THE
COMMITITEE

The Commititee was founded in the spring of 2019 by Trevor Shaw, who had been quietly lobbying his social circle for years to form a league worth taking seriously. The founding meeting was held on April 6th at Mike O’Regan’s apartment at 10 Crillon Road in Worcester, Massachusetts — a compromise from Trevor’s original plan to host it in Nashua. The constitution was drafted primarily by Shaw and O’Regan, the latter of whom, in Trevor’s words, “covered half the document alone.”

The original roster stood at eleven owners before Ryan Belleville was confirmed as the twelfth. Carello proposed Vegas for the draft within the first week of the chat. O’Regan countered with Dave & Busters in Providence. Macsata suggested Montreal. Montreal won. The league’s identity as a traveling outfit was set before the first pick was ever made.

The inaugural season launched in August 2019, with a Google Sheets draft board, a Yahoo platform debate that nearly derailed the whole thing, and a $200 bottle of champagne that Trevor called a commissioner’s gift at a Montreal club. Drew Egger won the first championship. The Commititee was born.

From the beginning, the annual draft trip was the structural backbone of the league. Every year, owners convene in a new city for a weekend built around the draft — a tradition that has taken the league to Montreal, Raleigh, Nashville, Savannah, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and Brownfield, Maine. The trip is voted on by owners each offseason, with proposals, debates, and formal votes that often generate more chat activity than the actual season.

The COVID year of 2020 was the only season the format was truly tested. Macsata cited case counts in Wake County and pulled out. Pratt’s employer required a two-week quarantine for travel. Clark stayed home. Nine owners made the trip to Raleigh anyway, with the remote contingent joining by Zoom. Pratt, drafting from his laptop in Massachusetts, won the championship. Some felt this was appropriate. Others did not.

The draft trip is the event that keeps the league honest. It forces attendance, creates memories, and generates the kind of shared history that makes the group chat worth reading. Through seven years and seven cities, not a single champion has repeated.

For the first four years of the league, team names were entirely self-directed. Owners named their teams whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted, and changed them as often as the mood struck. The results were varied: I’m Shit Outta Luck, Tank for Tua, My Ball Zach Ertz, The 21 Beekeepers, Collusion, RENT FREE. Barney alone went through four distinct identities across the first four seasons. The chat was colorful. The records were a mess.

In June 2023, Commissioner Shaw issued a directive: “I think everyone should follow a city mascot team name format. Gives it more of a franchise feel.” The proposal passed. Owners were required to adopt a permanent [City] [Nickname] identity going forward. The idea was to treat the league as a proper franchise operation — not just a rotating collection of inside jokes, but a set of stable organizations with real geographic homes and institutional history.

The transition was not entirely clean. Egger’s announcement — “I have rebranded… THE WALRUSES COMING FOR THAT ASS” — set the tone. Norm had to be personally reminded by the commissioner to update his name. Barney, true to form, rebranded three more times after the rule was introduced. But the framework held, and by 2024 the league had twelve stable franchise identities with real locations, nicknames, and a growing sense of institutional permanence.

The franchise model also marked the moment the league fully committed to its own mythology. Team histories, travel records, championship lineages — all of it becomes more meaningful when the names stay consistent. The Commititee in 2025 bears little resemblance to the eleven-man proto-league that gathered in Worcester in 2019, but the constitution, the draft trip, and the group chat form an unbroken thread.

The league has had fourteen unique owners across its history, with the core group of ten remaining intact since 2021. Ryan Belleville, one of the original eleven, departed after the inaugural season. Norm Harris joined in 2020, the same year Belleville left, and has been a fixture ever since — finishing runner-up in his third season and sweeping the in-season, points, and all-play championships in 2025.

Matt Pratt was the league’s most colorful periodic presence — a genuine fantasy mind who won the 2020 championship remotely, built legitimate contenders, and was immortalized in the chat when his wife Jaclyn was overheard commenting on his reaction to a playoff loss. He departed after the 2023 season. Josh Levene joined in 2024, inherited the franchise, and went 9-5 in his first season — a strong debut that fell short of the playoffs. Logan McConnell, who had been quietly building toward a title for six seasons, won the 2024 championship. Levene has yet to reach the final.

The Commititee runs on a heavily customized scoring system built at the founding meeting in Worcester and refined through annual votes ever since. The active roster is 1 QB, 3 WR, 2 RB, 1 TE, 1 W/R/T flex, 1 K, and 1 DEF, with seven bench spots and one IR slot. The league moved from Yahoo Fantasy Football to Sleeper.com ahead of the 2023 season. Entry fees are $375 per team, with a $2,400 first-place prize, $900 for second, and $150 for third. A $10 weekly low-score fee keeps every game meaningful through December.

The scoring system departs from standard settings in meaningful ways. Passing first downs are worth a quarter-point, interceptions cost two points instead of one, and rushing and receiving first downs each score bonus points. Defensive scoring uses a 12-point baseline regardless of points allowed, with a half-point deduction per point surrendered — making a dominant defensive performance genuinely valuable rather than a flat bonus. A defense that allows zero points and fewer than 100 yards earns a retroactive ten-point bonus. A kicker who breaks the all-time field goal distance record earns ten bonus points. A safety is worth four points. The result is a scoring environment that rewards depth at every position and punishes lazy roster management.

The keeper system is the strategic core of the league. Each owner receives one A-tier keeper and one B-tier keeper per season, with no hard cap on total keepers — additional keeper rights can be acquired through trades. A keeper costs one round earlier than where the player was drafted the previous year. A B-tier keeper can only be used in the eighth round or later; an A-tier keeper can be used in any round. A first-round keeper from the prior year requires both an A and B keeper combined with a first-round pick. Players drafted in the first or second round can only be kept one consecutive season; third-round and later picks can be kept two consecutive seasons. A red-shirt rookie — a player rostered before Week 1 but never started — can be kept the following year without using a keeper pick at all, then follows normal escalation from year three onward.

The draft order is determined by a 45-cup beer pong lottery, with 25 labeled cups and 20 blanks assembled in random order. Cups are allocated based on prior-year results: playoff teams receive 4% odds each, non-playoff teams start at 8%, and consolation bracket winners earn bonus odds ranging from 4% to 8%. The winner of the Sacko Bowl — last place — earns additional lottery odds, a small consolation for the obligation to organize the next year’s lodging and maintain the live draft board during the draft. Failure to wear your official team jersey to the draft costs you your sixth and seventh round picks to the end of those rounds. Attempting to draft an already-drafted player with conviction costs you your spot in that round entirely — a rule named the Colin Rose Draft Penalty.

The six-team playoffs run weeks 15–17, mirroring the NFL conference playoff structure. Seeds 1 and 2 receive byes; the bracket reseeds each round so the top remaining seed always faces the lowest. The non-playoff field runs its own consolation bracket simultaneously, with named bowl games at every level — the Mediocre Bowl, the Pity Bowl, the Lottery Odds Bowl, the Peaked in High School Bowl, and the Sacko Bowl. The trade deadline falls at the end of Week 9. Every draft is a negotiation between what a team needs now and what it wants to preserve for next year. Seven seasons in, no single approach has dominated. Seven champions, seven different owners.