NPL Awards – 2021
And just like that, the 2021 regular season is in the books. It seemed like just yesterday the Commish was asking people if they still wanted to play. No, I’m not talking about the annual ‘Are you in?’ text. I’m talking about the two different weeks where the NPL set and then tied the record for the most no-shows (with nine!). Squid Game had more willing participants! [pause for laughter]
Not scheduled to make an appearance at tonight’s award ceremony are the Josh Javelineers. They finished with their worst record and accuracy since 2008 and missed out on all the awards, the postseason, and happiness. Cari and Laci make their annual appearances in the Lonesome Losers and Lowest Pick Accuracy categories. Just which category they claim is entirely up to them, it seems. And our lone rookie, Samuel, went against all odds to win Rookie of the Year, but we considered giving it to Miranda, since her three wins were certainly rookie-esque. [even longer pause for laughter]
Today, we are here to announce the lucky winners of the 2021 NPL Awards! A huge congratulations to all the finalists, you have definitely set a very admiring benchmark for all these other losers to imitate. Let’s get to it!
Are We Smarter Than ESPN?
It’s an age-old tradition in the NPL to poke fun at the ‘experts’ at ESPN and their echochamber of opinions when it comes to predicting success in football. Here, we have 28 people that make predicitions based on feelings, statistics, coin flips, whether or not one team would win in an all out brawl over the other team, etc. And consistently, the NPL has held their own.
We took a simple ‘majority rules’ approach to the picks: If more people chose Team A than Team B, then the NPL (or ESPN) pick would be Team A. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how we did in 2016.