All right, we are here for a show none of us planned on doing
this week. But it is something that has
come up that has really kind of engulfed our world the past few
days in a week or so. And we want to tell you guys
everything that's been unfolding with a cheating scandal on NFCA
platform. We've played on this year
platform we're currently in playoff contest in.
And we recently discovered an employee who was helping another
user on the site change their lineup illegally.
And we uncovered this with the stat chasing guys.
And tonight we're going to tell you guys everything that we
learned how we uncovered this and kind of the ramifications as
well as NFCS statement. So a heavy tone for us here on
chef chasing, but Pat and Ben, we're going to kind of fill
everyone in on what's been going on here tonight.
Yeah. So we have kind of a lot of
details to go through in terms of everything that we uncovered,
how we uncovered it, details on this contest, which itself is a
complicated playoff contest with where you can change players
after each round. And so we'll kind of dive into
all of those details. But I think from a high level
perspective, we're looking at 2 post lock line up changes that
were made to one of the highest scoring line UPS in this playoff
contest. Those were made by an NFC
employee and we brought that to NF CS attention.
Yeah, and people who watched our We did a week of playoff shows
and we were covering all the contests in this specific NFC
hold em playoff contest. It was one that we actually
weren't super familiar with. I played one entry in it last
year with Davis Maddock and we were kind of talking through the
strategies on the show with the stat chasing guys, Sacrilegious
and Draco. And if you guys watch that show,
you saw we were having a hard time wrapping our head around
all of the intricacies. Well, flash forward.
These guys went so deep in the weeds on this contest thinking
through all of the game theory. Pat and I would, like, check in
on our group chat and Gretch and these guys would have sent
literally hundreds of messages on strategy.
Like, I was like, holy cow, I didn't even realize there was
this much to discuss. But Gretch, like you guys, kind
of fell in love with trying to solve the puzzle pieces of this
NFC playoff Hold'em contest. Yeah I mean that was the the the
thing about this it was so such such a bummer I think was that
there's so much game theory in this contest.
There's so much fun to it. For the I think it was the first
time for both Draco and Sack to dive into it really.
It certainly was for me. So the three of us to kind of
all be like bouncing ideas off each other we had a blast with
it we so we we ultimately saw something fishy was up on Sunday
night after the Chiefs Bills game.
But just for like a little background we had spent almost
two hours Sunday morning talking about our two line up decisions
for Sunday. Just the games in, the players
in and really it was our second player we were going to be
adding to the Detroit line up and the second player we're
going to be adding to the KC line up.
Because the way this contest works, we were already committed
essentially to Detroit over Tampa Bay based on the way our
line up was set up, and to Kansas City over Buffalo.
But we were going to be adding and then there's a a multiplier.
So we're already committed with our first player, but in the
second round you could add a second player from each team,
and it was that second player for those two teams that we
spent literally two hours talking through.
How do we do this? The line up in question was
ahead of us in this contest, so we had our eyes on this line up.
This was a line up that we needed to find a way past and we
were really hoping the way things played out that and Ave.
would open up so that we could actually get ahead of this line
up by playing Travis Kelsey and the line up would would have
Hershey Rice and that would be kind of our path to to passing
this line. It would be kind of a similar
equivalent. You know if anyone's played head
to head cash games on DraftKings and you have the 1:00 PM games
and you're behind against your opponent, and then you're trying
to figure out what do they have in the 4:00 PM slot.
And you know that your equity in that head to head is tied to how
you're late players compared to theirs.
And if you're blocked and if you're behind, you know you need
to make a switch based on what they have.
So there's this almost like game of chicken in general or trying
to figure out how do we optimize to pass this guy who essentially
has a better version of our line up right now.
Exactly. That is, that is at its core,
but, well, the fun. The fun thing about this contest
is there are a lot more options, I think, than DFS.
But then when you really boil it down, you recognize that you do
need to make decisions on who's going to win which games in each
round to set up these multipliers that exist.
And so one of the reasons this this entry for us was so good
was that we got Aaron Jones through in the first round.
We played both sides and you can do in the first round, play both
sides of a couple of games. You can't in the second round.
It's a it's a unique element, the way that the multipliers
line up. If you're really optimizing, you
need to pick the four winners correctly and divisional round
weekend. But in the first weekend you can
play both sides of a couple games.
We played both sides of the Green Bay Dallas game we got
Aaron Jones through, which ended up being a really a huge key.
One of the other sharp decisions we made was to full fade Miami
and not play both sides of Kansas City.
Miami, which a lot of other people were doing.
Miami didn't have a big score and a loss.
We didn't have that, you know, So we had Kuka and Akua and a
loss in our line up. That's like an FFPC playoff
contest element that exists in this element or in this contest.
But we had set it up where we had the four eventual winners in
divisional round as our second round winners.
We had KC over Buffalo determined before round one by
the way that we played the Buffalo Pittsburgh game.
It's all very complicated, but we full faded Pittsburgh.
We saw faded Buffalo. You don't you don't do that in
like a FPC contest. You can do it in NFC where we
just had the Buffalo kicker and so we had set that up.
So the Buffalo had to lose in the second round in our entry.
And so the point I'm trying to drive home is that you're in
this lane with your entry and there's only a couple other
teams that are potentially in that lane.
So really the one team on Sunday morning we were looking at that
was ahead of us, it was in our lane.
They end up double stacking Buffalo later kind of a unique
decision, they added digs to their to their build.
The team that we're going to eventually start breaking down
was actually behind us in the morning, but they had Mike Evans
on a multiplier. And so when the Detroit Tampa
game got like 50 points out of Mike Evans and shot ahead of us
and then immediately got on our radar, we were covered up every
other spot. And we needed to make a decision
on the Kansas City Buffalo game just basically between the two
games. And Draco really sharply got us
onto this pivot to Kelsey. But we were concerned that
someone other player might think Kelsey was the right play the
the. So both of us had Pacheco as our
first player that was going to be on a two times multiplier and
then you had a second player on a one times multiplier and the
decision was essentially Kelsey or Rasheed Rice.
We thought that in all likelihood the other user would
would play Rasheed Rice over Kelsey.
So we pivoted to Kelsey and we were ecstatic to see that this
user's roster at Locke did play Rice.
And so we're we're sweating. Who he even plays.
We want to see who this line up ends up having.
At lock is a sweat for us 'cause we've got to.
We want to be able to get past it with Kelsey.
Which is so crazy 'cause we never catch this, we never, we
never run into this if we didn't have this really good line up
that is also so identical. That is both of us soft faded
Buffalo with with a kicker or a defence advance.
Both of us had Pacheco in the two times multiplier.
Both of us had this Kelsey or Rice decision, and both of us
had the same players advance from Detroit, Baltimore, and San
Francisco. All of the rest of the lineup
was set up identically. Yeah.
And and obviously just kind of like zoom back that is that's
the only reason I think we would have ever uncovered this Draco
sacrilegious, Gretch because they were so in the weeds with
hey, we have a really good chance with this team, like this
team can make noise in this contest.
So what do you do when you have a good team and regardless of
ADFS fantasy contest you start Hawking all the other teams
ahead of you. What is our path?
The 1st place who blocks us? And in this contest, the way
Ben's describing it, it's really unique in that if some people
haven't made the same decisions as you, you're really only
competing against a couple of rosters who are on the same
trajectory, essentially trying to execute the same game plan as
you. Yeah, and it's not just for
sometimes you're just kind of hoping, like in a best ball
contest, you're seeing you know if you're blocked or not and
you're hoping you'd find out you're not blocked.
But there's nothing you can do about it.
If you are in this contest, if you find out that you're likely
to be blocked, you can actually pull some levers to get unique
with who you had in the in the future round.
So that's another reason you know we're scouting out the
other line UPS that we're doing really well and you find a line
up that looks so similar to yours, all of a sudden it
becomes very, very critical that you get different in a sharp
way. And this Kelsey Rice pivot was
was our attempt to do that. And at lock boom, there it is,
played out exactly like we're hoping we have Kelsey.
He has rice. So you can see screenshots all
that. Yeah, you can see the screenshot
still says pregame, but we can see the other users roster.
The other thing I'd point to is that the players advancing from
Baltimore, San Francisco, and Detroit all the way down are
going to be the same. They're not necessarily the
exact same slots on the screenshot.
Like the two quarterbacks are flipped in the top two lines
there. But we both have McCaffrey, we
both have Jamir Gibbs. The other user has Gibbs down in
the flex at the very bottom almost off the page.
We both have Almanro St. Brown throughout this, you'll
see this. But the other user had Mike
Evans down here and had on on a multi multiplier was able to get
57 points because they got times to his score And so he had
almost a 30 point game, he gets almost 60 points.
We weren't really anticipating all that and then it was OK now
we're actually chasing by a good margin this other user.
And so we jump in with this Kelsey play and to see that Rice
was in that line, it was like, OK, great, Now we have this
opportunity for Kelsey to outscore Rice by a bunch this
week and in future weeks because now the multiplier's going to
build on Kelsey and their multiplier's going to build on
rice. They can play Kelsey next week,
but we'll have an extra multiplier.
So basically it becomes our Kelsey first their rice.
The rest of the way, we're more committed to Kelsey.
They're more committed to Rice. And so you're really pumped
about this. And then the game plays out.
And that's the same. Just to just to clarify, the
reason this screenshot exists is because we were so anxious to
see what did they end up playing.
That he took. This screenshot and then like we
did it, we got our Kelsey leverage over the Rashi rice.
Play we have. Multiple screenshots of this
because Draco and Sack were taking screenshots.
I mean, everyone, there's excitement.
Yeah, and they both took a screenshot.
I was kind of asking about the pivot in the chat.
They both send it. We're like yes, this is this is
great. It was a really it was a last
minute pivot. We had talked through a lot of
eventualities that morning. Draco very sharply and Sack
joins in. They both they they took the
initiative to make this pivot that we had sort of discussed a
little bit earlier but absolutely crushed it.
When Rice is on the other team then the game plays out and
Kelsey has this great game and we're pumped.
And then after the game me and Draco are are talking in the
chat and both at the same time realize this user's team is
still in the top 10. So coming into Sunday, our
roster was in sixth out of 1500 teams.
This is part of the reason we're so excited, but we knew that we
would get past by teams that had Josh Allen and played the Bills
heavier. We were soft fading the Bills,
they were playing both sides of Kansas City and Buffalo or or
had access to a lot more points. There's a lot of people that had
Josh Allen on a two times multiplier, they were going to
gain points and right now we have fallen a lot further down
the leaderboard. But we're still in good position
when you look at this whole contest.
But this other user, despite not having Josh Allen and despite
soft fading this Bills and only having the Bills, kicker was
still sitting in like 6th place and me and Drake are like, how
is this possible? We click on it and he has
Travis, Kelsey and we both immediately are like this is
weird like like this doesn't make sense because we were
sharing screenshots like what happened?
Did something happen with the software?
Why was this person able to make a change after line UPS were
visible? Because our immediate thought is
they saw that we played Kelsey and then for some reason they're
able to then make a change to match us because they were ahead
of us. They know that they can block us
and we're like that. That's smart.
But we have evidence that they were able to see our player
because we were able to see their player.
And that's a huge game theory element and and that's not the
way it should go. As it turns out, that's not
actually what happened. There's a lot more to it, but
that was our initial thought and it was just like Pan.
I mean, we actually have screenshots because we're so
excited to see rice in these lineups and now Kelsey's in
there. Like, how does that make any
sense? So we all start digging a little
bit more. So and Ben, just so people do
know with the the way the lineups are posted is it kind of
like it could be a game of chicken up until lock.
When it's frozen where you're looking and you're refreshing,
you're refreshing, you're refreshing it.
If they change it with a minute left before lock you could then
go re change. No, it doesn't actually show
before. It doesn't always.
That's what I'm trying to clarify.
It's like. Maybe it did when we we're like,
wait, does it show? Is there a screw up there?
Is there? There is no way.
No. To do that the way we have since
learned that that isn't a thing once.
Once lock hits, that's when the line UPS show and you're not
able to change as a user at that point.
Yeah, right. So.
Then you then see that they have the Travis Kelsey which you have
screenshots of saying no, it should be Rashi Rice.
Then where do you guys go to try to figure out what's going on?
So the first thing is just trying to understand how this
even got changed. What was there a software error?
What happened? And as we're digging around,
Draco finds in the logs A transaction was made at 6:46.
This screenshot says on the way right 646 Eastern Time.
Now this is actually not correct.
The Eastern Time it's listed. All of these are listed in
Central Time, but on this screen for some reason it it shows
Eastern Time, but the reason that you'll know that it was
Central Time you look at all the transactions before.
Our transaction is highlighted at the top where we added Kelsey
right before Lock 520-8528, 520-8529.
This is all of the teams in this contest.
You can go look at this log, it still exists there.
The transaction undoing the rice Kelsey is now added, but you
could you could go look at this log if you wanted to.
But all of those other transactions are happening right
up to the 530 cut off which is 5:30 central time.
The game started at 6:30 Eastern Time, but when we first noticed
this transaction, we thought it happened 16 minutes after lock.
What we've come to understand because this screen is actually
displaying Eastern Time but it is actually Central time and we
have another screenshot of our transaction at 5:28 that shows
Central time. Just to confirm that this is the
stat chasing transaction that we made on 1/21 at the bottom there
528 Central time. It is just a display issue on
the other thing and that's why all the transactions stop at
529. It is 530 lock.
The other transaction happens an hour and 16 minutes later, not
16 minutes later. We thought man maybe kick off
was just delayed 16 minutes and for some reason the the ads and
drops were locked until the ball was actually kicked off.
But you could see our roster and so like that's that's not fair.
Those things should have happened at the same.
Time doesn't even climb up. It doesn't quite work out, but
we're what are. We're trying to think through
things, right? But then it turns out it's an
hour and 16 minutes later and we're like, wait, somehow they
were able to change this an hour and 16 minutes later.
That's a long way into the game. When did Travis Kelsey scores?
First touchdown. That's we're asking in the chat,
like three people go check and we find that it happened at 6:43
Central. Yeah, Central Time, 7:43 Eastern
Time. I went and checked my DVR.
It happened 3 minutes before Rashi Rice was removed from the
line up and Travis Kelsey was entered into the web.
For this team name here that if you are are watching this on the
screen, share the team name is Red Solo Cup 2 this team How
many teams did Red Solo Cup have in this contest?
Then six different teams and all named Red Solo Cup 123456.
I've never found six. I found one through.
They were all named one through 5.
The first five that I ended up looking at.
So the next thing we do once we realized that this user somehow
has access to make changes after things are locked is, well has
he done this before? Right.
And so we start looking at other stuff.
We look at all of his other teams.
I did not find any issues on any of the other rosters in the
logs. I did find something that was
weird in this particular team the week prior.
And so we started flagging that and discussing that and we
didn't really understand that. So this is something that's we
get into a little bit of the technical element of the the NFC
site. So the last screenshot when
you're making a one for one change in this third column
type, it was showing add and drop and it was showing when you
make changes to your line UPS there's an ad or a drop ad Drop
ad drop this next screenshot that Pete pulled up.
When you submit a full line up it just lists move for all of
them. I'm not entirely sure why it's
it also lists move when you just move a guy around from flex to
running back or whatever. But when you it's when you
submit a full line up it lists move all the way down and so
this was the same red solo cup to roster known none of his
other rosters. Week 19 he submits a full line
up on 1/12 which is Friday before the contest.
The game started playing on Saturday.
You can see it goes from quarterback all the way down
through defense. The only other transaction he
makes after that is another full line up at 11411 O 6:00 PM.
This is again Central time. So it's it.
It's after the game was played. The only difference between
these two rosters. If you look through the
screenshot, these two line UPS are identical.
The first one has Raheem Monster.
The second one has Aaron Jones. So this user after Green Bay and
Dallas played, made what is a massive change to a line up that
otherwise pretty much had the nuts.
So I'll highlight It has puka nakua on this team in a loss.
A really important piece. It has Dak Prescott on this team
in a loss. A really important piece.
This user was playing a Baltimore Dallas Super Bowl with
Dak advancing, but after Jack lost, he became a really
interesting piece. If you had played the other side
of that game as well and you had Aaron Jones advancing.
When we first saw his lineup, like this guy was sharp as hell.
He played DAC two different ways.
He played DAC to the Super Bowl but also if he gets upset he's
got Aaron Jones advancing and he gets A1 game monster score out
of DAC which would have been the nuts.
And so when he makes this one pivot it makes DAC A1 off piece
that is a really like high scoring one off piece that he
can. Then in that you get 2
quarterbacks and the way the quarterback stuff works is a
little bit tricky. But he can then add Brock Purdy
the next week to his Christian McCaffrey and then play San
Francisco pretty optimally if you start with McCaffrey and add
Purdy. And so it's not a big miss to
have played DAC and lose in the first week.
But he didn't actually have a Green Bay Packer on his initial
line up. He had Mostert instead.
He switches this and it does a few different things for him.
It makes Dak that a really impressive 1 off piece.
It makes Aaron Jones this really impressed this extremely
important advancing piece. 3 touchdowns in the first game and
you have a Packer for the next round.
There's not a lot of people play the Packers.
As a reminder, the the Dolphins game was on Saturday, so this is
post Brahim monster scoring 4 points in a Dolphin's loss.
All of a sudden Monster becomes very undesirable.
Dolphin's Fade becomes. That's the third thing.
The Dolphin's fade is the third element.
So you make this one switch and it gives you some.
Like as we're going to learn with some of the explanations we
are giving it gives you some plausible deniability like oh,
it was a mistake but this. So there's not a ton of changes.
But they got away with this Aaron Jones won one week and
then they tried it with Travis Kelsey again the next week.
And once you have two, that's when the IT becomes undeniable
and. Once we're looking at your line
up all, all morning and yeah. So can you explain 'cause I
think one thing, Nen is looking through the transaction logs
where something fishy was going on in both cases.
Why is one of them an ad drop in the Kelsey rice?
And why is one of them just a move as if a flex player was
being shuffled to a wide receiver or whatever?
I believe it's just a technicality on the NFC site.
Pat you you've thought through this as well and I'd love to
hear your explanation as well. My understanding is when you
first submit your line up it shows the full line up and it
says move for all and then if you decide to make changes
you're removing and adding it so then it doesn't add drop like
you're making a swap. But when you first get in there
you have to set a full line up. I don't know why the whole
second one would be move unless a full line up is being
submitted elsewhere. And the and the explanation we
ended up getting would be one reason that an admin was
resubmitting a full lineup behind the scenes is potentially
the the reason that you would have a full list of moves twice
because don't think any other reason you'd have a full a full
roster submitted twice. It would all be ad drops after
that point I think. That's what I was going to say,
because if you tried to go submit a a lineup for a player
that had already played, it would say like invalid.
It would not let you select it, which is why you have to do it
within the confines of the rules, which is an ad drop, but
in this case it probably required some kind of admin
thing to allow a submitted line up post lock.
Yeah, and to be clear, both of these changes, although they
were recorded differently in the log as different types of move,
both were executed by an NFC employee and were not done by
the user himself. So you know, they they were are
recorded differently, but they but it's not like the user did
one of these moves and the employee did the other.
Both were done by someone with admin powers.
And so I I oh, go ahead. Yeah, no, no I was I was going
to say I I keep alluding to this explanation we got.
So once we talked to NFCA little bit about this initially we
talked to them about why was there a move allowed after
Locke. That was our conversation Sunday
night. It wasn't until Monday and and
and sort of more digging essentially that we kind of
uncovered the Aaron Jones thing and started to realize like this
is probably cheating of of some sort And we were discussing with
them. The the explanation we were
given is that the admin sub that was contacted by a user who
could not see the live scoring and they resubmitted that user's
line up so that they could hopefully see it and they made a
mistake and they swapped accidentally swapped Rishi Rice
for Travis Kelsey in the line up.
Our our response was that sounds hard to believe given that it
happened 3 minutes after Travis Kelsey scored a touchdown and
the mistake was to add Travis Kelsey to the line up.
But then when we brought up the Aaron Jones thing that's when it
became clear that there was more to happen and NFC has done a lot
of work behind the scenes released a statement we'll get
into all of that. But the that explanation is very
interesting because that's not the way the logs show the rice
for Kelsey change. They show that as an ad drop.
It is the way they show the Aaron Jones thing where it was a
whole resubmitted line up and there was a a mistake.
Oh, I accidentally clicked Aaron Jones instead of Mostert.
It's like it was a pre packaged answer that would be given if it
if you were caught. And the logs look like the Aaron
Jones move, but it doesn't actually fit the Kelsey rice
move which was just a one for one ad drop behind the scenes
somehow. It's so.
And once we learned that because we received word when we were
communicating with the NFC that it was an employee who made it,
we started to do a little bit of digging too.
Because I was curious, who is this user?
Red Solo Cup? The user is named Bradley
Willis, This employee's name is Derek Bucher.
And you know, just me wanting to do a little sleuthing on
Twitter, see if there's any connections started poking
around for their Twitter accounts.
He ended up finding a very long history of public communication
for these guys, literally spanning A decade.
I should also mention Derek's Twitter account has now been
deactivated. But we have screenshots and I
can pull up some of these here. This was one, a really old one
from September 22nd 2012. Brad Willis, who he believed to
be behind the account Red Solo cup.
At least that's how it's publicly listed.
Bradley Willis interacting with Derek, saying make sure you hit
the red pepper and especially remembering your favorite cousin
back in Lakeville. Derek even in his Twitter bio
says he's from Lakeville. We do not know if they are
actually related, but it felt very, very clear scrolling
through their communication that not only are they friendly, but
they're very good friends and have been for a very long time.
So the explanation we were given that a user called and said they
couldn't see live scoring and in a line up was submitted so that
they could see live scoring was quickly shown to be not.
This isn't any old user, even if the guy, even if it had.
This isn't any old user who's calling and of course.
There's a personal relationship that spans more than a decade
between these two individual the person that the the admin
changed the line up for and accidentally put Travis Kelsey
in the line up and also Oh yeah, accidentally put Aaron Jones in
last week is. And didn't actually resubmit a
line up during the Chiefs game, only replaced Hershey Rice with
Travis Kelsey and did nothing else.
And another thing that we should mention with all of this stuff,
you know, partly I recognize the name Derek Bucher.
I'm not, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly.
But because we did a deal with NFC this year, those of you guys
who have been watching on the channel know that we played in
multiple of their high stakes contest.
We interacted with Greg who is the head over there.
We even did some live events at their Vegas drafts.
One of the reasons I was familiar with this name, Derek,
is because anytime I corresponded with Greg about
tech stuff. Hey, can we get a link, a
landing page, et cetera, et cetera.
Derek was always CC. He was heavily involved in NFC
operations, specifically on the back end with anything tech
supporting. Again, I don't know the entire
purview of what his role is, but I do know that when we were
interacting with him, even when I was having stuff with moving
Money around to enter us into a contest, Derek was CC D on that.
He was involved with all of this stuff.
So that's just to say he was a very prominent member behind the
scenes and it makes sense that he would have access to a lot of
the mechanics of the NFC site. And when you say was, it's
because in the statement they have acknowledged that they have
fired an employee. They don't name the employee
probably for legal reasons. But it's our understanding that
that that is Derek and he that he is no longer with NFC.
At this, the time of our recording, which is just a few
days after this happened, we're still getting our heads wrapped
around all of this, yes? Yeah, this just to again to
frame the timeline. Everyone remembers the the
Chiefs and Bill's game. That was on refresh my memory.
When was that game? Sunday night.
So this is all that happened and
we're recording this on Wednesday evening around 8:00 PM
Eastern. So, and we we didn't know until
Monday. We I, I did send Greg some
emails, a couple emails because then we started to see the time
stamps on Sunday night asking why was this user able to do
this, Did your software malfunction.
He let us know in the morning it was not a software issue.
I'm told that an admin made this change.
I'm going to do more research throughout the day Monday.
That's Pete. I think when you uncovered the
some of the the Twitter links and some of the social media
links, we were starting to piece things together and be like, OK,
this is different than what we actually thought it was.
This is actually something you know a lot more serious.
So it wasn't even until like late in the day Monday that we
were able to to determine that like what what has actually
happened here that these guys have a a relationship that
there's a lot of other things and then there's you get hit in
the head with so many things. And and part of the reason we're
doing this as a recorded show rather than our typical live
show is there are so many ways that you can speculate from
here. I think all of our, we don't
want to do any speculation, but I, I think all of our listeners
are smart enough that the first question they're going to ask is
how long has this been going on? We're showing you tweets from
2012. There's a lot of other things
Greg has assured us and says in the statement that this is the
first time. It does seem hard to believe
that we caught the first time, but he does.
You know, we we have some scepticism about that.
But he does say that in the statement he has not found
anything else. They've they are doing a full
review and they have banned the user in addition to determining
the employee. So.
Yeah, our our understanding is because Bradley played a bunch
of regular season stuff this year.
So they've gone through the logs for all the regular season going
back through all their logs, I believe they switched to the the
software that they're currently on in 2021 I believe.
And so you know they're but they have logs from the previous
system as well as my understanding and they're
reviewing all of that to confirm that there is no additional
instances of this. But all we know, you know is
that we were able and we were able to to review the logs for
his other teams in this contest. This is the only thing that we
found. We found these two moves on this
one team. And it it's hard because we we
know what is publicly available, the NFC they do have those
publicly available accounts, but we have no idea how the back end
system works. We don't know what kind of
potential override. You know we we don't know
anything other than what's publicly available that is still
publicly available to anyone on the NFC website.
They have said that they're leaving those transactions up
for the sake of transparency. But just being clear, you know
we all we have is what is publicly available.
We were able to use that to uncover this, but we can't, you
know, fully know the scope of that other than taking NF CS
word for what they say. Even in this contest where they
show all these transactions, which is great that there's a
log, we can't see past years transaction logs as far as I
understand. I actually did not do that
research myself. I'm pretty sure Pat you were
talking with with Sack and Draco about that a little bit, but
that's right, right. We can see the results but not
the transaction logs. Yeah, I'm not.
I'm not sure I know. Well, I believe NFC can, but I
don't know that we can. We cannot I'm, I'm almost
positive. I just don't want to say
something wrong, but I'm I'm almost positive we can't see any
of the transactions in past years on the site And as a
result like we're not, I mean we're not doing like.
Our investigation is limited to. Right.
And we're not like, I mean like we've we've kind of talked about
this feels like an investigation behind, you know, between
ourselves, but like we're not trying to investigate anything.
We just ran into this, right. It's like what what do you do?
You start pulling threads, and there's certain things that we
can't see, right? There's threads we can't pull.
Yeah. And like again, like the whole
part of this I mentioned, you know, us doing a deal with NFC
and a huge reason we're doing the show is because we promoted
this site. We told our viewers, our
listeners, hey, we're excited to play on this site, come play on
this site with us. You know, we exchanged promotion
for free entries into contest. So we feel like we have a big
burden on us to not only, you know, share what we uncovered,
but allow people to know that this happened as APSA.
And that's the thing that sucks. Like there is the thing of like,
oh, we we uncovered this, we investigated it that that feels
good. But it also sucks.
Like we told people that you can play on this site and if we
wouldn't have uncovered it, people we said should play in
this hold'em contest would have been defrauded in this contest
via and that sucks. And that's why we feel the onus
of telling you guys literally everything we know, everything
we've done these past few days and and it's been nice to see
some of the steps that Greg is making through his statement and
this. But I I feel very shitty about
how this has transpired after we put our, you know, you know how
people view us, you know, our reputation's on the line with
this site. And so I I think all three of us
felt very strongly about kind of being super public about what
happened. Totally.
And I mean the the the other flip side of this is just that
it is really hard to wrap your head around what happened here.
I mean the only time I've ever heard really anything like this
is like 12 team home leagues. Like you hear about it like in
high school right. Or like I when I was working at
CBS you'd hear about these like because people are playing in
these public leagues are commissioner he he changed the
his buddies you know quarterback after Locke and he this is a
this is a tournament with a six figure prize to 1st place and
they were changing. They put Aaron Jones in the
lineup after the game was either completed or like in the fourth
quarter. I'm not 100% I didn't want 100%
check the the central time zone thing there but very late in the
game because it's eleven O 8 or whatever is a time stamp there.
I'm Pacific Coast so games end at 9:00 here.
It's always it always throws me off but that I mean you're
putting a player in after he scores 3 touchdowns like a 16
year old does in his twelve team league and is like I'm going to
I'm going to win the championship and no one's going
to notice this And then his buddy calls him out on it and
then you know that gets talked about on some you know mass mass
audience fantasy football show where they have to you know
answer questions like this and everyone everyone agrees yeah
you kick that guy out of the league and you move on.
But like, I mean to to this is one of those things that like
people have conspiracy theorists have speculated about this type
of thing happenings. An employee at a site with a
major tournament with a lot of money in the line, changing
lineups so that their buddy can win or that the site can win and
then they don't have to pay out the prizes or whatever.
You know, like you see these tweets and things.
It's just it's crazy the way that as we've pulled this thread
this week in these last couple days, that this is like what
actually happened. I mean it's it's it's bizarre.
It's hard. It's hard to grasp, honestly.
And even I'm sure some people like, again, as we mentioned at
the top of the show, like there's not even like a clean
way for us to explain the mechanics of this tournament.
Like, again, anyone who watched our show, it is a it's a
complicated tournament. Like even the levels of game
theory, we've gone back and forth with Leone on how they
attack it. Draco, it's sacrilegious.
It is an epic puzzle. Like, I don't think there's a
game in fantasy that is more complicated that we've played or
encountered than this one. And so I do think it is for
explaining some of those mechanics, and hopefully we did
a good job doing so. But, you know, the reason we
were able to do it is just because we got so obsessed with
this contest of Draco and sacrilegious and Gretch really
being in the weeds on it. Because otherwise, I don't think
we ever, ever figure this. Out and really Draco, Draco and
SAC. I mean huge hat tip to those
guys like I mean they they've been so in the weeds on this as
you said since the very beginning were very integral in
pulling some of these threads and doing some of the research.
Drico's the one who found the first log he's the one who I
know was pushing for that swap that we ended up doing that led
to this and was highlighting some of the other teams was
leading a lot of those conversations and Sack was right
there with them. Those guys, I mean they're
they're are incredible guys at at stat chase you know that that
do stat chasing every week. Obviously follow them like all
their work, whatever, but just want to give them a ton of
credit for being like hugely important parts of of uncovering
this. For sure.
I thought we could. This release came out about a
couple hours ago. There is kind of an official
legalese, you know, element here from the lawyers at NFC.
And then Greg followed it up. I thought we could pass along
some of the things, he said. A lot of this we've already
covered here, but just to punctuate at the team, this is
the Red Solo Cup and all of his teams are now locked and he is
ineligible to ever play in the NFC contest.
The employee who we referenced has been terminated for cause.
And then Greg kind of gets into how we were able to uncover it
with the public transaction logs, and he goes on to say
nothing is more important than the integrity of our contest.
Nothing. Nobody trusts us with their
money. If anything can happen, I'm sad,
I'm disappointed, I'm shocked, I'm mad, I'm so mad.
But we can never let something like this happen.
And we now have safeguards in place to alert multiple people
if this ever happened again, which it won't.
The contest remains intact and this didn't affect anyone else's
teams. This owner's teams have been
eliminated in the employee release.
So sorry that I can't say more, but please understand that we
thank those who alerted us to the situation and we acted
immediately and with the appropriate punishments.
Thanks. And I'm not sure if he mentions
it here, but he also told us that they're now going to
partner with a company that. That's an initial statement, OK.
So that that has been our week guys, ever since Draco and
sacrilegious got to the bottom of this and us going down the
rabbit hole, presenting all of this to Greg and and letting him
know there was a huge problem and they needed to start fixing
things. I don't feel comfortable right
now saying if things are fully fixed or not.
It's only been a couple of days. I think I'm encouraged by some
of the steps, but we wanted to get this show out now
specifically because this contest is ongoing.
Moves are still going to be made this weekend for the conference
championship. There's a lot of money on the
line and we really wanted to alert people that this has been
occurring up to this point because it brings up a lot of
questions and hopefully we answered some of them tonight.
I think we've done a really good job illuminating at least what
happened. There's lots of whys and follow
up questions, but we do have some facts that, you know,
collusion, cheating, whatever you want to call it occurred in
this contest that we have entries in, that our friends
have entries in that ship chasers have entries in, and we
owed it to everyone to get this out.
So everyone can make their own informed decisions, decide what
kind of actions they want to take.
Yeah, I mean you you said it really well.
We wanted to be fully transparent.
We wanted to let the the listeners of this show who put
their trust in our recommendations on who to play
in their line UPS, but also the recommendations on where to
play. And we have implicitly told them
to trust the sites that we play on and talk about playing on and
do content around. We wanted to be.
I mean it was immediately clear we were all in lockstep.
We were saying we were in lockstep.
It was cool. And it's one of the things that
I love about working with you guys is when we first did really
touch base on this. And you know some of the initial
conversations were with Draco and Sack Pat, you were a little
bit busy. Pete, you were on vacation this
weekend like we were. We were talking touching base on
on Monday and we were all immediately very clear.
The number one thing is we wanted to be very transparent
with our whatever you call viewers, subscribers, listeners,
people that that follow ship chasing in any kind of way that
they would know what we know that we're not holding anything
back in those things. And then like you said Pete, as
far as timing, this is an ongoing contest.
It ultimately had to be this week.
We weren't going to sit on this and needed to be as soon as as
possible really talk to NFCA little bit.
They got some things done and and released a statement and
then you know we certainly want to give some time to to handle
this, how they wanted to handle this, but then wanted to be able
to to share this stuff in full transparency and and where we
fit into all of it. Yeah, and to in truth be told to
give this a wider reach, a bigger platform, you know, I
don't know the full extent of how NFC is going to communicate
it. As I know now it is on message
boards there. I have as of this time I haven't
checked, but before the show I had not seen it on social,
hadn't seen it in an e-mail to their to their users.
I generally get emails from them on site wide.
Things about new condos haven't seen that yet.
So I do feel like the onus is on us to put this story out there
in a larger way. Like people in the fantasy space
need to know about this. This isn't something that gets
brushed under the rug. I'm not saying that's what
they're doing, but I feel like it's our responsibility to put
this out there so everyone knows what happened.
Right, with the, I mean regardless of what NFC does,
it's sort of as we've discussed we we talked about this contest,
right. It's not just that we did NFC
season long stuff. We talked about this contest the
week before the wild card round. Yeah, exactly.
Not a link to register for this contest.
So we then had an obligation to share with our our viewers what
had happened here. This is, you know, it's kind of
like regardless of what NFC does in terms of getting a statement
out and and publicizing the statement, we kind of have our
own obligation I think as we've directed people to this site in
this contest and we had a time time sensitive obligation given
that it's an ongoing contest. So, yeah, I mean, I don't think
we really have that much more to say.
We've kind of shared everything we have with you guys kind of
chronologically, all the kind of evidence that we were able to
put together and feel very thankful that it was a
compelling enough set of evidence that action has started
to be taken and and that's encouraging there.
But yeah, I don't really know where else we go from here other
than putting this out there and and letting things continue to
play out. Agreed.
I mean, there's a lot of questions.
We said this. We've done a lot of speculation
behind the scenes. We don't want to add a ton of
speculation here. People are going to have a lot
of questions. There's going to be a lot that
that probably comes from this or presumably I mean like when you
think about the the scope of what this could be, but it's
not, you know, this is not the forum for for those types of
discussions as as we had already talked about.
But that's not my my main point being we're not saying that's
the end of the story. Obviously, I think there's going
to be a lot of people. But like you said a minute ago,
Pete, we're just going to kind of we, we we were tending to
kind of just give what we know and then let people kind of form
their own conclusions or or do their own research or or think
what they want to think. Ultimately make their own
decisions about, you know what they want to do from here.
Yeah, and I'll include a link to the forum post in the show notes
of this video if you guys want to read.
You know, if you guys are ship chasers and you guys want to
talk to us in the Discord, certainly understand if you guys
have specific concerns as it pertains to us, we'll definitely
make ourselves available to answer anything that we know.
You know, we aren't going to be publicly speculating any
further, but I can promise you as we learn cold hard facts, we
will always share those with you guys as they come across star
radar. Pat, anything else here before
we get out of here? No, nothing else from me.
Well, thanks again as Ben highlighted to Draco and
sacrilegious who are just so sharp and that kind of level of,
you know, attentiveness, you know, really helping us unearth
this, which is it would have been a very scary thing for this
kind of stuff to continue on going and for us to be unaware
as we play on this site. So again, really want to thank
them for all their hard work. And very quickly as well they
were. They were uncovering stuff by
the minute, it felt like. I mean it's so funny you said
the I mean like we had so much fun talking strategy and
everything. It was almost like desperation.
Like oh man, this guy got gets Kelsey in there.
We're screwed now. We've had so much fun building
this team out and everything that I mean those guys
immediately. I mean they do they did exactly
what anyone would do. You you're looking through and
and trying to figure out, you know what if your own team is
blocked and what what the paths for your own team are.
And so anyway, it it's it's just wild.
Like I'm I'm sorry, my mind is still just blown by all of this.
It's it's been like just completely like dropping
whatever veil or whatever. It's been a lot for us to
process this past week. And you know, getting all of
this out there, it feels cathartic for us because we've
been going down these rabbit holes, really trying to think
how to process everything that happened.
So I feel good that we were able to record this show.
We are going to post this now, so it will be, you know,
recording it on a Wednesday evening.
We'll be live here on a Wednesday evening.
Yeah, we appreciate all of you guys who stick with us through
thick and thin, through the ups and downs and all that stuff
here. And yeah, we'll be back.
You know, for our our usual stuff.
We're going to do a shift cast on Sunday night.
Feels weird to to promote something at the end of the
show, but I don't know what else to do other than to say we'll
see you on Sunday night for a shift cast, but other than that,
really, genuinely appreciate all of you guys and we'll talk to
you soon. Peace.