Steve's Trout & Tires (Week 7)

We interrupt this News blog for a bit of nostalgia. What you see above came my way from Keith. It's a business card from Steve Barenholtz' Steve's Dockside, our friend's first venture into the hospitality world as an owner/GM. As you can see it was located on West Alabama between Argonne and Revere and I have some great memories, especially of helping with painting, polishing, and prepping it for the opening. 

As for the title of this post...I'm not 100% positive of the backstory but my spotty memory tells me that a couple of us had flat tires in the driveway during that initial building prep period and the nickname arose from us changing tires there. I know it's referenced in early editions of the Hughes News. I may have to do some digging.

I can't find a picture of  Steve's Dockside but the photo below is of the building's next incarnation, The Ale House. This 2001 Houston Press article addresses the building history (it was haunted?) and the story of it giving way to 'progress' in the form of a high-class strip center. Steve's Dockside is mentioned. 

And here's the spot as it looks today. 

RIP Steve. We miss you and think of you often!

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Three close, three not... of the six games in Week 7 (can you believe we are halfway to the playoffs?) there were a few that came down to the wire. The Sticks caught and tied the Nats thanks to Michael Pittman's TD catch with under three minutes on the clock Sunday night. The 113-113 deadlock cost the Nats a share of first place in the Barenholtz Division... The Giants fell just short on Monday night in losing to the Flyers, 127-124. Rick's club came from about 70 points down after the Sunday afternoon schedule to close the gap with four primetime players. 

Let's hear it for the Heroes who posted their first win of 2021. They beat the Ridgebacks by 10 in what was the only other relatively close matchup. The Bombers drubbed the backsliding Blizzard who had one of those weeks where nearly everyone falls below expectations...and the Legends completed a four-team 'perfect' Lombardi weekend with a 61 point win over the Pirates. 

The Strawmenn lost to the Holes and fell to 2-5 despite having the second-highest PPG in the division this season. The 789 points that have been scored against them pretty much explains the issue there. It's the most in the league.

IR Hell... everyone is suffering from it, players down with injuries or COVID. And now that 'bye season' has started there will be going to be thin ice under a couple of clubs in any given week. One thing you should HAVE TO do is monitor your IR situation closely. And do it before the Thursday Night game, please. It's very easy to get caught in a situation where an IR violation you failed to fix leads to you being locked out of your Submit Lineup page. We've had multiple instances of that recently. Although my intervening is a gray area in the rules I can fix the problem. But if you don't happen to catch me before the games start on Sunday you're gonna be out of luck. Making changes or submitting lineups for owners after the fact is a can of worms I will not open, I was in a league that imploded over that sort of thing a few years ago. As I type this on Tuesday morning there are two teams with IR violations. 

I'm probably going to just do away with IR slots next year. It will make things simpler for everyone. Meanwhile, I've posted a reminder near the top of the league site and moved the module right below the helmet display.

Thinking Out Loud While In Freefall

That's what I get for running my mouth keyboard. From a record-setting Week Five performance the Flyers fell to Earth (hard) and scored about half as many points this week in losing to the Holes. The next time I break the scoring record, and bygawd there will be a 'next time', I'll just keep my mouth shut.

Elsewhere...The Giants pulled out the big bats this week and at 5-1 continue to dominate the Barenholtz... The Kuhlmann continues to be the most competitive division with the Sticks and Pirates tied at the top. The Bliz have slipped a bit from their early season Power Ranking lead but McCaffrey will be back soon to set things right...and what the hell happened to the 0-3 Legends? Well at the moment they are breathing again at 3-3 and are the highest-scoring team among clubs not leading their division. 

If the playoffs started now...Flyers, Sticks, and Giants are in as division champs...the Pirates and Nats get spots based on record...the sixth spot would go to the Bombers since they are 1-0 among games involving them, the Legends (1-1) and the Blizzard (0-1) Note...the Bliz and Bombers play this week. The Legends would get the seventh spot since they have outscored two of the wildcard teams (actually they've outscored all three!)...

I'm a numbers nerd despite the fact I sucked at math in school and I'm endlessly fascinated by the Power Rankings chart found on the site's 'Numbers' tab. For example..Flyers are ranked #1 in the standard PR Points but drop way off the pace when looking at the Alt PR column...we also see that the 4-2 Nats would be 0-6 of the rest of us were better at picking lineups...the Giants have a 92% lineup efficiency rate but does that mean a smart owner of a thin bench?... it took until this past week for every team to have hit the 100 point level in a game. Last season we were there in Week Two. I  have no idea what that means in terms of our season...we have one team (the Giants) with over 700 points scored through six weeks. Last year we had two (the Flyers and Nats) but only one of those two made the playoffs. Hint: It wasn't the Flyers. 

The League Site... I'm gonna leave well enough alone for now as everything seems to be working fine. I've taken out some modules that I figure were redundant or were not being used and maybe that helped. I'm using a different browser and the site loads fairly quickly and the modules seem to work as intended. Contact me with any problems you see. 

A few clarifications... #1) MFL doesn't change player positions during the season as a matter of policy. I agree with them allowing leagues to make those decisions for themselves. 

Cordarrelle Patterson is listed as a receiver but he clearly is serving as an RB for the Falcons. With our flexible lineup requirements, I don't see a point in manually making the position change. 

#2) I'm going to add some guidelines for how we handle add/drop errors to our rules. I haven't decided on a formal policy but in the meantime, my suggestion (request) is that if you f'ed up and want to rescind a drop the first thing to do is post on the chat and then contact me.

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I've had a couple of ideas pop into my (normally empty) head recently. They involve how the league functions and I'll discuss them here and ask for feedback. These certainly are not critical issues and neither would go into effect this year.

The first is our required lineup structure. All of us know that these days quality running backs are at a premium. It's just part of how the game has evolved. More and more RBs now a) share carries, b) get tweaked (at the moment I'm typing this 12 of the Top 25 backs have injury designations), and c) are more like wideouts on many teams. Guys running for 100+ yards is something that occurs less frequently than it used to. 

My thought was to give owners a little more flexibility in picking a lineup. We could change the 2/3 RB 3/4 REC setup to 1/3/RB 3/5 REC. In other words, you'd be able to start 1 running back and 5 receivers in addition to the options you have now. As I said, it was just a thought and I'm always open to feedback. This is one of those issues I'd put to a vote before implementing.

The other possible change comes in the area of free-agent pickups. It occurred to me last Thursday when I claimed a player who'd been dropped just a few minutes prior. I just happened to check my email and saw a player was dropped who I thought was better than the last guy on my bench. So I nabbed him. But was that fair? What about guys who are working or otherwise can't be checking for drops at random times during open waivers?

EDIT...I wrote the five-paragraph missive below last week but I've come to realize that I'm looking probably for an answer to a problem that doesn't exist. Nobody has ever abused the system or complained about how it is currently set up. Everyone's thoughts are, as usual, welcomed.

MFL gives us several options. None of them are perfect for our situation but several may improve things. Keep in mind one thing...I want to keep it as easy as possible, for me especially, so a couple of options are just not gonna fly. 

We could simply have dropped players 'locked' for a day. A player dropped on Thursday at 2 p.m. would unlock and be available at 2 p.m. on Friday. Outside of not changing anything, this is the easiest solution. It gives everyone a chance to see who has been dropped before some vulture swoops in. What it doesn't do is solve the issue of working stiffs possibly not being able to get to the league at that time. And it makes for the possibility of a 'fast finger race' at the time the player becomes available. Then again, how many players of any real value get dropped in open waivers? And ANY specific 'unlock time' would create a 'race to the button' situation. 

There are options to unlock dropped players all at once on a given day and time. We could have all dropped guys unlock at noon on Saturday, for example. Or we could have them NOT unlock at all and make them available through the next round of blind bidding along with the rest of the free-agent players. I don't like that last option much because the newly minted FA could be a desperate owner's savior for that coming weekend. I'm not in favor of tying anyone's hands by making players unavailable.

One suggestion I heard was a second waiver session during the week with a set cost ($10) and priority being based on records (W/L, Points, whatever). The problem is that MFL won't let me set up two different types of priority waivers. You either have blind bidding (as we do) OR 'rolling priority' waivers i.e. based on record waivers where you go to the end of the line with a claim. You can't run both in the same league. 

OTOH...it's possible (likely?) that I'm searching for a solution to a nonexistent problem! We've had the current system in place for a number of years and I've never heard one complaint. Leaving well enough alone may very well be my best bet.

Week Five...Working Like A Dog

I'm about as tired of wrestling with the league page on Firefox as you likely are hearing about it. I've spent hours doing everything I know how and can't get it to work right consistently. Rather than pour any more time into it I just gonna switch my default browser, at least through the end of the Hughes season. Bye, bye Firefox, Welcome back Vivaldi. I used Vivaldi ( a better, tweaked version of Chrome) for several months last year and I can't remember why I gave up and switched back to Firefox. But it'll hit me one of these days when something goes south on this one.

In the meantime, the work I did on the site wasn't a total waste. I did clean up much of the custom stuff I had and eliminated much of the bloat. A few features I liked weren't used much if at all so I got rid of them. I put the Marquee (headline ticker) back on Tuesday night but it doesn't look to be running very smoothly so it will come and go as I experiment a bit with it this week. Hopefully, there are no additional issues among you guys that I haven't heard about. 

Meanwhile...back in the League.... We have a new single-game scoring record and I'm kind of proud to say it's the Flyers. Yup, 186 breaks the old mark of 181 which was established by the Holes in Week 12 of 2018. I'd have broken thru the 200 point ceiling if I hadn't listened to some bad 'professional' advice and sat Miles Gaskin. Funny thing...I stayed up to catch the whole Monday Night game (Lamar Jackson is fun to watch) so I knew our scores but the Tuesday morning results email had me at 176. The first thing I thought of was a scoring change (would have had to have been a pretty big one!) but the webpage still had 186 so I got to feel good about my team all over again.

BTW...one of the absolute best features of the site is the Historical records page which is accessible through the Links module down the right side of the front page. It only shows the current name of each franchise (Attica records show as Portland for example) and it only goes back to 2003 which is when we moved to MFL. That first season's numbers (we were still in TD scoring mode in 2003) can skew some results, but there is a lot to see if you dig around. Wanna guess the biggest margin of victory in our history? [answer at the bottom] And would never guess that we've had 31 ties since the 2003 season started, and 39 games decided by one point!

In other action, the Sticks and Giants cruised to wins which have helped establish them as the leaders in their divisions. We are two weeks from the midpoint of the season. (I like that the 14 game schedule gives us an actual mispoint once again.) If the season was over right now and the playoffs were starting we'd have the Flyers, Sticks, and Giants as division champs and the Nats, Blizzard, and Pirates in as Wild Cards based on record. But wait, there's more! We'd have our first seven-team playoff field. The Legends with a 109+ PPG are outscoring the Nats and Pirates so they would qualify for the postseason as well. 

It would be a heartbreaking situation for the Strawmenn who have more points than the Nats and are just one point behind the Pirates total. They'd be out in the cold by the equivalent of twenty rushing yards and the fact that the Legends would nab the only 'bonus slot' available. I hope things stay this tight all the way to Week 14.

Random Stuff... Seven teams have two guys on the IR list, and only two teams are IR-free. I saw a report of a few COVID cases hitting the NFL players this week so be sure and check your lineups all the way through the weekend...if you have an IR violation (someone who is no longer eligible for the list that you haven't yet activated or cut) you will be locked out of lineup submission by the system... Remember that in-season trades no longer get you a two-year eligibility 'bump' in draft values. Players acquired in trades will hold the same value that had this year when next year's draft comes around. So it's really a one-year bonus... 

Week Five was also significant in that it marked the maximum games played for Dalvin Cook Rule eligibility.  With three exceptions the listed players will no longer be eligible for 2022 Cook Rule retention once they appear in one more game. The exceptions are Josh Jacobs, Chris Carson, and Calvin Ridley who have all missed at least one game this year. Jacobs has already returned to the field, Carson doesn't appear to have a long-term issue and Ridley missed this past weekend with a 'personal issue'. None have been placed on the NFL's IR which is also a requirement for gaining a year under the rule. Christian McCaffrey was kept by the Blizzard under the Cook Rule so he would not be eligible again even if he otherwise qualified. All the others on the list have now played five games. 

1.01	Clear Lake Strawmenn	Henry, Derrick TEN RB
1.02	Rhodesia Ridgebacks	Barkley, Saquon NYG RB
1.03	Baja Bombers	Elliott, Ezekiel DAL RB
1.04	Portland Pirates	Jones, Aaron GBP RB
1.05	Thailand Sticks	Chubb, Nick CLE RB
1.06	Baltimore Flyers	Adams, Davante GBP WR
1.07	Syracuse Nationals	Hill, Tyreek KCC WR
1.08	Joliet Giants	Taylor, Jonathan IND RB
1.09	Adirondack Holes	Kelce, Travis KCC TE
1.10	Boulder Blizzard	McCaffrey, Christian CAR RB
1.11	Lincoln Legends	Harris, Najee PIT RB
1.12	Tampa Heroes	Hopkins, DeAndre ARI WR
2.01	Tampa Heroes	Mixon, Joe CIN RB
2.02	Lincoln Legends	Cook, Dalvin MIN RB
2.03	Boulder Blizzard	Mahomes, Patrick KCC QB
2.04	Adirondack Holes	Jacobs, Josh LVR RB (3 GP)
2.05	Joliet Giants	Pitts, Kyle ATL TE
2.06	Syracuse Nationals	Carson, Chris SEA RB (4 GP)
2.07	Baltimore Flyers	Jackson, Lamar BAL QB
2.08	Thailand Sticks	Ridley, Calvin ATL WR (4 GP)
2.09	Portland Pirates	Jefferson, Justin MIN WR
2.10	Baja Bombers	Sanders, Miles PHI RB
2.11	Rhodesia Ridgebacks	Allen, Keenan LAC WR
2.12	Clear Lake Strawmenn	Evans, Mike TBB WR

And... In looking at the Rules page I realized that the Cook Rule section was rather confusing. I think that while updating it this past offseason I had failed to delete a portion of the old rule which made the whole thing less clear. I'll be working on that today. 

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Answer: 101 Points---Week 13, 2016...Heroes 137, Flyers 36. Of course, the Heroes scored about half that and lost in the Wildcard round the next week, so there's that. The records page shows the results as the Legends losing that game to the Heroes because of how the franchises have swapped around in the last half dozen years. A franchise timeline should be my next project!

Week Four...Mind the Gap

Just a bit delayed this week. I've been kind of distracted  with everything happening around here but here we go...

I'll admit that I don't always look all that closely at final scores for all the games but even my cursory glance this week told me that we had a bunch of blowouts.

The Nats beat the Strawmenn by eleven but none of the other games had less than a 35 point difference! The six winning teams averaged more then a 37 point margin. 

I looked back over the final scores for the previous three weeks and here are the results:

• Week One.......24.7 point average margin
• Week Two.......29.5 point average margin
• Week Three.....19.3 point average margin
• Week Four.......37.3 point average margin

I'm not sure what it all means, if anything, other than we had an unusual amount of easy wins but I did find it interesting. When I get the time I may take a look at last season and see if the 37+ differential is that out of line in a larger sample size.

Observations... Don't look now but the Pirates have quietly won three straight to put themselves into a three-way 3-1 tie at the top of the Kuhlmann Division... The old adage that says you can't draft well from a boat in the middle of the night is getting shot all to hell.... Elsewhere most of the Flyers took a week of unpaid leave and they were drubbed by the Rbacks but they still hold a lad in the Lombardi. BTW...you have to go back to the strike season of 1982 and the 8-0 Nats to find a Hughes team that didn't lose a game. Won't happen this year either.... the Legends made it into the win column this week and the fact that they've outscored the division leading Flyers tells you something about how good fortune factors into fantasy sports... the 1-3 Strawmenn have more points than any Lombardi team. Interesting times for sure.

League Site Stuff.... over the last couple of days I've had issues with the site loading very slowly on my desktop computer running Win10. Specifically when using the Firefox browser. No issues with Chrome but I much prefer Firefox and having problems with it is super frustrating. I suspect one of the custom scripts used on the site is hanging up but I can't pin down which one. Or it may be a different problem entirely. I'm telling you this because I plan to dig into this over the next few days and that might mean parts of the site won't look the same as you're used to. I've already removed a few items (nothing critical) but since that problem persists those modules will be returned before long.