Fantrax NMA-11 Blog Cup Begins Now!

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Fantrax NMA-11 Blog Cup

From CreweGuy:

I said I’d run a cup competition this year, and it seems there is some enthusiasm for this, so I will try to stick to my plans, which were to run a simple quick cup competition in the early weeks and then something more complex later on. So consider this early cup as equivalent to the EFL cup (or League Cup in its many guises for those of us who are a bit older – remember the Milk Cup?).

So if you lose, you can dismiss it as an unnecessary distraction, yet those who survive to the later rounds will no doubt consider it much more important! At least you won’t be running the risk of picking up extra injuries if you’re still involved.

This cup will be run in the style of the old Yahoo Blog cup which certainly ran in 2012-13 because I found a number of old articles about it. There were 1200 teams then, whereas we have 172 teams this time (most of our managers now play the Official FPL game), so it won’t be quite such a mammoth effort to run as it must have been back then.

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How Will It Work?

I intend for this cup to run in weeks 4, 6 ,8, 10, and 12 with the final in that last week. That will leave the rest of the season free for the other cups, of which more later.

So, with 172 teams, I plan the rounds as follows:

Week 4: All teams enter, and the top 125 scores go through.

Week 6: 125 teams – top 90 scores go through

Week 8: 90 teams – top 60 scores go through

Week 10: 60 teams – top 30 scores go through

Week 12: 30 teams – winner is the highest scorer

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Tiebreakers

I’m going to be quite strict with tied scores, and tie breakers will apply (this is partly to make sure I have sensible rules for when we do head to head matches in later competitions). So if you are tied for 125^th place in the first round, this is how I’ll determine who goes through:

1) Most goals credited

2) Fewest goals against per minute played – this is tricky since our Fantrax leagues don’t credit all these stats, but Jeff has used his Jedi Fantrax sysadmin skill to extract the numbers without scoring them.

3) Most assists (I’ll total up AT’s plus A2’s)

4) Fair Play: Each yellow card counts -1, each red card counts -3, and you want zero. This will also be per players with games played.

5) Most corners forced + accurate crosses.

6) Latest roster transfer timestamp (to the nearest minute) prior to the Blog-Cup-Week deadline, according to the Fantrax NMA-11 league transaction history. In the unlikely case of two identical 11-man rosters, there has to be a way to separate them, and this rule gives the advantage to an actively managed team over an abandoned one.

7) Coin toss – You’ll have to believe me if it comes to this, but hopefully there are enough other options to avoid it.

So this week is the start of the competition, and best of luck to everyone!

— CreweGuy

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What do you think of the setup? Can you think of any other tie-breakers to use in future Blog Cups? Or just for laughs? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

[Ed. Note: Please thank and encourage CreweGuy too!]

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