You’ve just become one of the first six General Managers in a new league. Your first draft is starting. Everything is going smoothly. You aren’t hoisting the championship trophy yet, but there haven’t been any major wrenches thrown in your plans.

Then you make a really tough decision. Now you’re taking a Boo shower, a whole community is pissed off, and you’re dodging hate mail while defending not only your competency, but your sanity. How do you get yourself out of this predicament?

The answer is both strange and simple: you fire yourself.

That’s right. Give yourself a pink slip, explain that the company is going in a different direction, and clean out your desk by noon under orders from yourself.

(Are you listening, Mr. Dolven? I hope not. You should be reading this, not hearing it.)

One caveat: don’t announce it as a firing. Simply hire somebody else to take the General Manager position, and take your rightful title of “owner”. That’s what you are, anyway. You’ve been given the reigns of a franchise. There is nobody higher than yourself; you are El Jefe. You may fire and replace little peons on a whim (especially if George Steinbrenner is your role model). So replace yourself, claim the ownership, and move on.

This would have a couple effects. First, you instantly regain credibility in the community. It takes a big man to publicly admit a mistake. It takes a Paul Bunyan-sized man to fire himself. And we, as a culture, forgive people who admit mistakes. Guillermo Mota took steroids, got suspended, admitted it, and he was cheered when he came back to the mound. Kobe Bryant has almost completely rehabbed his image. As long as somebody doesn’t keep letting us down, we’re willing to overlook a few hiccups; we’ve all made mistakes.

By adding a GM, you also have another trusted opinion on player evaluation. Instead of having a little voice inside your head saying, “this might be a bad move” you now have a person looking you in the eye and saying, “are you out of your @$*(%# mind”!? Plus, four communities are hard to keep track of. A franchise needs to know about all the prospects, undervalued players, over-rated players, etc. I think that’s too much for one person to handle. Having a GM would add valuable brain space, especially if you get somebody with a really big head. More head = more brain space. Just like a filing cabinet.

The weirdest thing about taking the new title is you’re one of the only people qualified to have it. You now have more combined knowledge about Dead or Alive, Project Gotham Racing, Counter-Strike, and FIFA than most people simply from being at the combine. Nobody would question your qualifications, just like nobody questioned them after you were originally announced as a GM. 

The best part about the whole thing: nothing really changes. An owner still has to approve all the moves a franchise makes. So you’d still hold the power over roster transactions, just like you do now, you have a smaller chance of making bad picks based on person bias, and you have a helpful helper to helpfully help you run the organization. Let’s review the best case scenario.

Bonuses

1) More credibility
2) Less stress
3) Less bias
4) Better title
5) Less death threats (possibly)

Negatives

1) Finding a competent GM
2) Being fired
3) Listening to a eSports blogger yell “I WAS RIGHT” every time he sees you at a LAN.

Now, the worst case scenario:

Bonuses

1) None. I think that's the least amount of good news you can get.

Negatives

1) Nothing changes. You’re still hated by the Source community, there’s no image rehabilitation, and you’ve fired yourself.

In other words, in the worst case scenario, literally nothing changes. In the best case scenario, you’re well on your way to putting out the fire on those flaming bridges. There’s only one thing left to do.

(By the way, Mr. Dolven, if you’re looking for a new GM … )