New Fantasy Football Format Celebrates NFL’s Worst Teams

On Sunday, the Seattle Seahawks and Tennessee Titans left no doubt that they are the two best teams in the NFL this season.

The two best teams at Loserball, that is.

Loserball is a new free-to-play (for the time being) fantasy contest that, in the words of its founder, Jonathan Gruber, “embraces the suck.” The format is extremely simple: Each contestant picks the three teams it thinks will suck the hardest every week, with the lowest score at the end of 18 weeks winning in either a public or private league.

Allowing a pair of first-half safeties, as the Seahawks did this past Sunday, or self-destructing via a pick-six/blocked-punt return touchdown combo, which the Titans managed to pull off, amounts to world-class sucking, according to Loserball’s scoring system, which awards the most points — as negatives, naturally — to rare occurrences of that ilk.

To wit, the Titans, who finished with a cumulative -551 points, earned -225 for allowing the blocked punt and -200 for the pick six, while the Seahawks earned -500 of their -670 weekly total on those two safeties alone.

“Not only did they dominate on the Loserball field, but they pulled out the actual ‘W’ as well,” Gruber said of the Seahawks, who defeated the Broncos by a score of 26-20.

Out of 16 Loserball categories, more common occurrences like points allowed or completed passes allowed count for only -1, while each turnover is -17, a missed field goal is -80, 300+ passing yards allowed is -135 and a missed point after touchdown is -180, to give you an idea of the weighted scale.

Speaking of which, each team starts each week with a handicap. For the first week, the 49ers had no handicap, making it easier for them to slide instantly into the red.

On the other end of the spectrum, the Vikings were considered the “best” Loserball team with a handicap of +126.

“It's because they've given up a ton of yardage, which is one of our categories, and their kickers have stunk,” Gruber said in explaining why, say, the lowly Panthers didn’t have a higher handicap. “We’re trying to level the playing field.”

Hence, as Gruber puts it, the Vikings “have to do more sucky things” to win at Loserball than San Francisco. In Week 1, they failed in this regard, as the 49ers finished with a score of -101, while Minnesota landed at +17 — the “worst” Loserball score of the week out of all 32 teams and the only one that finished in the black.

Down With the Browns

Now based in Silver Spring, Maryland, Gruber is a documentary filmmaker who grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where he cut against the grain by rooting for the Red Sox. He also attended Syracuse, making for a youthful athletic confluence that compelled him to quip, “My whole life was leading to Loserball.”

The actual seeds for Loserball were sown when Gruber and a friend, each of whom thought “fantasy sports was a little too serious,” picked an NFL team, declaring that whichever team lost the most would be the winner. Gruber had the good fortune of picking the Cleveland Browns during their winless 2017 season.

“I went to to Cleveland and the parade and thought, ‘Maybe there’s something here for fantasy.’”

After getting serious about this idea, Gruber was also in Cleveland when he won the elevator pitch contest at an industry confab.

“I ran the beta last season and people liked it, so here we are launching,” he said. “We’re trying to thread the needle for people who don’t play fantasy. It’s a total mind shift when you’re watching the game, which is really what’s exciting about it. I call it the Monty Python of fantasy football.”

While Gruber is trying to attract non-fantasy fans, the person who won the beta version of the game last season “was this legendary fantasy baseball guy,” which compelled Gruber to embrace a handful of participating sharps as "Legends of Loserball."

“There is strategy involved,” he conceded. “The Niners or Ravens are not exactly the best Loserball team, but maybe the teams they play against are the ones you want to target. You can see all the categories and they’ve been weighted, so we’ve put a little math into it.

"The handicap is what they start with. Of the 16 categories, 10 of them are based on whether you're a bad team. There are six categories that are the big money plays — pick six, getting a kickoff returned for a touchdown. We take the frequency of how often those teams did those stinky plays and then we weight it, and that's how we come up with a handicap."

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Another All-Expense-Paid Trip to Charlotte?

While this year’s version of Loserball will adhere to the free-to-play format with prizes, Gruber has plans to “add DFS stuff and do these competitions where people can wager money” next season.

As with all things Loserball, the top prize for this year’s winner is tongue-in-cheek: a trip to the city with the NFL team that posts the season’s worst won-loss record. Last year, that was Charlotte. This year, though the sample size is small, it looks like it may be Charlotte again.

The Loserball app features team and game previews, recaps and research that call to mind Defector’s hilarious “Why Your Team Sucks” preseason series.

It is clear that they are penned by Gruber, who summed up Week 1 accordingly: “The Pats were a huge disappointment, but the Vikings met their kryptonite — the Giants!Daniel Jones has clearly come to play after being out last year, and Bryce Young is remarkably consistent. In fact, his jersey goes to the Alarm Week 1 Prize Pool winner for the lowest QB rating of the week. Strong start!”

Looking toward the Week 2 slate, Gruber added: “We are just reviewing the numbers, and it seems like there's a lot of volatility for next week's handicaps compared to Week 1. The Niners are still the dregs, though. It was fun rooting for the Rams to get the -90 collar for giving up 150+ rushing yards in OT. Every play counts in Loserball!”