Let me just start out this blog post from Reno with the biggest little heartfelt thank you I could ever give to every one of you who listens to and reads articles from us at Orange and Black SoccerCast. Whether you were one of the participants of our new little experimental format in our playing for pride competition, or you followed along with our weekly updates, the fact stands that you helped contribute to our community. More importantly, this event helped a charity that is very near and dear to our hearts in Athlete Ally (https://www.athleteally.org). 

This year’s Playing for Pride stands out as our best charitable event yet, and if I am honest to you, hopefully a baseline for us in creating more successful fundraisers in the future. There is no way I could express my fullest gratitude to everyone for taking part in Playing for Pride 2022. However, I can definitely start by giving you all my promised insight with an in-depth debrief! This week, we will focus on why we changed the format of the competition, as well as the final results and take our first look at our players in the Freebie and One Cost tiers. Next week, we will take a look at players in the Two to Five Cost tiers, so keep an eye out for that article!

Going into this year’s edition of PfP, we at Orange and Black SoccerCast wanted to do something we haven’t yet done, which is including everyone else in our little soccer community. However, that proposition comes with a lot of different questions and problems in its own right, foremost being, “How do we hold a snake draft for a team with ~25 players, and still have a competitive fair game”. One idea we had was to have one fan run team to compete against us, with different members joining and drafting alongside us. We could have opened the draft beyond OCSC players, and had at the end of the draft each team select one or two different players from other USLC Teams to represent their squad, but that too just felt like it ruined the spirit of the contest and our group. Finally, we had decided to just scrap the whole snake draft, and thus our draft was made into a “cap space” auction style competition, bringing forward a new era in our Playing for Pride event! 

As you saw earlier this week, here were the final scores of Playing for Pride!

Congratulations to Chuck, Marcus, Russel and Larry, who honestly crushed the competition, scoring into the 70s, and making all of us “experts” from the podcast look like absolute chumps. 

Without further ado, let's talk about the stuff you came here for in the first place. Each following section includes players from each tier level of the draft, including the total fantasy points they scored over the month of June, as well as how many rosters they were selected on. After each table, I will try to add some insight into why these players were selected into this bracket, as well as what changes I would make now that the month of June has passed us by. A quick refresher for you about the rules of the competition; Each player was given thirteen dollars to construct a Five man roster with. If a participant spent their entire budget prior to having a five man roster, they had to fill out the rest of their team with $0 players.

Let us start with….

The Freebies

Not much to report here, however everyone who picked a “freebie”all picked Gomez, and were rewarded with one point from 18 minutes of action against Loudoun. These players were all put into this category because of the lack of playing time they were receiving (except Danny Acosta, who sustained a season ending injury), and were given as purely speculative roster “fills”, to allow everyone some flexibility with the higher cost players. I was curious to see if anyone would have chosen multiple players from the Freebie tier to pick both five cost players, but nobody this year was willing to take the risk (understandably so) this year. After seeing both five costs score a combined 60 this year, maybe next year somebody decides to take that risk, and fill out their roster with more freebies instead.

The One Costs

Moving on into the one cost bracket for us, there are a few things I want to point out here. First off, seeing Tommy McCabe being drafted more than Gorskie surprised me. I had included Hunter as a one cost player, because it seemed more likely prior to his release that Gorskie would be a player who consistently started, or saw minutes out of this group, but would never find his way onto the scoresheet enough to warrant himself being a two cost. Therefore, when creating values for PfP, I thought he would be a steal at the one cost tier as a player who would consistently get 3 points, but could lose points for accruing bookings. 

At the end of the month however, it’s Tommy McCabe who shone from this group, benefiting from the absences of Rocha and Kuningas. I was pleasantly surprised to see him rewarding the six PfP drafts who chose him with a solid 13 points. I guess I should have seen this coming, as I have consistently praised Tommy over the past two years with OCSC (and own his Hispanic Heritage jersey from 2021). Shame on me for being a doubter. 

Finally, to understand why Shutler was a 1 cost instead of a 0 cost, let's take a look back at a player comparison from 2021’s PfP. 

If you would have guessed that player A was Patrick Rakovsky, and player B was Abraham Romero, then give yourself some credit! Over the month of June, Romero earned himself some playing time, and with a spectacular 5 save effort against Oakland, was able to outscore Rakovsky on the month. For value comparison, Rakovsky was my 1st round pick last year, while Romero was snagged in the 4th round by Mr. Alan Underwood.

So how does this relate to Colin Shutler? Goalies tend to be hit and miss in this competition, but there is value in having the backup keeper. June tends to be a month in the season where players are given a rest, or are subjected to roster management. Since goalies are the players who have the highest ceiling (and lowest floor) based on minutes played and chances to earn or lose points, there always is a chance that the backup could come in, and make a difference for people who draft them. In this case, the sole person who chose Shutler also won this year's PfP (Chuck). Those 8 points Shutler picked up were the difference between himself and Marcus, who had picked Gomez from the 0 cost pool to fill in his roster.

In summary here, there was considerable value to be had at the one cost tier that allowed for roster flexibility further down the line at the 2-5 tiers, with 3 teams picking up multiple 1 cost players. Not every player from the 1 cost tier lived up to their full potential, but next year, don’t sleep on these player’s value.

Thank you for checking out the first of this two part dive into our 2022 Playing for Pride! I know it sounds cliche, but seriously none of this would have been possible without your guy’s interest in participating alongside us in this little charity competition, as well as your willingness to donate to a very important cause near and dear to our hearts (seriously, go check out https://www.athleteally.org). Next week, we will go over the 2 to 5 cost players, and I will inform you all of our final donation numbers as a team!