To The Victor...

 

...go the spoils. And so it was this past Saturday when the Houston contingent (6 of the 7 of us anyway) gathered at Cactus Cove for some fun stories, friendship, and refreshments, as we presented Mike with his hard-earned 2023 EHFL Championship trophy. 

I wasn't alert enough to snap some pictures(!!) but Mike was good enough to post this one showing him as he displays the hardware. He also took home a framed copy of the Hughes News Championship edition and a few Hughes-branded knickknacks I accumulated over the past year. 

Cactus Cove turned out to be a good location for us with large tables, plenty of TVs (we watched some of the UH-Cincy hoops game), and reasonable (and tasty) food and drinks. I'd rate the day as a success. The only thing lacking was the presence of Bobby B. who wasn't able to attend due to a bout with back issues. Bobby very generously kicked in towards our tab. Hope to see you soon, Bob.

The Owner Get-Together is my favorite league-related event. Draft night, with all the things I figure will go wrong, is too stressful and I don't get to appreciate the fun of it all. But this annual thing is always a good time. This year's event was made even better by a guest appearance from my granddaughter. Thanks to Keith for snapping this shot.

More Year-End Stuff:

Second Season Contest... Jack and James took the top two spots in the contest and will be rewarded with bonus waiver cash for 2024. That is if we return to MFL. More on that below.

This is the second straight year for a Scofield to win the contest. Dan took it last year. And it's James' second consecutive money finish. The site has a parallel playoff contest that doesn't restrict you to one player per playoff team. So if you want to go all in on a particular NFL playoff team you can. I might try opening up both types for us next year. We could pay the winner of each one.

Rolling Over to 2024... Last night MFL made the 2024 sites available. I went through the process to 'roll over' our league to the new season. That doesn't mean we will stay with MFL. Nor does it mean we will even continue the league at all. I won't pay for the season until I've decided on what I want to do going forward. The new site is available here. You can also easily get there by changing the year in your bookmark from 2023 to 2024 since the rest of the URL remains the same.

If we continue to play and move to another site I will figure out a way to reward the Second Season contest winners. It'll depend on the available waiver systems.

2024 Changes... Other than dropping a roster spot and adding a 2nd IR slot I seriously doubt we will make any changes, especially if we are on MFL. If we move to a different platform all bets are off as we may need to adapt to what is available wherever that happens to be.

I may experiment with a different template for MFL in case we stay there. I've had some issues with both of the 'hosting' sites I use, Imgur for photos and OOOwebhost for the stat files and a few other things. It's become a pain to deal with those sites and a new standard template might help me out.

Worst to First Quirks... I recently did some cleanup of a few of the stat pages (the ones found on our site in the Links module). As I was tweaking the All-Time Standings report it struck me that The Legend and Pirates both went from last place in their divisions to first from '22 to '23. In fact, they went from last to the top two seeds. Being the stat nerd that I am I knew I had to dig deeper and see how common that division jump was over our history.

I was surprised to see that it wasn't all that uncommon. Thirty-four clubs have made the jump from 'worst to first' since 1981. A caveat here...I went through the stat sheet pretty quickly and a team might have gotten past me. I was looking at win/loss only. Ties for the best record or worst record in a division both went into the mix. 

No need to list all the instances I found but I came across a few things worth mentioning...

-In 81/82 the Nationals went from last in their division to become an undefeated championship club.

-In 83/84/85 The Giants went from 3-11 to a title and then back to last in their division. 

-In both 94/95 (Knightriders & Attica) and 97/98 (Strawmenn & Giants) two teams pulled off the worst-to-first trick. Attica and the Strawmenn were champs on the back end of those. The Flyers (95/96) were another team in that decade to go from last to a title.

-In 06/07 all THREE last-place teams (Bombers, Bliz, Nats) won the division on the rebound. The Bombers won the 2007 title.

-Two teams have reversed their fortunes for the better in each of the last three seasons. Flyers and Sticks in 20/21, Heroes and Strawmenn in 21/22, and as mentioned previously, Legends and Pirates last season.

Happy Valentine's Day from Ellis Rose!

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