May Update...a LONG one!

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How I Spent My Summer Vacation...

Last time I posted here I mentioned that I was adding league sites for the seasons we spent prior to our first year on Myfantasyleague.com (2003). I also wanted to 'fix' our established sites since quite a few had degraded over time due to 'link rot' and lost graphics.

 

It was a long, and sometimes tedious process, but it was also fun and I have it complete. Read on to see what I was able to do. First up, the 'sites that never were':

Before we go any farther.. the sites are all found by clicking the 'Yearly Bests and Websites' link on the right.

MFL allowed me to create a site for each of these seasons. They don't have player databases going back that far so what I was able to do was somewhat restricted. Each of those seasons uses a common 'skin' (they all look alike) and I was able to do the following:

->Create a banner: This was something I've had a lot of fun with. I tried to be era 'appropriate' with these. When I could I included Hughes News graphics from the corresponding year. The 1995 banner I added to the top of this post is an example of that. In other cases I built it around a player or two from the title winning club like the '92 Steve Young banner, or I just created something that I liked for no good reason.

->Season Notes: From the scores and standings, as well as the old Hughes News issues, I came up with a few lines covering what made each season unique. Changes to the league makeup, team shuffles, rule changes, quirky scoring weeks, that sort of thing. 

-> Scores, the schedule, and final standings: Entering the schedule, team names and weekly scoring was the 'drudge work' part of all this. But in doing it, and cross-checking the data, I was able to fix some errors I found in the records I was keeping and in what I produced for the Yearbook. I even found at least one correction I needed to make in a Hughes Bowl game score. Luckily none of the 'fixes' changed a game winner at any point. 

I also found that I had screwed up the 1983 schedule (see below) but it's too late to do anything about that now. LOL  Live and learn. 

->Hughes News Examples: Each season has a link near the top of the page to 'Hughes News' which sends you to the Campionship Edition for that season as well as some sample pages of each year's newsletter. Some seasons have one, others have several. Many of the sites have Stat Sheets as well as the newsletters. Since I used the same style of spreadsheet stats for long stretches I didn't include them for each year. 

It was fun to go back through the archives and trace the evolution of our communication over the decades. Handwritten/typed with 'rub-on' headlines and letterheads through 'web-posted only', email-only seasons, etc. I'd forgotten stuff like using Quattro Pro, WordPerfect, 'The Commissioner' and assorted other programs to run this thing and get the info out to everyone. I had several flashbacks to using Macintosh desktops and workstations at UH Intramurals and at school in Baytown, and that bulky Gateway 2000 386-SX aka my dear, departed first home machine. (with 2MB of RAM, and 40MB hard drive! LOL). 

->Missing/Upgraded Champs Editions: In some seasons, particularly in the early 1990s and early 2000s, I sent the majority of  'newsletters' as emails, or as online, text-only pages. Some title winners during that era never received a 'proper' Hughes News Champs Edition. I've tried to rectify that by putting something more graphical for those teams. These are also  part of a different project I'm working on. I've done 5 or 6 as of this writing and I'm planning on doing a few more this summer. In most cases I've included the original 'News' (such as it was) along with the new, updated version. These are all accesible through the season site link as noted above and the Champions News Editions link to the whole history of these newsletters over on the right. 

The 1992 Champions Edition is shown below. Originally that season had a pretty 'Plain jane', text-only version and I thought I'd bring it into the modern era. The text shown is the original text with some spelling/grammar corrections.  The photo is one from the 49ers' 1992 season that I ran through an AI site and I loved the way it came out, (We will discuss AI below). if you look at Bobby's title season site you will see this and the original.

->Misc. stuff: the Hughes Bowl box score, the champ's helmet and the approriate playoff bracket: Both are dsplayed on each year's site. 

We began with MFL online in 2003. All our league sites remained up and visible but many had gotten 'unlinked' from my account which meant I had no way to fix anything that had gone sideways. Banners and other graphics which had been housed on my old Flickr or Photobucket accounts were no longer visible and modules with bad/outdated info/links couldn't be removed. 

That finally changed when I asked the MFL folks to allow me to access our 2011 page so I could correct a misspelled owners name and have the plaque look more, well, professional. They were kind enough to walk me through that AND they returned all the league sites to my account.

So regaining those sites has allowed me to reinstall some banners. In many cases I recreated the originals or created a new one. I applied the same ‘skin’ and module arrangement that I used for the new league sites to be consistent. I also added a helmet for each champion. 

And, again,  the Champ's H-News is linked near the top as in the 'new' sites. A few other Hughes News pages are there as well. But, since we were doing things mostly online and eventually via the blog, they are almost all just text-based newsletters. By about 2006, give-or-take, we were totally on the blog and for some of the years all I was producung was stat stuff. I've tossed some examples of those under the Hughes News links as well.

All the stats, rosters, etc. are still available via the regular menues, unlike the '80-'02 sites mentioned above.

After some debate with myself, I decided to 'convert' these to the standard, simple template, at least through 2024. I figured that as we move along I'd leave the previous season site intact for one full season. This also cuts down on the bandwidth for TOS who provides and hosts the new template and all the scripts that make it work.

Using AI... this is certainly becoming a contentious subject as of late. And I understand the debate. No need to get into that here. My use of AI in relation to this project was limited to:

• Tweaking some images of players so that they appear in EHFL uniforms. 
• Having some legacy images 'cleaned up' or enhanced for aesthetics. Old Mac and crude pixel art needed to be fixed.
• Adding color to the background on some of the banners I created. A real timesaver and much neater than I could do.
• Correcting or suggestions for the code I used to building or tweaking some tables and pages. I could spend an hour hunting down a missing ">" but Chat GPT can do it instantly. 
• Pulling the text from old News Champs editions that had been converted to image files. I used the text to create the new replacement Champs editions. MS is abandoning/cratering Publisher this fall and I'm racing to save a lot of the work I did with it. 

I'm also in the process of creating new helmets for our teams which I may or may not use. AI has had a hand in that. 

The Championship Plaque... the site-based one (auto-created by MFL each season) went FUBAR when I added the new sites so I created a new one from scratch. You can view it via the link in the right-hand column. AI helped with fixing the coding I struggled with to align the 'plates' and size the text correctly. 

And finally...this was a really fun project that turned into way more work than I anticipated when I began it. But I enjoyed it, truly a labor of love. 

I also love feedback and corrections! Please check out as many of the new/old yearly sites as you can, especially those that represent your title(s), and let me know what you think.

Can we all agree that the Statute of Limitations is up on a mistake I made 43 years ago, scheduling the 1983 season? The graphic below is the 'Schedule Validation' page that I generated after entering the schedule into the new/old 1983 season website. Click it, and the problem is evident.

(Click to Enlarge)

We were a twelve-team, two-division league. The idea was that a team played the other five division rivals twice, and four games against teams from the other division. It was supposed to be four games against four different opponents. 

As you can see, the Heroes, for example, played three different Wice teams, with two against the Giants.  Several other teams had the same scheduling anomaly. The Bombers, the '83 champs, played two games against both the Nats and the Blizzard! Yikes!

If you stuck with me here and read all the way through, thanks. Again, comments/corrections/criticisms and all very much welcome. Enjoy the rest of the break. See everyone soon.

-Commish 

Spring/Summer Update #1 2026

 

I hope everyone is enjoying the start of the off-season. Summer plans are the best plans. I'm posting now, and possibly monthly over the spring/summer, to bring the few who look at this blog up to date on what I've been up to since the end of the season. 

February

• Finished and distributed 2026 League Yearbook.
• Rolled over the league site to 2026.
• Did routine new season site tasks, i.e., clearing rosters, resetting waiver $$, shuffling schedule weeks, etc.
• Fixed broken code affecting the Quick Links module.
• Reached out to MFL for help fixing a misspelling of a champion owner's name on the site plaque.
• Related to above... was reconnected to all of our MFL season sites, many of which had been disassociated from my account for various, mundane reasons such as a defunct email address. 
• I cleaned up those old league sites and added a header and/or year graphic to each one to easier ID them. See below for more details.
• Began the process of adding 'legacy' season sites on MFL. Once they 'reattached' my account to our previous seasons, I was also able to create sites for 1980, 1981, etc. These sites are limited in scope with a banner and scores; they will represent our complete history. 
• Used ChatGPT and Google AI to clean up the coding of Ed Hughes Tribute page and several other news blog pages.
• Began updating a long-abandoned project...an Excel workbook of scoring by franchise and owner from 1980 to date.

Old League Sites...    

For a couple of years, I've been aware that many of our pre-2020 MFL sites had fallen into disrepair, with bad links, missing graphics, and corrupted layouts among the problems. Part of that was due to MFL's policy of moving older sites off their original servers. And part of it was because much of my customization code/graphics had been stored on defunct or outdated sites, or on ones like my old Flickr account, that had gone from free to requiring payment. 

I wasn't really able to do much to fix the issues, with the older sites particularly, because in moving them to other servers, MFL had somehow dissociated them from my account. Or severed my ability to log in as commish. 

Then, a few weeks ago, I noticed that a championship owner's name from a decade or more ago was misspelled on the Champs plaque on our site. I went back to the year in question and found I had no ability to fix that. With the season over, I had the time to do something about it. I contacted MFL and, after a series of messages back and forth, they re-linked me to all our seasons. A few more messages and I was able to figure out how to get the name straightened out. 

With that done, I decided to clean up the sites, at least those with issues, most of which were seasons before 2020. I converted them all to a common, default layout and 'skin'. All of them have a new/updated/restored graphic on the front page to make them easy to ID since they otherwise look similar. In restoring the sites, I used the original banner or a higher-quality reproduction in cases where we had one. I created those that were lacking. 

Once I finished that, I took on the task of creating MFL sites for all of our seasons. The only real content they have is scores, the schedule, and standings to go along with season-appropriate banners.  It's tedious work to enter the data, but I enjoy finishing up a site. The sites do not have rosters, as the MFL database doesn't reach back to the 80s, but I've noticed that our 2003 site has FA listings for that season, so I may be able to load rosters for some of the later 'missing' season sites. Sites are in place from 1980 to 1983. That '83 site is incomplete, as I haven't yet tackled adding the schedule and results. 

If you are up for a stroll down memory lane, you can do so now, and the links to each are in an easy-to-find spot. I took our 'Yearly Best' page, which lists the team that had the highest scoring, the most wins, and the champ for all seasons. I linked the MFL sites to the year listed in the left column. You can get there through this Hughes News site. Just look in the right column for the link to 'Yearly Bests and Websites".

Post Season Post

 

Yes, it is time to wrap up the 2025 season in a pretty orange box and move on to 2026, our 47th season. The '26 site is online and ready to go. Unlike last year when I was wrestling most of the summer with the new template and the many new-to-me modules, this time it was simple...accept the update, clear the rosters, shuffle the schedule, add back and/or adjust a few modules, and pick a color and new header logo. I was done in an hour or so. Easy, peasy.

Here is the inside dope, what you need to know for 2026:

➤The '26 league site is here: EHFL 2026. You can just change the year in your bookmark to get there as well. 

➤Rosters will be reduced from 17 to 16. No other rule changes are in the works other than one related to drafting, which will be discussed below.

➤If I'm feeling ambitious over the summer, I may dig into our standings/playoff seeding tiebreak system and clarify or modify the list. As mentioned previously, some of what is in the document we use now is outdated, confusing, or just doesn't apply to our current situation. 

➤Entry fee will be $23 for 2026. And in a related note, PayPal won't let me put a button up on the page without creating a 'business' account. Booo! I'll be emailing everyone my PayPal and Venmo addresses over the summer to collect the fee. Check, cash, or MO is fine as well. Paying via PayPal should be via the Friends and Family option. Details will be included in the email. Your prompt attention to the payment request is much appreciated. 

➤No pay, no play. I'm trying to finance Ellis' Harvard education, and how can I do that and carry your butt as well? 😜😉

➤Keep Labor Day open for drafting and expect a new online draft site. I may solicit some testers late in the summer for the new draft page. 

➤Speaking of the draft.. we are going to go back to something we did some years back, a 'Pick Your Spot' system that I liked a lot. When I generate a list of clubs via the random generator site, that list will not be the draft order but the priority choice order. In other words, each owner, in turn, will pick his own draft slot. So, the list that is generated looks like this:

1. Heroes
2. Nats
3. Rbacks
4. Sticks
5. Legends
6. Flyers
7. etc...

And then the Heroes will get to choose any draft position for 2026. The Nats would have their pick, then the Rbacks, Sticks, and so on through the 12 franchises. I don't have all the details in place, but teams will have a time limit to choose a slot (likely 48 hours) before they fall to the end of the line, and we move on to the next team in the queue. 

Once slots have been chosen, trading of slots (with a TBD limited amount of waiver cash involved) would be allowed. Note that only initial slots would be eligible to be traded, NOT individual draft picks. For example, in the above scenario, the Heroes might select the #5 slot, which is what I was hoping for. I end up with #7 (or #3 or whatever). I could offer the Heroes X amount of waiver cash to swap positions. There would be a hard deadline on that as well, since I need time to set up the draft site with teams, logos, etc. 

Feedback on this is welcome, but my initial discussions with a few owners have been positive. It sort of goes against my philosophy of 'less work is better' that I've adopted recently, but it isn't much trouble. And when you see the research I've done into the 'slots vs wins' included in the Yearbook, you might find getting a choice is a nice option. 

Speaking of the Yearbook...

I'm just polishing it up this week. It's done, and was sent to you via email. I sent it out in MSExcel format, and I included a link to a Google Sheets version for those who prefer that or don't have Excel access.

I've added/updated a ton of stuff this year. It's a super fun project for me, and I hope you will take the time to check it out. I've done quite a bit of error checking, but fresh eyes are always welcome, as are suggestions for new additions. 

Here is a summary of what is coming:

This is a Changelog/Addition List for the 2026 Yearbook:

• I updated all the applicable team and league pages with 2025 records and 300 Win Club badges.
• Scores have been added to the Playoff Games tab.
• The Hughes Bowl Results page has been enhanced with high and low scores per era and game totals.
• I cleaned up the Champs Lineup page with added initials to differentiate players and fix some NFL team identifications and other errors.
• Research shows I had for decades listed the final score of the 1984 Hughes Bowl incorrectly. The Giants scored 59, not 69 points in beating the Holes. It is fixed now and a new, corrected Hughes News Champs Edition published.

EDIT:The Playoff Game scores page still lists the incorrect score for the '84 Hughes Bowl. It'll be corrected in the next edition.

• I added box scores for every Hughes Bowl, including lineups and scoring for both clubs.
• I added scores for every game in our history. Regular season scores are on six pages divided (roughly) by era and/or decade.
• I used the history function on our league site to find individual game high scores as well as combined one-game high scoring totals.
• I did some old-fashioned hand research to find those same records for games prior to 2003. See the 'Fun Facts' tabs for scoring records and oddities.
• There are some oddball stats highlighted on the Scores pages themselves as well. 
• I added a page showing my Draft Slots research. It is basically a look at how slots result in wins. Take it for what it's worth. Note: It covers the current redraft era that began in 2022.
• Added a page with some Hughes Bowl trivia and data
• Added a Second Season winners list to the Contest page

Please let me know what you think once you get a chance to dig into it. 

I don't plan to publish any updates to this blog before the summer but if something comes up that you need to know about I will update everyone, either here or through an email.

And there you have it! See ya soon enough.

The Monkey Wins!! (But the Fish take the $$$)

 

When I had the bright idea for the randomly drawn 'Beat the Monkey' team in this year's Second Season contest I figured that the club would land near the bottom. Seemed like an interesting way to drop an extra $5 in waiver cash in most club's coffers for 2026. I had no idea it would cruise to 1st place.

I mean, c'mon. I made the team by using an online projection list and a random number generator. Literally a shot in the dark bunch. Turns out the random approach may be the way to go in the future as the Band Of Primates finished at the top, more than 50 points ahead of the best-scoring 'real' team, Dan's Our National Fish. So no $5 bonuses will be awarded. 

Dan's win marks the third for him in the nine years we've been doing this in one form or another. Jack had won the previous two after Dan won the two before that. That means we've had five straight Scofield 2nd Season wins!

Dan finished just a few points ahead of James who seems to be our annual runner-up. Jack was third and Keith finished fourth. 

I mailed out a .pdf file on Monday night with all the details. It will also be a part of the new Yearbook which should land in your email's inbox any day now. 

I plan to follow up with a big email and/or News blog post once MFL rolls the league sites over to the 2026 season. That usually happens within a few days of the Super Bowl. 

More News To Know:

--Later this week (I hope) MFL will roll the site over to the 2026 season. At that point I clear rosters and take a break for several months. Unlike last year when I first installed the new template and then had to wrestle with it endlessly over the summer, I really don't have much I need to do before next season. 

• I'll randomize the schedule as always. 
• Make the adjustment to the new roster size. 
• Double-check that the dates for a draft and waiver schedule are correct. 
• Adjust waiver $$ totals for 2nd season winnings.
• Choose a color for the thing. 

That's pretty much it. 

--I might have a change in determining draft slots, but that's up in the air.

--Expect a raise in the annual entry fee. Nothing crazy but the cost of a trophy has gone up significantly.

--The 2026 Yearbook is about to be distributed. I realize that it is mostly for my own amusement, but I'd appreciate you checking it out. I had a lot of fun putting it together. 

Shown below are the latest pieces of my Ed Hughes collection. This program comes from Coach Hughes' first official home game as head coach of the Oilers. 

The Chronicle's Oilers beat writer, Hal Lundgren, had a recap of the season opener in Cleveland. CEH was NOT happy with the on-field fight in that one which thinned out an already diminished O-line.

Here is the article in easy-to-read mode (click to expand).

The program, and others like it, are now posted to the CEH Tribute page. 

Next is my second signed index card, this one was signed by CEH with an added 'coach' below his name. It is my third example of his signature joing my first index card and the '56 Giants team-issued card. I've added it to the Hughes Trubute page which is worth checking out if you haven't do so lately. 

The late, great Diane Charlemagne. She did so much beautiful vocalizing on my guy Moby's songs. RIP

Bonus Track:

Ellis looking so grown up! 💖

More Monkey Business

 

"...there is still only one team beating me!"

- The Monkey

We're down to a single game, the Super Bowl, and James' Omaha! Omaha! crew leads the pack in the Second Season contest. Here is a chart (in graphic form, click to enlarge) that shows who is still active for each club. Two teams (and possibly one or two more, I haven't checked that closely) are out of contention for a money berth. 

Once the Super Bowl ends, I will update the site with the final standings. Soon after that, usually by the Tuesday after the SB, MFL rolls over the sites to the next season. In our case, our 47th!!

Oh, Joy!

Then I will lock down and distribute the 2026 Yearbook. It has some fun new features that I am looking forward to sharing. Right now, I am in the process of trying to error-check the thing. 

Just a few days ago, I was rather dismayed at the forecast for this coming weekend. Now things have taken a turn for the better, and we can say the Houston owners will be meeting on Saturday. I may change the venue, but count on being somewhere inside the Loop at around 2:30 that day. I will text all you locals with details when I'm sure of what we are doing. As always, I'm looking forward to seeing everyone. It's more fun for me than the draft because I'm not having to worry about all the possible tech things that could go wrong. LOL

Monkey Shines

The long-range forecast for the 31st is not promising. I'll make sure to update all the Houston owners as to a possible venue change, rescheduling, or cancellation of the get-together.

The weather now appears to be fine for Saturday. Maybe a bit too cold for an outdoor venue. I will update all Houston owners with any change in where we meet, but the date and time look to be good to go. See you then!

And now back to your regularly scheduled Hughes News....

Two weeks in, two weeks to go in the Second Season contest. A few random observations:

-It is still wide open, with several clubs having a real shot at a money finish, a few others essentially eliminated due to low point total and having their remaining players covered (or nearly covered) by higher scoring teams.

-Only James is ahead of the Beat The Monkey team right now. My use of an RNG to select that club's players should tell everyone how much luck is involved in these things. 

-They have nine players left; only Jack's team, with ten, has more. And the Monkey crew would have ten had Nix not gone down. 

-Speaking of Nix..I can't recall this many postseason NFL injuries in the prior contests. We've already had Kittle and Collins lose a game plus for the teams that selected them, and Nix and Charbonnet are finished. 

Quick Reminder. The Houston guys are meeting a week from Saturday:

January 31 @ 2:30

Bayou Heights

3905 Washington Ave, between Jackson Hill and Waugh

There is a map and links to their website in the last Hughes News.