It’s fantasy football for the cynic. It’s the dispirited fan’s chance to make something useful of their woeful team. And a new way to fade a rival.
Loserball celebrates the joy of being right about teams with so much going wrong, creator Jonathan Gruber believes.
“It’s embracing the suck,” he said. “The mental shift, it’s really changing a paradigm.”
The paradigm is simple: Fans enter free-to-play contest pools, select three teams they expect to struggle on a given NFL weekend and earn negative points as they compile hopefully rotten statistics. A handicap figure for each team adds an element of strategy. Predicting the suck for an otherwise successful team can be lucrative.
In Week 1, Gruber had the Rams among his selections, and going to overtime in a 26-20 loss against Detroit was a welcome development.
“I was so happy that there was overtime because they needed to give up 150 yards rushing [to earn points],” Gruber said. “And it was … 135, 143. I’m like …
‘Come on, give up some yards! Get the negative points!’
Gruber said he doesn’t understand the new NFL dynamic kickoff rule, but thinks it has prospects for being good for business. It fits the idea.
“The more chaotic, the more things go wrong,” he said, laughing, “the more we jump for joy.”
Loserball: Multiple Ways to Embrace Bad
There are multiple paths to joy via infamy. Fans can pick a despised foe and glory in their demise. And if they fade their beloved franchise and that sad sack lot somehow succeeds, a bad Loserball day means success in the real NFL. And the game is free to play anyway.
“If someone is like ‘I cannot wait to make Pittsburgh my team because I hate the Steelers,’ now they can root for them to suck, but they’ll win,” Gruber said. “And what’s also cool is that if you are a long-suffering, say Jets fan or a Commanders fan, and you pick those teams in Loserball and they do well in Loser ball, then you’re winning at Loserball.
“But if they don’t do well, then they’re doing in theory, traditionally well. So it’s kind of a win-win.”
Gruber said plans are underway for a daily fantasy sports-style game offering player futility markets for failures like blocked punts or missed field goals.
NOTE: Gaming Today played along this weekend, and learned the handicap figures are huge factors in decision-making. Handicaps are assigned using a three-year assessment of 10 key statistics of frustration — such as missed field goals — and don’t necessarily reflect records. The handicap must be overcome during a game as a team works into the negative. The higher the handicap, the worse team in these key Loserball categories.
Entering Week 3, even at 1-1 and with a bevy of key injuries, San Francisco is a 0 handicap. Minnesota, at 2-0 and with a win over the 49ers in Week 2, has the highest Loserball handicap at 167 because of its struggles trouble in the 10 key categories over the last three seasons.
We went with Panthers, Falcons and Broncos, scoring -443 points, good for 162nd place. A player behind the handle “JDanger0” claimed the Week 3 win at -1919 with three low-handicap teams — the Raiders and Saints even won — and the Titans.
Loserball Has Roots in City of Non-Champions
The germ for Loserball sprung from a sort of reverse-eliminator contest between Gruber and a friend. Entrants picked a team they thought would lose the most games in a season and cheer (jeer?) along the journey.
“We just felt that fantasy football was way too complicated and way too serious,” Gruber (right), a documentary filmmaker for 25 years told Gaming Today. “It was just contrarian, a little subversive. We gave out paraphernalia for the winning/losing team. But what was so much fun was the banter, all year long just speaking in opposites, like, ‘Oh, my team has the home-field disadvantage’ or ‘They collapsed scoring all those points.’
“We just had a great time flipping all the sports cliches on their head.”
Cleveland Sowed the Seeds of Loserball Twice
Gruber still relishes his ‘perfect’ season of 2017, when he drafted what he deemed “the dynasty that is the Cleveland Browns.” Gruber giddily watched Cleveland roll (over) to 0-16, becoming just the 12th team to go winless since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970.
Gruber even attended the sublime commemoration/wake Browns fans held around the stadium. And then a hard, five-below wind off Lake Erie blew in an idea.
“I thought maybe there’s something in here for fantasy,” he said.
But there needed to be more engagement. The original reverse eliminator idea had nothing else to keep players involved except grinding toward the final record at the end of the season.
“We wanted to create an experience so people could be engaged on every play,” Gruber said. “So whether it’s incomplete passes or if you’ve got a team and they’re on the offensive side, you’re rooting for a pick-6 or a sack allowed.
“If you’re on the defensive side, you’re rooting for yardage to get given up, points to get given up, completed passes. … It needed to be a little bit more detailed to make it sticky and have it be something that’s more than just people tune in from winning and losing.”
Gruber augmented and tweaked his concept, concocted an algorithm — although he’s not a coder — and was ready to move until the COVID-19 pandemic shelved the project for nearly two years. Then he found an encouraging reception to his idea and the reassurance it was unique at a Fantasy Sports and Gaming Association convention in Las Vegas in 2023.
Later that year, at the organization’s summer conference in, again, Cleveland, Gruber returned to the scene of his big idea and won an elevator pitch competition for what would become Loserball.
“That was really validating,” he said.
Hot Paper Lantern CEO Ed Moed and fantasy sports industry pioneer Rick Wolf came aboard as advisors. Moed said he was impressed not only with Gruber’s enthusiasm and research but the potential of a “head-turner” app that could be converted to real money eventually and appeal to dabblers and the semi-serious heckling each other on office Slack accounts.
“There’s a real opportunity if you do it right,” he said.
After hiring a developmental team to craft a beta product, Gruber launched Loserball for the final three weeks of the 2023 NFL season and playoffs, with about a hundred users registering. The site has around 1,100 registered users entering Week 3 of this NFL season. The champion of the largest season-long league, “Pigskin Pandemonium,” will win a trip to the city with the least-successful NFL franchise.
Charlotte is lovely that time of year.
Will Loserball Expand to Other Sports?
There will be losers and failures in any sport, so Gruber sees his creation as applicable broadly. Very broadly beyond North American pro sports and global soccer.
“Eventually, we would want to get to India for cricket,” Gruber said, “where there are 200 million fantasy cricket players out there. And once I figure out how to play cricket, we can do a loser ball version of it.”
Because there is so much suck to embrace.
More Fantasy Football:
About the Author
