[Tiger Fan]

There is no sim today, so no new edition of This Week in Figment Sports (TWIFS) but I thought it would be a good time to give some background info on the Figment Universe for those not in our league who have been following along. The Figment sporting universe is the brainchild of our commissioner, who goes by legendsport on these boards and has this website as the main hub for our universe. He is the architect of the universe but there are plenty others involved in the construction as many General Managers from our leagues contribute to these weekly updates.

We typically sim five days a week (Mon-Fri) and with every sport advancing at the same time by one calendar week -which is why the TWIFS updates generally appear once a day during the week. The first online league was FABL -our baseball league- which began in 1876 as a solo sim that our commissioner quickly advanced to the end of the 1925 season, at which point our 16 human General Manager's took over. We are now spring training of 1950 and many of the original GMs remain in the league.

Legendsport had been simming other sports along with the baseball and in the early 1940s those other sports went live as well. Presently our hockey league - the North American Hockey Confederation- is in its first season with FHM10 after having human GMs for three seasons with FHM9. We also have a pro basketball league - called the Federal Basketball League- which is in its third season as an online league using Fastbreak Pro Basketball. It traces its pre-play history back to the mid-1930s. Finally, there is the professional football league, called the American Football Association. Because of the way the game was played in this era and the lack of a suitable sim with online capability and the ability to replicate pre-1960 football the AFA currently is a solo sim project ran alongside the rest of the universe and update weekly using a game engine called Second and Ten football.

There are other sports to fill out the universe as well that are solo simmed along. They include college football (using an excel based program that generates results) and college basketball (using Fastbreak College Basketball) as well as boxing which uses Title Bout that used to be offered here on the OOTP site.

SPORTS ARE FICTIONAL, EVERYTHING ELSE IS REAL

At some point in the early days of Figment our commissioner made the point known to all that everything outside of sports in this universe will be just as it was in real life. That explains why many of our best athletes missed up to 4 seasons serving during WWII and why we include the weekly news section at the bottom of each edition of TWIFS. All of the sports in Figment will be fictional - players, teams, venues, executives- but everything will be designed to closely resemble real life. That is why we had legendary hitters by the names of Max Morris (who hit 711 homers in our sim) and Rankin Kellogg, whose career was cut short by illness (think Ruth and Gehrig). We have two baseball teams based in New York (the Gothams and Stars) and one in Brooklyn (the Kings), we have six teams in our professional hockey league, we have a dominant heavyweight champion by the name of Hector Sawyer (think Joe Louis) and we have the most famous venue in sports being Bigsby Garden in New York City named after an infamous family in early baseball history that still has ancestors shaping the sport now. We had a rebel football league called the Continental Football Conference that existed from 1946-49 before folding a couple of months ago with three of its teams including the mighty Kansas City Cowboys led by coach Pete Walsh and quarterback Pat Chappell (think Cleveland Browns) join the AFA for next season.

There were some differences too. For example, in our universe the Great Western League (our version of the AAA PCL) decided to follow the CFC's footsteps and declare itself a "major" league. It, like the CFC, recently folded with the teams disbanding or returning to AAA status but not until after large multi-purpose stadiums were built in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Each will house an AFA team but there is already speculation that one of our New York ballclubs (the Stars) and one of the two Philadelphia teams (the Sailors and Keystones) will move west in the near future. Or perhaps FABL will expand beyond its current 16 team structure.

I mentioned our college system which is called the AIAA (American Intercollegiate Athletic Association) and is our version of the NCAA. Like the pro teams, all of our colleges are fictional but upon close inspection you can surmise which real life school many of them are based on.

UNIVERSE HAS PLENTY OF TIE-INS TO UNITE SPORTS

The centerpiece of the Figment universe is the Barrell family with members having their hands in all of our sports. They might be the only piece of the universe that is perhaps just a little too incredulous for a real-life counterpart although perhaps the Conacher family might come close.

You can read about the Barrell clan here in a dynasty thread that has been going since around the time of inception of the league. Barrell's are involved in all of the major sports in one capacity or another but there are plenty of other connections and just the right number of brother combinations, father and son combos and two-sport stars to feel like it is realistic.

Many of our GMs run teams in the same city in multiple sports to add to the immersion and many interesting storylines that cross sports have developed over the years.

OPENINGS IF YOU WISH TO JOIN

As just mentioned, many of our GMs run clubs in multiple sports- I am the GM of the Detroit Dynamos (baseball), Mustangs (basketball) and Motors (hockey) and will take the Maroons (football) as soon as football welcomes human GMs- but there is no requirement to participate in all sports. Some of our GMs write articles for TWIFS and some just make occasional posts on our slack channel that can be incorporated into articles done by myself or others but there is also no requirement to do so. If you are interested in joining one or more of the leagues send our commissioner legendsport a message. If you are enjoying following along in this thread and like watching sports history unfold I am sure you are the type of GM we would love to welcome to the league.