The Mother Plucker’s Ramblings

Don’t Be “That Guy” at Your Fantasy Draft by Kristin Wollman 

Fantasy Football…Don’t Be That Guy

Football season is a magical time at the Pluckers headquarters. At any given moment, two or more of us can be heard in a heated discussion defending our position on a player, team, division, game, or quite frankly anything even remotely related to football. Between us, we are involved in 15 fantasy leagues. Add that to the number of guests who host their fantasy football drafts at Pluckers and we’ve become self-proclaimed fantasy football experts.

With all these fantasy drafts under our belts, we’ve noticed a few trends that are not only ridiculous but rather irritating to your fellow drafters.  We thought we’d take a moment to impart our wisdom on to you to help you avoid being ‘that guy’.

The ‘Professional Drafter’ Guy

This is the guy that instead of just naming his player has to say it something like “And with the 2^nd pick in the 2010 [insert clever fantasy league name here] draft, the so and so’s select…” We get it. You’ve watched the NFL draft before.  That bit was clever back in 1991 when people first started playing fantasy football.  Now you are just the tool that we talk about on the side how we can kick you out the league next year.   Hint: Maybe you should spend more time thinking about who you draft and less time on how you draft them. The only thing worse than this guy? The second guy that does it.

The “I’ll take Sidney Rice” Guy

As of blog time, I’ve been to three fantasy drafts and it’s happened in ALL THREE DRAFTS. It’s not that hard.  Don’t rely on a fantasy football magazine that was printed in June.   If this is news to you, you better be a rookie fantasy drafter.  Let me give you another tip: don’t believe it when your buddies tell you Chris Johnson is out for the season. Unless you heard it from me…

The ‘He’s Already Been Drafted’ Guy

You know who you are. You see Cedric Benson still sitting there in the 6^th round and you think, ‘He’s still available in the 6^th round? Idiots!’ Yet when you try to draft him, everyone yells at you because guess what? He’s already been drafted! Listen. If it looks too good to be true – it is!

The ‘Homer’ Guy

I’m a Longhorns fan as much as the next guy, but I’m not taking Jordan Shipley with my 3^rd round pick. I get it. I’m a Ravens fan. Nothing makes me happier than the fact that we finally have an offensive player in the top 5 fantasy player rankings. But I’m also not naïve enough to think Todd Heap is a good tight end pick when Dallas Clark is still available. So, yeah, when you take Vince Young as your starting QB when Drew Brees is still out there? I’m judging you.

The ‘First to Draft a Kicker’ Guy

Do you know the point difference between Nate Kaeding and Jeff Reed? Less than one. So, wasting a pick on the “best” kicker available is simply comical. In my draft last weekend, we made the first person to draft a kicker buy a round of shots for everyone. We thought it was a good compromise for wasting our time with a stupid pick. I highly recommend adopting it.

Listen…we’re not looking into a crystal ball. We don’t claim to have a magic formula to help you win your fantasy league. You can take our advice or leave it. One way or the other, you’ll give us something to discuss in the office after our fantasy drafts. Regardless, we wish you a great fantasy football season and we’ll see you on Sundays!

Much to my business partners chagrin, here I am writing a blog about soccer.  I am not sure what inspired me to write this exactly.  Maybe its that I feel there are a lot of sports fans out there that are missing out on a great sport.  Or maybe I enjoyed seeing Pluckers packed for a lot of the World Cup games.  Or maybe I believe that Landon Donovan’s goal against Algeria will finally help soccer catch on in America.  For those of you reading this that think that Americans don’t care about soccer, check out the security camera at our Baton Rouge store after Donovan scores his goal here.  Or if you want to see another video that brings tears to my eyes every time I see it check out The World Reacts.

I was like you in the past…a soccer hater.  I thought the sport was boring, too European, too many guys rolling around on the ground with fake injuries, etc.  But something has changed me in the past 5 years.  Honestly, I grew up a huge baseball fan, but since the strike in 1995, I have never fallen back in love with baseball.  The NBA?  The players have grown to become such “me-first” people that I find it difficult to want to cheer on any team.  Hell, was it me or was Lebron’s “Decision” the worst 60 minutes of television in the past year?  What genius thought that it was necessary to devote 60 minutes for something that took 3 seconds?  Hockey?  I love the NHL Playoffs, but I won’t even try and sell you on both hockey and soccer in one blog post.

What that left me was a gaping hole between March Madness and the start of the football season.  So I decided to give soccer a shot at first just from April to May.  Over time, I have really learned to appreciate the sport and without boring you, will give you 3 reasons why you should give soccer a chance also if you are a sports fan.

1.  Relegation.  

This is the single greatest concept in sports today.  For those unfamiliar with the concept of relegation, each country has their own football association and the best 20 teams make up their top division.  In England its called the Premier League, it Italy its Serie A, in Spain its La Liga, etc.  Beneath the top division, there is a 2nd division, 3rd division and so on.  Basically, if a team finishes in the bottom 3 of the 20 teams at the end of the year, they get relegated to the 2nd division and the top 3 teams of the 2nd division get promoted to the top division.Think about if we applied that to any American sport.  There would be no expansion, no teams tanking at the end of the season to get a higher draft pick and every game would mean something, especially if your team was having a bad year and could get relegated.  It also means no more having to deal with owners of teams like the Kansas City Royals, LA Clippers, Pittsburgh Pirates and Detroit Lions who consistently put a terrible product on the field, yet charge their fans big bucks to watch them.  Finally, it means that any community, anywhere could start at the bottom and make their way to the top…basically the American Dream.  The concept of relegation is American capitalism in its finest sports form, only we choose not to use it for our sports which is a shame.

2.  Soccer is everything our sports aren’t.  

Personally, I am fine watching 4 hours college football games because there are only 12 of them a year for each team.  However, who wants to watch a four hour baseball game when there are 162 of them?  Soccer is great because you have two 45-minute halves, a short halftime and then its over.  You don’t have to commit an entire day to it on your weekend or more importantly if a game falls on a weekday when you have work.For those of you over 30, you may remember a time when watching sports was just sports.  These days if you are at the stadium we are overwhelmed by jumbotrons, luxury boxes and a theme song for every batter or every trip up the court in the NBA.  Back in the day, you pretty much just had sports at a sporting event.  What a novel concept…attending an NBA game with the purpose of actually watching basketball!  We didn’t need a scoreboard to tell us when to cheer or a cheesy voice telling us to yell “Dee-Fense” every 30 seconds.  We watched the game and knew when to react.

Watch a soccer game and there is nothing but the game.  Even on TV, there are no commercials, no breaks and no sponsors except in the upper corner of your screen.  Sure there is music but that is the chanting of the fans singing throughout the game usually either in support of their heroes or making fun of their opposition.  It is being a sports fan in its purist form in 2010.

3.  Intra-Country Tournaments  

Besides the regular season, there are also a series of tournaments that are held by each country’s football association.  Some of tournaments are between the best of each country like the Champions League or UEFA Cup and others are just within the country.  In England, they have the FA Cup which takes over 700 teams from all levels of football in England and puts them in one tournament.  Its like March Madness, except on an even greater level for potential upsets.  Instead of seeding the top teams to help assure they make it to the final rounds, there is no seeding whatsoever and matchups are chosen at random draw.  Even cooler is that the team that gets to play at home is also picked at random.  To compare this to an American sport, imagine if the New York Yankees had to play an away game against some semi-pro team from New Braunfels (or some other small community).  It’s like that terrible hockey movie Mystery, Alaska except that it actually happens every year.

I could go on and on about other reasons why you should watch soccer, but I am hoping that those three reasons are unique enough to make you want to give it a chance.   Ultimately, you are going to have to get over the fact that there are usually only 6-10 good scoring chances in many games and you have to learn the names of all those foreign players that you can’t pronounce.  However, if you are a sports fan like me, give it a chance for one season (I suggest watching the Premier League on ESPN and Fox Soccer Channel) and see if you enjoy it.  Heck, most of the games are on between 7am and 11am on Saturday and Sunday mornings so you won’t even have to miss any American football.

Hi…my name is Dave and I am a sports addict.  According to my parents, my addiction started at four years old when I was reading the sports page and memorizing the statistics of all the Atlanta Falcons.  Now I don’t remember much of what happened at four, so even I am a bit skeptical about my parents claim that I was reading, much less the sports page (you know how proud parents can be).  However, I have had this verified by their friends so I believe it to be true. 

My addiction continued even after my personal athletic peak at 12 years old.  After 12, I realized that I would never play in a Super Bowl, World Series or NBA Finals.  However, I must say there is still part of me that thinks I just grew up in the wrong country and maybe I would have been an Olympic Gold Medalist ski jumper or curler if I had been playing those my whole life. 

Unfortunately, I have many vices but I have to think my sports addiction affects my life more than anything else.  Recently, I was thinking back about my life as a sports fan and wanted to verify if I was truly an “addict” or just fanatical about sports.  First I thought about the 10 greatest moments of my life and wanted to see how many of them were related to sports.  Here they are in no particular order:

·      Morton Andersen kicking the game winning field goal to send the Falcons to the Super Bowl in 1998.

·      Starting the Tomahawk Chop at an Atlanta Braves game in 1991.  Don’t worry, no one else believes it either, but on my daughter’s life, I swear it is true.

·      Singing the Eyes of Texas in the Rose Bowl after Vince’s touchdown run against USC to win the National Championship.

·      Stealing home to win the game when I was 7 years old in Little League.  They called me “Crazy Legs” Paul in the Morgan Falls weekly newsletter.

·      Francisco Cabrera’s game winning hit to lead the Braves past the Pirates in the NLCS in 1992.

·      Being at Reunion Arena and watching the Dallas Stars finally exorcise their demons and beating the hated Avalanche in 1999.

·      Taking a picture with AC/DC’s Angus Young while we are both holding up devil horns over our heads a la the Highway to Hell cover.

·      Losing my virginity

·      My wedding.

·      The birth of my child

So there it is.  7 of the 10 greatest moments of my life had something to do with sports.  Actually, the last two are debatable but I didn’t want my wife to cut me off for the next three months so I had to throw those in there.

So I figured it was time to scour the internet and determine if I was clinically a sports addict. My search took me to addictions.com to find out if my symptoms qualified me as an addict.  Here are the symptoms of addiction and my findings:

Symptom #1:  Extreme mood changes – happy, sad, excited, anxious, etc


Most people who know me would say I am a bit of a hard-ass, somewhat insensitive and have never seen me cry.  I have had four different grandparents pass away, a family dog die and relationships end.  Although all of these things made me sad, they usually don’t bring me to tears.  Let me give you three pathetic examples of sports movies I can name off the top of my head that make me look like a chick at the end of Steel Magnolias.

1.    Anytime I watch Rudy make the sack on the final play in “Rudy”.  I have probably seen this movie 100 times.  I can turn it on at the beginning, middle or end, but two things are for certain….first, I will watch it until the end and second, I will cry like a bitch.  Is there something wrong with this?  Maybe.  But if you are a dude and you don’t cry at about 5 points during this movie (when the Notre Dame players turn in their jerseys for Rudy, when the crowd chants “Rudy, Rudy, Rudy”, etc.) I don’t think I can be friends with you.

2.    When Ollie hits the game winning free throw in Hoosiers.  Not only do I cry when he hits the free throw, tears will start welling up in my eyes about 30 seconds before he gets to the foul line just knowing it is going to happen.  “Didn’t know they grew em’ so small down on the farm”.  Oh yeah?  Here’s a couple of underhanded free throws for you, so take your lame ass back to Deerlick or wherever you come from!

3.    Here’s the topper…I cry when Daniel Larusso goes into his infamous crane stance and wins the All Valley Karate Tournament.  Partly it is because Daniel is the ultimate underdog, but mostly it is because he kicks all-time 80’s movie a**hole Billy Zabka in the face.  Whether he was playing Johnny Lawrence in Karate Kid, Greg Tolan in Just One of the Guys or Chas in Back to School, Zabka was portrayed as the typical blonde, popular American high school douchebag who needed a good asskicking and on that day, one of the great American actors of all time (or at least of 1984), Ralph Macchio had the honors.

Symptom #2:  Sleeping a lot more or less than usual, or at different times of day or night


Hmmm…lets see..it’s currently 3:15am and I am watching the replay of the LA Kings vs Vancouver Canucks.  On Saturday I woke up at 6:45am on three hours sleep to watch Manchester United knock off Manchester City.  So yeah, I guess I qualify.

Symptom #3  - Weight loss or weight gain


I would say my weight varies by about 10 pounds during the fall and summer.  The difference?  Football.  You think sitting on a couch or at Pluckers for 25 hours over the course of a weekend isn’t healthy?  Try compounding that with the fact that I have to drink beer to calm my nerves if the Horns, Bulldogs or Falcons are playing.  Then more beer to chill me out if I have a bet on a game that is on tv, which only happens about 21 times during a football weekend.  Those 6000 calorie days definitely don’t help keep the lb’s off.

Symptom #4 – Destroying relationships because of your addiction

In college I was dating a girl for a few months that I really liked.  Everything was too perfect…she was cute, sweet and we got along all the time.  Then, football season came around.  A couple of weeks into football season she told me that I had to make a choice each Saturday and choose between watching the Horns and the Dawgs because she wanted us to spend more time together on the weekend.  So I called my mom and asked her opinion (see mom I actually do care about your opinion sometimes). 

As a woman, you would have expected her to tell me to make a compromise for the girl…maybe watch some football, hang out with her a little, then watch some more football.  Luckily my mom knows me better than that and she told me “Dave, I have known you since you were born.  You may think you love that girl right now, but any girl that won’t let you watch football, will never be someone you can spend your life with”.  It was great advice and I took it. Three days later, we broke up.

Symptom #5 - Seeming unwell at certain times, and better at other times


I feel bad for most women.  The truth is that no matter how much you think you love shopping, puppies, men or whatever else you do for fun, you will never, ever love anything as much as a guy loves sports.  Women are just entirely too rational to understand a man’s feeling about his favorite team.  Here is a typical conversation I have with my wife about when one of my favorite teams loses:

Mrs. Plucker:  Why do you let the (insert team name here) loss affect you all day or all week?  It isn’t like you had any control over the outcome.

Me:  Please leave me alone and let me be miserable.

Mrs. Plucker:  Come on, you can’t really be that miserable over a stupid game!

Me:  Not only will I be miserable today, but you can expect me not to want to talk to anyone for the next three days.  If you are lucky enough that I acknowledge your existence over these three days, please realize that I didn’t take this loss as badly as some losses.  In these cases I will not want to be social for at least one week.

Mrs. Plucker:  Well please explain to me why you feel this way?

Me:  Here is $100, please go shopping.

The reality is that most men can’t explain to you why we are so happy when our team wins and why we are so upset when they lose so stop trying to make us!

Symptom #6 – Making yourself believe in things that do not exist.

In my 37 years on this earth, I still have not truly determined if I believe in any one God, Allah, Jesus, or whatever each religion calls their god.  You see, these gods rarely manifest themselves in everyday life.  However, I have empirical proof that some gods do exist.  These are the gambling gods and the sports gods.  These gods are more powerful than any god you may worship.  You see, you may ask your god for something in your life and occasionally he or she will acknowledge your measly presence.  However, the gambling gods and sports gods absolutely have rules and if you break these rules, you are doomed to accept whatever fate they have for you.  Here are just a few irrefutable rules of the gambling gods and sports gods. 

Rule #1:  If you ever mention in passing to a friend that your team is playing well, your team will inevitably lose.  That’s just how it works.  Sometimes, you can use phrases that acknowledge these gods and they will accept your compliment of your team, but only if it is tied to something pessimistic.  For instance, if you say “Damn the Horns looks great tonight!”, you have singlehandedly just cost Texas a win.  Now if you say something like, “Although the Horns look great tonight, I am sure they will blow it in the end”, you are acknowledging to the gods that you respect them and this will not cause an inevitable loss.

Rule #2:  Never mention to a friend which games you have money on.  I have been betting on football since I was 13 years old and I am pretty good at it.  However it isn’t that I watch more football or know more football than the average guy, it is because I respect the gambling gods.  I have had to learn this the hard way.  My friends say I am prone to hyperbole (and this may be true), but when I say I have never, ever won a game that I have openly admitted to gambling on, please believe me.  We are talking hundreds of games here folks.  This can’t be a mere coincidence. 

For instance, this year I had Indiana +17 against Iowa.  That means that Indiana only needs to lose by less than 17 points for me to win my bet.  With 7:23 left in the 3rd quarter, the score is Indiana 21 – 7 and Indiana is driving to score again on the Iowa 20.  I am covering the game by 31 points, with the ball and less than 23 minutes left in the game.  Being an idiot I call my friend that also has money on the game and we start talking about how smart we were, how we knew Iowa was primed for a letdown and just in general how great life is.  BAM!  Iowa returns an interception for a touchdown. 

No problem, Indiana gets the ball back, drive, kicks a field goal and then is driving again and I am now up 28 points for my bet with 13 minutes in the game.  There is no way Indiana cannot cover.  I am talking “no way” as in the “no way” you will ever win the lottery.  We are talking 20 gazillion to 1 that they don’t cover.  Needless to say, over the next 13 minutes the gambling gods literally pull out my heart and stomp on it for my transgression and Indiana misses the cover by 1 point.  Some people may think that Iowa started playing better or that Indiana choked the game away.  I know the truth….it was my fault for talking about my bet.  Sorry Hoosiers, I owe you one.

Rule #3:  Always be pessimistic about the team you are rooting for.  Many of my friends can’t stand watching games with me.  I will never give my team any credit.  I am always waiting for the worst to happen…and you know what?  It helps my team to victory.  You see, the gambling and sports gods respect a man that will publicly make himself and everyone around him miserable in respect of their aura. 

Conclusion

After looking at all of the evidence, I have concluded that I am a sports addict.  For many addicts, recognizing that they have a problem is the first step in the rehabilitation process.   Unfortunately for my friends and family, I would rather meet an early surmise than to give up my addiction (hey that’s another symptom of an addict!).  As for you, the Pluckers guest, please know that I will dedicate the rest of my life to making sure that Pluckers is the best place for other addicts to meet and commiserate.  Whether it is adding more sports programming, more plasmas or whatever is necessary to feed your addiction, I am here for you.  Screw it, following the 12 Steps are for quitters anyways. 

Being the owner of a restaurant can be very difficult at times.  Mark, Sean and I are all very prideful people and we want most every guest that dines with us to have a “WOW” experience.  I am sure that sentence stopped you there for a second.  Why is he saying “most every guest” and not all guests?  Well, over the years we have figured out something that is key to Pluckers being successful.  This essential secret is that we cannot make all of the people happy all of the time.  Most businesses live by adages such as “the customer is always right” or “we will do anything to please the customer”.  At Pluckers, we live by a different set of rules. (more…)

Last night, we closed all of our Austin restaurants to celebrate the holidays with our employees at our annual Christmas party.  As one of the owners of Pluckers, I can’t tell you great it is to see hundreds of smiling faces being able to take the night off and enjoying themselves in an atmosphere away from work.  We even had many “Pluckers Alumni” coming back to hang out with us.  No matter how much personal success we may have in the future, Mark, Sean and I take no greater pride than in helping better the lives of the people in our company and watching them grow as people at Pluckers.

We have unfortunately grown to the point that we are no longer able to remember the name of every person in our company. However, it is a great feeling when employee after employee comes up to us at the party to thank us for allowing them to work at Pluckers.  Because this is the only real job any of us has ever had, its sometimes hard for us to understand just how many people do not enjoy the place they work at.  Hearing from our employees is always a special reminder of how much the things we do at Pluckers mean to them and how important it will always be for us to strive to create a better working culture for them.  Here is an email I received last night from one of our newer managers that helps better explain this.

 “Hello Gentlemen, I hope this day finds you with not too bad of a headache.  My wife and I thank you for the opportunity (and good excuse) to get out of the house and punt the children to the Grandparents.  It was a good time with a new flock of co-workers and I had the best time at a Christmas party, that I’ve not had in over 10 years. You all run a refreshing company and I sure am enjoying myself.”

While the title of this blog may seem a little egomaniacal or cocky, I really just wanted to share with you one of the secrets of our success.  For anyone that runs a business or manages people, I would like to think that this may inspire you or at the least give you a better understanding of just how easy it can be to become more successful at your job.  As Pluckers has evolved over the years, we have had the opportunity to meet many people in the restaurant industry and exchange ideas on everything from menu items to accounting practices to real estate.  I’d like to think that people enjoy the food at our restaurant, the plasma televisions, Trivia Night and all the other fun things we do that separate us from the common wing place.  However, the thing I think we are strongest at and what makes Pluckers great is our people.

Whether or not you have worked in the restaurant industry before, anyone who has every held a job knows how rare it is find a place that you enjoy working at.  To Mark, Sean and I, there is nothing we are more passionate about than our people.  We truly believe that almost all you have to do to be successful in almost any industry is to hire, coach and inspire the people that work for you to care about their jobs.  Once you show your people the love, it is almost inevitable that your business will become successful.  Its almost mind-boggling how few businesses today understand this simple concept.  When we talk with fellow restaurant executives at conferences, 90% of the topics they want to talk about are food costs or marketing or reducing labor costs.  90% of what we want to talk about is the pursuit to finding better people to work with us and learning better ways to take care of them.

The people that work for us work very hard and we are incredibly demanding of them.  We do not demand that are perfect all of the time…god knows we mess up way too many of your meals to say we are perfect.  However, we ask them to strive for perfection all the time.  It is this pursuit of perfection in taking care of our guests that we believe allows you to understand when we make mistakes because you know that we care about you.  To get your staff caring about your guests, you have to show them that you care about them.   To let you behind the curtain a little, here are some of the things  we are proud of that are different than most restaurants or businesses.

•          Over the past few years we have taken all of our general managers on an all-expense paid trip to Las Vegas.  And by the way, this isn’t the $5.99 all you can eat buffet way to go to Vegas.  We stay in the best hotels, eat at the best restaurants and take everyone VIP in the clubs.  This year we are headed to New Orleans and we have decided to expand that group to our office employees as well as many other people we work with in business life that help make us successful. 

•          We believe that holding people accountable for their actions is one of the most important lessons you can teach an employee.  We also believe that rewarding them accordingly when they do a great job must happen for them to continue to improve.  Most of our general managers have the ability to make over $100,000 a year with the bonuses we make available to them.  That is about 50% more than the typical restaurant GM makes.  People always ask us why we pay our people so much.  We tell them that we don’t pay them that much, they earn it.  We give them the tools to treat our business as if it were their own and want them to have the chance to nurture the entrepreneurial spirit inside of them. 

•          Every year during the Summer, we close the restaurants and have Pluckers Field Day.  Each of our stores compete against each other in events like the three-legged race, tug of war and the infamous Twinkie eating contest.  This idea was inspired by two of our General Managers who felt that every so often we need to bring out the child inside us.  As hard as they work, Munson Stodder and Todd Winiger spend countless hours each July planning the event for the employees not because they get paid to do it, but because they love the people they work with. 

•          Most of the restaurant industry is a churn and burn type of business.  Our goal is to develop every person that we hire to become anything they set their mind to with our company.  Where many restaurants typically hire people from the outside, a large portion of our staff is from employee referrals because they want their friends to experience Pluckers with them.  In addition, we are proud to say that almost every General Manager at our store started off as a cook, server or delivery driver in our company. 

•          The average Pluckers employee has about 100 hours of training before they are allowed to work on their own.  This includes attending employee orientations, studying for tests, reading manuals and on the job training.  Where many companies talk about cutting training costs to make more money, we believe the only way for an employee to feel good about their job performance is to make sure they have a full understand of our expectations and how to be successful with us. 

Really I could go on and on with this subject, but I think you get the point.  If you want to be successful in business, you’ve really got to spend time building relationships with the people you work with.  When other people ask us “How can you afford to do all of these things for your employees?”, we ask “How can we afford not to?”