May 8th, 2021

To all Scoresheet Football participants:

I am very sorry to be writing you today with the unhappy news that we (brothers Jeff and David Barton) have made the sad decision to stop running our football game. As you know, we did not offer our football game in 2020 due to all the uncertainly surrounding covid. At that time we hoped it would just be a one year break. But for a number of reasons, we have decided that a re-start of Scoresheet Football is just not feasible for us.

One problem is that our football game is not big enough (we do not have enough football teams) to afford to make the biggest change I would like to see - the addition of live scoring. But just getting the stats each week to enable live scoring is very expensive, and is just not doable with our numbers. We also are concerned that after taking a season off that our keeper leagues would end up with a lot of holes (teams without owners) if we move forward. And getting new folks to play Scoresheet Football the last few years has proven very difficult, so filling those holes might not be possible. And the final factor is that after running Scoresheet Sports for 35 years, and as we move into our 60s, it gets tougher every year for us to have the energy to work the necessary number of hours to run multiple sports. And since baseball is by far the biggest part of our company (90% of our overall teams are baseball teams), we are faced with the very tough choice that we really need to spend more of our efforts on baseball, and that sadly, that means the loss of our football game.

By the way, many of you (most of you in fact) also play our baseball game, and might be wondering what this means for Scoresheet Baseball. As alluded to above, baseball is what keeps our company going, and it is our full intention to run Scoresheet Baseball for many more years, since neither David or I are anywhere near ready for retirement. And certainly our plan is that, many years down the road, when we are ready, we will embark on the long process of training someone to run Scoresheet, or will find another company to take over the game. We strongly feel that our baseball game is unique, being the only fantasy game that plays complete simulated games using the current season's stats. And most of our baseball leagues are keeper leagues, many of which have significant numbers of minor leaguers already drafted. And thus we really do want to keep our baseball game going. Our thinking is that by stopping our football game we will have the energy to keep baseball going for far longer, and will also have the time and resources to work on improvements. So while this is very sad news for football, I do look at it as good news for the longevity of our baseball game.

The silver lining I suppose is that there are numerous other choices (good ones) available for playing fantasy football. And the bigger companies such as Yahoo, ESPN and CBS Sports all offer an option to run a keeper league on their site, including tracking of traded draft picks, the ability to have each team keep players before the draft starts, etc. And of course all of those sites also offer single season leagues you can join alone or with friends. Those other sites have also greatly improved their game offerings since we started Scoresheet Football in 1989. Back then we were the only company offering individual defensive players, but those other sites now have options to customize the scoring system in many different ways, including scoring points for individual defensive player's sacks, interceptions, tackles, etc.

If you are in a private Scoresheet league (private meaning a league that found its own team owners) then your league already has a commissioner, and hopefully he, or your group, can choose which other company to use to keep your league going. If you are in a public league, but the group of owners does want to keep their teams and group together, probably the first step will be to have someone volunteer to be the league commissioner, and thus move the process forward, picking which site you want to use, etc. ESPN, Yahoo, etc. do make it as painless as possible to be a league commissioner, and do allow for rule customizations that mean you should be able to have the keeper rules, and scoring system, fairly closely resemble Scoresheet.

In an effort to facilitate keeping your league going if you want, we will be keeping the league rosters up on our web site, including the ability to use your league message board to communicate with each other. In addition, if you already play football on a different site that you like, or you find one that you feel will work well to transfer your Scoresheet league to, we would encourage you to send feedback to us that we can pass on to other Scoresheet Football players. You should also feel free to post messages on our Scoresheet Football message board regarding fillings opening in your league, looking for another league to join, recommendations for other games, etc. That message board is at: http://www.scoresheet.com/msg/list.php?4

I do apologize for having to break this news to you. We have run Scoresheet Football for over 30 years, and letting it go is the toughest decision we have had to make since starting Scoresheet in 1987. But we have come to realize that we just can not do so any longer, and that we need to put more of our energies into our baseball game, which is the game that has been supporting our company's efforts for many years now.

Sincerely, Jeff Barton - Scoresheet Sports