Yes, it’s back, and not even in pog form! Who remembers last March where this was a staple every day, running me a little ragged and inadvertently flooding the site with more #content? (Which is why I originally wanted to put them on the sidebar, but it got bumped to the main stage.) Hey, it got enough love to get a sequel.

We’re doing a couple things differently this time around. For one, no seeds! Which means no 16-1 upset to piss off the “Selection Committee” of one self-important guy, but also means that that the comments themselves will shine, rather than where they’re ranked. This did mean I had to fire up the trusty random.org sequence generator to figure out what would face what when, but that takes much less time for someone who honestly doesn’t have a ton of it right now. We’re also going to compact everything a bit so it doesn’t take 16 friggin’ days to complete the first round. That was a bit excessive and I think we all had fatigue at the end of the first round. I know I did.

The selections? Actually fairly simple. There were 64 banner comments in the year 2019, so there was absolutely no work needed to be done there.

Cool, the Selection Committee did its job.

I do want to take this time to give honorable mentions to two non-banners, but important comments in [DFO] history. The first is from Porky, a lengthy response to Robert Kraft getting busted for paying massage parlor girls to make him bust.

To everyone’s knowledge this is the most upvotes a comment has ever gotten (+34), and certainly the most under the current format of voting that we can record.

The second is what we think is another first, or at least an extremely rare occurrence. A stickied post! Courtesy of the brains of resident hobocide expert, Scotchy.

So congratulations to them for being brilliant and/or extremely fucked up. And they may have banners in the competition too! You’ll find out when the tourney ends.

Anyway, let’s break into the stash. We open with four match-ups from the top of the GAMBLOR Regional. Numbers are based on chronological order of the banner comment, for my own bookkeeping.

64. “Only thing wetter than this Ravens-Steelers game is my wife seeing the Witcher in the tub.” vs. 17. “I haven’t seen this much scrutiny over a black man touching a piece of metal since the OJ trial.”

43. “‘I aspire to write as infrequently as this DTZM fella’ -George R.R. Martin'” vs. 27. “You’d think everybody would remember the name of the jockey who became famous for riding Cigar, but all everyone ever talks about when it comes to that subject is Monica Lewinsky.”

6. “LA is the trickle-down economics of sports: as an idea, it’s stupid, ignorant, and wrong. But every decade or so, it gets an awful lot of traction.” vs. 50. “THIS AARON DONALD I CALL HIM PEYTON MANNING IN THE TRAINING ROOM BECAUSE HE’S GOING TO DROP THE SACK ON YOU AGAINST YOUR WILL AND NO ONE WILL DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT.”

56. “The Bengals have a bye next week. They’re three point underdogs.” vs. 36. “All this talk locally about the passing of Pat Bowlen and the affection of the players, coaches, and front office just goes to show you that one should go ahead and pay for a higher quality and more discreet massage parlor handjobs.”

Let the polls… BEGIN!