FPGP DATA

If you want to see the actual data used to calculate the standings, you can click here. I've put this link on the sidebar as well, so you can come back from time to time and check my math.

Now... if there is a mistake, try not to get your panties in a wad. It will be easily corrected. I do suggest that everyone looks at their players to make sure I have the starting values correct.

UPDATE 1/28/08

Here is your first update of the year... it's a marathon not a sprint, yadda yadda yadda... still, not surprising at all that Bandit jumped right out of the gate and into the lead. The man is a machine. Also not surprising is that the newest bigmouth to the pool, "The Shize" is plugging away with a whopping 12 points.

429 .... Bandit
416 .... Excal
329 .... Stan the Man
316 .... Vic
299 .... Tev
263 .... MG
263 .... Shades
246 .... Steve T.
210 .... Stevie V.
128 .... CASWAS
107 .... DTM
12 .... The Shize
-11 .... Johnny V.
-37 .... Robbo
-39 .... Dave/Mark
-81 .... Shane/Jay
-87 .... Ryan

Now, before you all get in a tizzy, these are the point totals that include PGA players who have made at least one cut. I am not going to invoke the Gossett Rule until the beginning of the trade window. As such, the following Tour players were not used in the calculations of these totals:

Clark, Tim
Clarke, Darren
Curtis, Ben
Duval, David
Els, Ernie
Faxon, Brad
Goosen, Retief
Immelman, Trevor
Jobe, Brandt
Johnson, Richard S.
Love, Davis
Overton, Jeff
Poulter, Ian
Quigley, Bret
Rose, Justin
Scott, Adam
Stenson, Henrik
Toms, David
Mediate, Rocco (short)

I will email the spreadsheet to Shades in a minute, and hopefully he'll be able to perty up the sidebar so you can see where your points are coming from on a player by player basis.

Gore/Licklighter & the Navy Seals

Watch the video HERE.

Good stuff JG!

Update... TOMORROW!

Get ready for the shit to start flying... I'll post our first update of the year tomorrow. I am not going to invoke the Gossett Rule until the first week of trades though, as doing so will completely screw up the standings. So, if you have a player who has not made a cut or played in a tourney, they will simply be at 0.

And The Early Favorite...

For next year's most popular short pick is...

TRASHCAN!

Is anyone else out there amazed that this d-bag is a multiple winner on Tour?

King's, Bear's, Sawgrass and You?

I must like failure, but here I go trying to really put a plan together for an FPGP 2008 Golf Event(s). Regardless, here we go...



September 12th - 15th
3 Nights, 3 Rounds of Golf
World Golf Village, St. Augustine, FL
Stay at the Grand Villa's at the WGV.
2 Rounds at the King & Bear Course at the WGV & 1 Round at the TPC Sawgrass Stadium Course (#17-Par 3 shown above.)

Cost is $739 PP Quad (so we need 4 or 8 to make this a good deal.)



I figure the Florida FPGPers and I could drive so we wouldn't need a rental car.

Any thoughts, comments or suggestions?

Which A-list Stars Are Playing With Your FPGP Team?

Click the image to enlarge.

2 Suggestions for the FPGP 2008

1. [Don't shoot my moderate-left heart]Would anyone else want to second or third that we donate all the trade fees to the charity of the winner's choice?

2. FPGP meet-up, golf, drink, golf, drink, etc. We tried to get a get together for Myrtle Beach last year, but that was like pulling teeth. So here's the deal. Who wants to meet up in Vegas? I'm thinking late July or early August. "It's hot in July and August", so what? We live in an era of global warming. It's hot everywhere. So if you're interested, let me know and I'll start putting together the details.

UPDATES

I'll start posting weekly (give or take) updates in a couple weeks... we need a few full field events to make the standings make a little sense.

It's not Tiger that some in the FPGP need to worry about.

it's KJ CHOI!

Here's the Field for the Bob Hope

Could this be the first tournament with 2 Dick Johnson's?

Just click on the image to expand it to a readable size.

Pop Quiz:

What's worse than shorting Steve Stricker?



Answer: Shorting KJ Choi!!!!

Congrats, you made the cut, but you aren't playing.

The new rule this year on tour is that while you may make the cut, only the the top 78 get to play. So if you "make the cut" but more than 78 also make the cut, the cut line moves up a stroke and you don't play on the weekend. The good thing is that you get last place money. So at the Sony, players finishing at Even will not play this weekend, but will earn about $11,000 for "making the cut".

Congrats to Tommy "Two Gloves" Gainey for making his first cut.

Our first W/D of the year goes to......

Frank Lickliter II. Way to go Frank. 1st in Q-school and now 1st in W/D's. Frank was injury riddled last year, so is this something that will dog him all year? Good luck finding out on the internet(s). Reasons for W/D's and player injuries in general are very tough to find. I don't understand why. In just about every other major sport you can get the player's MRI somewhere online.

UPDATE:
Frank W/D'd because his wife gave birth to twins. They were born premature and thus the surprise W/D. Congrats to Frank and his family!

Official 2008 PGA Tour Exemption List

I have no idea why it took this long for the PGA Tour to get this page up on PGATOUR.com, but here it is in case you wanted to see who is on a medical exemption or some other reason: http://www.pgatour.com/players/pgatour-exempt/.

2008 Rosters...

Timmy will not be re-joining us this year, but I'd expect him to throw some bombs from the sidelines...

Jeff has the spreadsheet and will be posting the rosters shortly.

Good luck everyone!

On Tim and the Shorting of Steve Stricker...

I heard back from Tim... he's had a bunch going on and wasn't able to access his email for a couple weeks. I told him he could do the late picks with Mercedes penalties, and I'm waiting to hear back from him. Either way, I'll send the rosters to Jeff on Thursday so we can all see what we are up against this year.

And yes... a few teams shorted Steve Stricker. I've never been a big fan of shorting good putters, because they tend to get hot as hell from time to time... We'll see how it all works out, but I am sure a few teams breathed a sigh of relief last night when Strick lost the playoff to Chopra.

FPGPers Against Calc!!!

There's a lot more hills to climb in Hawaii.

EDITORIAL CORRECTION

Bandit has won this baby THREE times, not twice.

A bad short pick?

I'll admit that I didn't short Mark Calcavecchia, but he was on my list of guys to short list (Sorry Tev). But given Calc's age (born in 1960) and, err... shape/conditioning (6'/225lbs? - 225 my ass), why wouldn't he be a good short pick. He made about $2,000,000 more in '07 ($2,993,332) than in '06 and would he really win again this year? Maybe if he keeps having score cards that look like this.

Even in this limited field that was the low score of the day and thru 2 rounds Calc is only 3 shots back of the leader.

Get To Know Your FPGPers...

With a big influx of rookies this season, I thought I'd take a minute to "introduce" each team and give a little background,... that way we all know who is talking smack to who.

LAST YEAR'S MONEY WINNERS

New Tex/Steve: Hey, that's me! I'm your commish, which means I have to deal with all of the bullshit rulings and I also tabulate the updates each week. I'm the current defending champ of this pool, and one of two two-time winners over the pool's 10 year history.

Da Bandit: Also referred to as Da Boca Bandit, this is our career money leader, as far as I can tell. The first member of the two-time winner club, Bandit has cashed in this pool each of the last four years, including a 2nd place finish last year. His nickname comes from his penchance for stealing other player's picks.

Excal/Joel: The man who founded this pool, and also made a late charge last year to finish in da money. The man loves to bet, smoke cigars, drink beer and play golf, although he's only proficient in two of those activities. When he plays, he carries a minimum of 18 clubs, tees the balls from 3 feet in front of the markers, takes all putts inside 5 feet, and hollars "no justice!" at every bad bounce. He also has one helluva mime outfit.

Tev: This is Tev's sophomore season, after a "succesful" rookie season in which he won the Duffer Award, a one-time prize for the last place finisher in the pool. He's an in-law of Jeff, but is otherwise a good guy and pretty quiet. Don't expect a lot of chatter from Tev.

RETURNING VETERANS

Shades/Jeff: My right hand man at FPGP Central. Jeff is the person who maintains the blog and makes the updates "pretty". If you are ever on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, make sure you add Jeff to your "call a friend" list, because you might just get a question on the swing weight in Tag Ridings driver... and Jeff would know it. Jeff is 0 for life in the blog, which is to say he is our greatest contributor.

Murph/MG03/JG59: Murph is the money person making picks for a certain Tour family, who's name is never to be uttered on this blog. MG fears being the Janet Gretzky of the golf world. We thought this team would have a ton of inside information last year, but not so much. We expect big things out of them this year though.

Talonflier/Vic: This is Vic's 3rd season in the pool. Last year he had slight hold on 3rd place money, but his team collapsed after the Fed Ex Cup finals, prompting him to petition a "let's end this pool after the Fed Ex Cup!!!" request. Despite being a Yankee fan, he's quite funny. Some of you youngins may need a dictionary to understand his posts.

CASWAS: This is Jeff's second donation team, representing his kid's picks. Let's hope they inherited their golf picking genes from their mom.

Stevie V.: An FPGP veteran who was awful in his early years but has come into prominence as of late. He's a colleague of Rob/Rodent, he knows Bandit "professionally", and his brother is also in the pool. Needless to say, he is a great slinger of da smack.

Johnny V.: Brother to Stevie V., and legendary man about town in New Orleans. Let's his picks do the talking, and never contributes to the blog.

Rob/Rodent/Diddler: It takes a special man to have this many nicknames. I won't get into why some of his friends call him "da rodent", but he's known as "da diddler" for making late decisions and having to ask his wife if he can spend money. The man does like to gamble though, so if you are looking for side bet action, look no further. Robbo and I were in a virtual dead heat in the 1st ever FPGP with one week to go, a year when we played "winner take all". I offered him a draw right before the last tourney started and he declined... and lost his half of an $800 pot. Like I said... the man likes to gamble.

Stan the Man: A colleague of mine who doesn't contribute to the blog.

ROOKIES

Shane/Jay/Da Rooks: Shane is a friend of mine from Illinois who was too cheap/scared to enter his own team, so he hedged with his neighbor, Jay. Together, they are "da rooks". At least they got the "da" part correct.

David/Mark: Another two-headed team, David is a colleague of mine from New York (yes, another fucking Yankee fan) who pulled in his old college roomate to put together a team. Special note: Mark is running a death pool this year, so you know these guys are twisted.

Drew/The Shize: Drew is Jay's brother, and he wants to call his team "The Shize". Ugh. Thanks for the donations rookie.

Ryan: A co-worker of Jay. I know nothing of this man.

AND A SURPRISE...

Da Dummy: YES! Da Dummy is back! Old-timers may remember when I used to draw random players for a Dummy picks team. Dummy doesn't contribute or win the pool, but he does set the benchmark for awful picks. I mean, if you can't beat a randomly generated team of players, how horrible are your picks?

GROUND RULES

Feel free to egg each other on, talk smack, etc. If you personally know someone, feel free to flame them... but don't flame people you don't know. If the shit-talking gets out of hand between people who are strangers, or if anything truly offensive is put up on the blog, I reserve the right to kick your ass off the blog and make you sit quietly in the corner. That said, your money is in and no matter how much of a shit you may be, you're in the pool for the entire year. Just be cool on the blog. For example, it's ok for the Florida guys (bandit, stevie v., rob) to give each other all the crap they want... but if a rookie jumps on and goes over the line, I'm shutting you down. Keep the shit talking to comments about the picks, and all is well.

ROSTERS... Next Week

We have 16 teams in at the deadline. Normally, I'd pass the rosters along to Jeff so he can put them up on the sidebar, but Timmy D., aka "Bimma", seems to be MIA. I've emailed him and Bandit has tried to track him down. Given his involvment in the pool/blog last year, I can't imagine he is just bagging this thing without letting us know, so something may be up. I've made an executive decision to let him come in as late as next Wednesday. His penalty will be that if he picks any of the players that were in the Sony this week, he will not get the money they earned.

Because Bimma may still be out there and interested, I am not going to post the 16 rosters until I get word from him on his intentions, or when the late deadline passes. Unless you want to open the door to potential sniping and banditing (remember who brought Timmy into this pool last year...), do not post your picks on the blog or in the comment sections. Just hold your horses for a few days.

Oh, and for "DaRooks"... we already have a Jeff/Shades, so I don't need phone calls after every shot is hit in every tourney. For fuck's sake, this is a marathon, not a sprint. True story... Jeff IMs me yesterday to say that Stephen Ames is either struggling or hitting a hybrid off the tee, because his driving distance average was only 240 yards. Yes, Jeff was IMing stats after less than 9 holes of play.

This is going to be a long year.

Glib Rodent

It's the beginning of the FPGP year and da Rodent is typically smug about his chances. He's already taken on 2 side bets with me and da Bandit. Jump in while the water is good. He won't be taking any bets after his team starts to fade in early summer.

The only caveat is that 2008 is the Year of the Rat!!!

Zero Hour

Just a few more hours remain to get those picks in without penalty... so far I have 10 teams in, and I am expecting at least three more (Stan the Man, and two two-headed newbie teams), and quite possibly a small fistfull more after that. Shades has decided to hedge his bets by entering TWO teams this year, one for him and one for his kids. This is not unprecedented, as Excal has done this in the past as well.

If anyone else wants to enter a 2nd team, by all means, just let me know. And no, you do not get a discount for refering yourself.

I'll be in Phoenix for a couple weeks starting on Sunday, but will try to get all the rosters set up and sent to Jeff for posting this weekend.

Good luck everyone.

GAME ON! TEE IT UP!

Number of Picks...

People... you get NINE total picks... not eight.