9 Candidates; 1 Game: Announcing The Peach Pundit Fantasy Football Invitational Tournament

Even those of us who are total political junkies can grow tired of campaign cycles that never seem to end. As you recall, we were already trying to decide who the front runner for the Republican 2012 Presidential nomination would be before the toe tags had officially been placed on the McCain Palin ticket.

As long as the campaigns seem for us, they are even longer for the candidates. Some have already been running for over a year, and we have almost a year before the first primary votes are cast in the 2010 elections; over a year before the general.

The days grow long, evenings and weekends are spent eating bad chicken dinners and listening to an increasingly polarized electorate giving each candidate their sure fire “it’s just that simple” fixes to the problems that they perceive to be most important.

It is with this backdrop in our frame of mind that we have invited 9 candidates and/or elected officials to help us break this monotany and have some fun. Let’s face it, these folks have already hit most of the “inside” crowd a few times, and the general public won’t be engaged until after the general assembly disburses next spring. We’re in a lull, and we’re going to fill it with some football.

The nine participants who have graciously agreed to participate, in alphabetical order, are as follows:

Congressman and Candidate for Governor Nathan Deal (R)
Secretary of State and Candidate for Governor Karen Handel (R)
Senator and Candidate for Governor Eric Johnson (R)
City Councilman and Candidate for Secretary Of State Doug MacGinnitie (R)
City Councilman and Candidate for City Council President Caesar Mitchell (NP)
Candidate for Governor John Monds (L)
Senator David Shafer (R)
State Representative and Candidate for Attorney General Rob Teilhet (D)
Congressman Lynn Westmoreland (R)

Team Names are as follows:

Nathan Deal: The Real Team
Karen Handel: Karen’s Krew
Eric Johnson: Johnson 4 Georgians
Doug MacGinnitie: The Mac Attack
Caesar Mitchell: Caesar’s Legions
John Monds: Monds Maulers
David Shafer: Zero Based Ballers
Rob Teilhet: Teilhet for A.G.
Lynn Westmoreland: Lynn’s Swans

The tenth player and league commissioner representing Peach Pundit will be Macon’s own Doug Deal. Doug is well known as a regular poster and has handled commissioner duties for us on our Peach Pundit bloggers brackets in the past. In addition, we believe Doug has the ability to be impartial and does not bring the bias that many of us from the “front page” may bring to the table, perceived or real.

To avoid the scheduling nightmare (and to avoid charges of misplaced priorities), we’ve selected an auto draft format. The teams for each candidate will be chosen by a computer at random, based on rankings from Yahoo! that may then be adjusted by candidates prior to the draft.

While we will endeavor to be impartial to all of our players during this contest, I would like to point out that only 8 of them are in the “lull” described above (and I expect a call or email from each strongly objecting to the term lull – they’re busting it every day – we’re the ones in the lull). I would like to thank Councilman Mitchell for stepping up and accepting our invitation knowing that his election will occur during this contest.

We’re still working on how to make the Yahoo! grid and teams available for public view. We’ll be sure to have a weekly recap here, with full details.

Above all, we want to emphasize that this really is about having some fun. Good natured smack relating to the competition is fine and encouraged. But this is not intended to create new issues for any campaign. Let’s all relax and have some fun with it.