the Bakers can still achieve a franchise-first, non-losing season.
DENNEY VOWS COMEBACK
$20 million rides on return to .500
By Ariel Mutha-Tafoya, Fantasy Sports Network
With a loss this weekend to the Cambridge Animals, the 12th Avenue Bakers could make NFFA history, as the first team to start a season 0-7. But if that happens, owner GQ Denney also plans to make history again by becoming the first 0-7 team to finish the season at 7-7.
A Bakers’ rally of such magnitude is not unprecedented. In fact, Denney is already “calling down the echoes,” as he put it in an interview Tuesday, of 2004’s “November to Remember,” when the Bakes ran off six straight wins and nearly earned a playoff spot. Coach Randy Warhol and the members of that 2004 team are enshrined in bronze in a small museum behind the main bar of Denney’s Cherry Bomb Café. (Warhol took over midway through the season after interim coach Dead Lombardi — who succeeded a coach whose name was never known and was fired after three games — was killed in a freak tractor accident at Denney’s Hohenwald farm.) The museum has been padlocked for the past two years.
Complicating the story, FSN has learned that injuries and bad luck were not the only factors behind the Bakers’ abysmal start.
In an exclusive interview, East Nashville coach Jim McMahon revealed that Denney was confused by a passing remark about a spoof fantasy league, sponsored by The Onion, in which teams attempt to score the fewest possible points. Denney apparently believed that McMahon instead was briefing him on rule changes under the new Fanstar system. During a long weekend involving substances ranging from Maui Zowie to “medicinal LSD,” Denney’s misimpressions about new scoring rules were confirmed during his “conversations” with portraits of Vince Lombardi and John Coltrane that hang on one wall of Denney’s penthouse residence.
“After that,” said Devlin Redd, head bartender at the Cherry Bomb Café, Q said he was ‘going nil, like in Spades.’ He even called a team meeting and told his quarterbacks, Philip Rivers and Drew Brees, to ‘lose one for the Gipper — every week.’”
Redd claims that McMahon took extra advantage of Denney’s misunderstanding by betting him $10 million that the Bakers could not make it through the entire season scoring fewer points than every other team every week. McMahon had just received his entire $12 million salary for 2008 in advance, Redd said.
Denney, according to several sources, accepted the bet. The Bakers cruised successfully behind everyone for the first four weeks before “being set” in Week Five, when they were under-scored by the Atlanta Smack Daddies. Fanstar league reports show that the Bakers’ record would be 1-41 through Week Six had they played every team every week.
How Denney learned that the actual Fanstar rules involve attempting to outscore opponents is unclear. In any event, it was too late to save the $10 million he had wagered with McMahon. “We were wonderfully bad, but I guess we weren’t quite bad enough to be perfect,” Denney admitted wistfully in an interview.
Now, however, McMahon has agreed to a double-or-nothing bet that the Bakers won’t be able to reach the .500 mark by season’s end. In fact, says Redd, it was McMahon who proposed the bet by reminding Denney of the heartwarming “2004 High” story and leading him on a tour of the closed museum in the Cherry Bomb.
The Bakers would have to go 7-1 the rest of the way to avoid a losing season.
Denney is staking another $10 million that it can be done. As an extra incentive for the team, he has promised each of them an ownership stake in the Sodbakers Grass Care business if they reach their goal. But even if he loses, he will remain philosophical. “Satan giveth,” he said, “and Satan taketh away.”
