🏃‍♂️ Chasing Kerrane

In this week's P.O. Box:

What's really embarrassing is that the show you now know as Ship Chasing was at one point called High Stakes Diaries. Cringe, I know.

Pat Kerrane, the $2,000,000 man, and I met while working on the now defunct Rotoviz podcast Fantasyland—an NPR-style show where I pretended to be fantasy's Ira Glass while doing deep dives on various topics within the fantasy space (yes, we were still talking about Zero RB back in 2016).

The show took us ungodly amounts of hours to produce and we eventually wised up and abandoned the format despite learning a lot while working with Fantasy Douche and Matthew Freedman.

But one of the last shows we produced took us to Vegas to cover our maiden voyage drafting in the FFPC Main Event, a high stakes fantasy football contest. You'll have to let me know if it holds up because Lord knows I ain't listening back to this:

Pretty sure there is some audio in there of me calling Buck Allen a generational pass-catching RB. Nevertheless...

We drafted a truly horrendous team that first year. In fact, here are the baby faces of two idiots hours before they took Arian Foster as their first RB in Round 6 only for him to abruptly retire after Week 7:

That show eventually morphed into a weekly column with another unfortunate name, Diary of High Stakes Sophomores. Our team that year was so bad that I wrote an entire column comparing it to the trials and tribulations of the Oregon Trail.

All of the images from that piece appear dead, but I still have them in a Google folder if you want to see what disease Corey Davis succumbed to. Some things never change, though:

That column turned into the aforementioned High Stakes Diaries podcast, where we continued to chronicle how bad we were at drafting high stakes football teams for a handful of listeners. And then we stumbled upon the Ship Chasing name when we brought the show to 4for4 for one year before ultimately taking it independent in 2020.

Since then, we've combined forces with Ben Gretch, pissed yellow, cranked purple, mushed handfuls of players with highlight clips, sauced your teams, and jumped the shark more times than I can count.

Oh, and Pat won $2,000,000 in Underdog Fantasy's Best Ball Mania III, the biggest season-long fantasy contest to date.

Sure, we are all happy for Pat, but in becoming a multi-millionaire, he single-handedly ruined our name (forever chasing the ships was supposed to be our Sisyphean destiny) and also broke our brains with regards to how we think about prize pools.

When Underdog recently launched their Big Board contest with a juicy $200,000 up top, my brain immediately processed it as "1/10th of a Kerrane."

Poor Davis Mattek admitted to spending an entire Saturday in January drafting 109 playoff best ball teams just in hopes of chipping away at Kerrane's $2,000,000 lead.

And thus Chasing Kerrane was born...

What's especially irritating about our new chase is that Kerrane isn't resting on his laurels and giving us a chance to chip away at his lead.

Many expected him to sail off into the sunset with his new-found riches and ditch us for good, but the opposite has actually happened. The man is not only still showing up for Ship Chasing streams, but he's sliding into my DMs to book himself as a guest on additional shows:

The man is sick and we're never going to catch him if this behavior keeps up. That sure as hell doesn't mean that we aren't gonna try, though.

Back to the Big Board lobby I go. After all, 1/10th of a Kerrane is up top...

🍳 How many times can one man get sniped on Trey Lance? I found out on this week's Best Ball Breakfast where I drafted two Big Board teams. I also discovered a new service I can provide for people who want to safely watch my streams at work.

💦 Over/under 5.5 WRs in the first round of the 2023 NFL Draft? NBC's Kyle Dvorchak swung by Splash Play to discuss his recent mock draft and the best landing spots for the skill position players in Round 1.

🚧 How to fix the Dolphins. Put on my hard hat and laid out how the Dolphins can become a Super Bowl contender next year over at Fantasy Life.

🤔 What's going on with Dapper Labs? Recent layoffs and departures begged the question on this week's Club episode.

🚢 The sleeper rookie TEs. We did a deep dive on the 2023 rookie TE prospects on Ship Chasing. There's also the debut of a new clip...fade accordingly.

📝 How to win $200k in Underdog's Big Board contest. Wrote up a high level strategy piece over at Fantasy Life.

📈 Where should Rachaad White go in drafts? ADP Chasing is a new show on the Ship Chasing channel where Sam Sherman and Davis Mattek, in a clear attempt to chase Kerrane, analyze the market movements across the best ball landscape. Fridays at 1pm ET.

🍔 I'm beefing with Guy Fieri. See ya in court.

🎉 Last Call: Signed Football Giveaway For Subs ⬇️

Anyone who is subbed to the newsletter will be entered to win. I'll be drawing the winner on Monday's Best Ball Breakfast stream at 10am et. Just fill out this form with your name & email you subbed to The P.O. Box with:

I love the Deposit Kingdom Discord. It's a sprawling world that I've previously tried to describe here, but it's always tough to fully explain. There's various nooks and crannies for fantasy (best ball, DFS, Underdog contests), sports betting, and NFT/DeFi, as well as places to discuss shows (Ship Chasing, Badge Bros, LOLz, Splash Play, etc.).

But I just wanted to shout out two of the server's most criminally online prolific posters, EZ & DangyWing. They are the only two people who have crossed the Level 100 threshold for activity. I could try to explain how that's measured, but just take my word for it that they refuse to log off.

Dangy is a server OG, a moderator, and the man to get in contact with if I ever get hit by a bus.

EZ is a spreadsheet-wielding mad man who has his hands in every pot—from MLB best ball to liquidity pools.

Both are too cool to redeem their Deposit Kingdom bomber jackets, but they are entitled to them for their efforts.

Anyways, cheers to the Deposit Kingdom thought leaders and apologies to your families.

Enjoy your weekend. See ya in the XFL streets.