3. There are lots of players who like to play game types that are not viable for full time leagues and Open league will allow those to be played.

The exact details of Open league cannot be determined until I get a better idea of how many teams there will be. In general, the idea is that teams will compete in the games of 3h, proball, scramble, smallpub, classic, and multiship. Teams will earn points for each win and at the end of the season the 2 teams with the most points will play for the title in a 2 week championship where they play each game format. Again the precise details will be worked out over the next few weeks as teams form but I have several ideas. Another advantage to Open league is players and teams will be able to join at any time during the season.

The major note that I do know is that the champsionship games will likely take place from 6:00-8:50 Eastern time on 2 straight Sundays so that they are in between Pro and primary Sunday PB times and doable for most euros.

So that is how I see the leagues for the rest of the year.

So now it is time for people to sign up and for Open League start forming their teams. If you want to form a team message me and I will set it up.

Signup

Championship
Sunday 12/20
#1 Herpetic Legion vs #2 FB GET C
Game 1- 8:00pm EST
Game 2- immediately after
Game 3(if necessary)- immediately after
EPBY awards to follow either Game 2 or 3

FB GET C vs Turbo recap
It started out looking like GET C would take its name literally and ride it to an easy semi-final win. Just under 5 minutes into game 1 they were up 5-0 but Turbo was not going down that easy. Led by their captain, Turbo goes on a 10-2 run over the last 15 minutes to take game 1. Game 2 was about as different from game 1 as is possible. Game 1 had 10 total goals scored in the first 10 minutes. Game 2 didn't have its first goal until the 10:39 mark. From there it was a 4 minutes stretch of back and forth with Turbo up 3-2 with 5:22 remaining. But GET C didn't want to end their season yet and they went on a 3 goal streak to knot the series at 1 game each. Game 3 was like game 1 and 2 combined and a great game imho. Captain KinGNewbiE took charge from the start with 3 goals in the first 8:40 to give GET C a 4-1 lead. But either the buzz kicked in or wore off for Sath because he put Turbo on his back with 3 goals of his own in a 2:04 stretch and combined with a dookey goal after an untimely lag ball for GET C Turbo took the lead 5-4 with 9 minutes to go. Then teams got stingy and battled for 7 minutes with no goals. Then unfortunately Turbo made 2 bad plays in the last 2 minutes which led to 2 open net goals for GET C. Just ?go replay ?replay 1752 ?ff 1020 and watch the last 3 minutes. Thus with 3 seconds left KN scored the game winner to get his team into the finals.

Herpetic Legion vs fearslayers recap
Unfortunately, I can't claim this to be as good as the other semi. Untimely lag led to fearslayers being without Defender and although they still had a good lineup I believe his all around ability was necessary. At first it appeared fear had a chance with 7th Saga starting hot to give fear a 4-2 lead after 6:46 but Legion continued to do what they did all season by unleashing a barrage of goals in a short time by scoring 5 in 2:19 to take a 7-4 lead. fear did answer with 2 to make it 7-6 but Legion replied with 3 of their own to gain a 4 goal lead with 5:43 to play. Still not out of it fear closed it to 10-8 with 3:38 to play, but Legion was just too much and they got 2 insurance goals to seal the game before Unf scored at the buzzer to make it a 13-8 final. Game 2 followed a similar pattern but without as many fear comebacks. fear started well getting ahead 2-1 through 4 minutes but then Legion buried them with a 9-1 stretch before chrono added 2 goals for fear to make it 10-5 with 2:31 to play.