Waivers Make Me Crazy Dept...I intended to write a 'How To' on the Wednesday waiver claim system. And I may still do it but it'll likely be after this season. I haven't had the time or energy to do it justice. Add to that the fact I can't seem to get a complete handle on it myself. In the meantime, the best advice I can give you is to dig into the Help Section of the website that covers Blind Bidding. This link will get you there.
The relevant part, the thing that trips most folks up, is discussed in the selection I've reprinted below.
Most commonly, for conditional bidding, you placed the higher dollar player lower in your priority, making them a condition of the above add/drop.
Bids for conditional bidding are awarded first based on highest bid dollar, then priority of the bid group (groups having no priority over each other). If an owners puts a lower $ amount on a higher priority player, this hides that player until the higher condition is no longer valid. For example: Team 1: Group 1: Add Player A for $1 and drop Player X Add Player B for $5 and drop Player X
Team 2: Group 1 Add Player A for $2 and drop Player Y
Team 3: Group 1 Add Player B for $4 and drop Player Z
When processing the bids the system will process high dollar amounts to low dollar amounts. So it will start at the first priority High bid which is: Team 3 will win Player B for $4 Next, it will look at the next highest dollar value bid which is: Team 2 will win Player A for $2 Only then will it ignore Team 1's bid for Player A (as this was outbid), now showing his conditional bid of Player B for $5, but that had already been awarded.
I botched my own bids last week because I was in a hurry and placed my requests in a single group instead of separate 'rounds' which are not really 'rounds. Or whatever. 🙄
Things... After we dropped off to just two teams breaking the 100-point barrier last week (falling off from a season-high of 9 in Week Six) we are back to seven this week and the Pirates missed by just a few tics... Dan and I combined for 14 lineup submissions in Week 8, The rest of you had 13 combined!! I'm not sure what that says about any of us...
I'm tracking results (W/L) by lineup configuration (because of course, I am), and here is where we are through Week 8. That's the RB-WR-TE starters on the left with the W/L on the right.
1-4-1 8-4
1-3-2 0-1
2-2-2 0-3
2-3-1 28-26
3-2-1 12-14
We had our closest game of the season finish up on Monday night as the Giants squeezed every possible yard out of Najee Harris and eeeked past the Pirates 100.54 to 99.58 which, for the math-impaired, is a margin of 0.96 points. If I'm reading the NFL's Gamebook correctly Harris' 7-yard run on first down with 2:53 left in the game was the dagger that killed the Pirates.
That result had repercussions across two divisions as it threw the Kuhlmann into a tie with the Pirates and Bliz both 4-4. It created a logjam in the Barenholtz, three teams are at 5-3. Never get too cocky in the Hughes League, my friends. You're liable to get holes bitten out of the seat of your pants.
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Multiple musical entries this week. These are some great covers I've been saving for a week in which I need a pick-me-up. Ray Charles, Chris Stapleton, Disturbed (yes, Disturbed!), and Amy Winehouse are included. Enjoy. And RIP Ray and Amy
Oh, and check out the world's cutest Witch at the bottom of the post. She was also a Bluey Magic Fairae and who knows what else this Halloween season. But that Witch deal is just so great!
This is the latest Ed Hughes picture in my collection and I've added it to the Ed Hughes Tribute page on our league site. It's similar to several others I have and one of a few that also shows Oiler Assistant Ernie Zwahlen. It turns out that Zwahlen played a central role in the drama that dogged the Oilers during Coach Hughes' one-year tenure in a Colombia Blue mock turtleneck.
The articles below make for an interesting read. Some attribute CEH's firing to Bud Adams, others put the credit/blame on GM John Breen. Breen himself says it was his doing, not Bud's. But when Breen was a radio show co-host here in Houston in the 80s he was always a Bud Adams apologist so I have my doubts about all this.
The only sure thing is that Zwahlen was a Hughes guy and he got booted out before the Oilers took their team photo for the season. I also know that the club finished with three impressive wins to end up at 6-6-1.
The author of the third article below, Wells Twombly, was a SF Examiner writer who had a column in the Sporting News (where I found this story). He wrote this story just a year after leaving the Houston Chronicle for the West Coast. That explains why he was familiar with the Oilers' mess. It doesn't explain why he comes off as such an asshole in this column.
League Stuff... I'm kind of burned out on research but I'd like to know the last time two clubs got doughnuts in one game and when was the last time a club had the high total for a week and that total included a zero. The Flyers and Strawmenn both had blanks, the Flyers had our high score anyway.
Watching the end of the Bucs-Ravens and Baltimore has a 10-point lead with a couple minutes left. Troy Aikman wants the Bucs to 'pack it up and live to fight another day." WTF? It's 10 points and the Buc's kicker is very good at on-side kicks. Troy talks so damn much he doesn't think about what he's saying. STFU once in a while, Troy. jesus.
After seeing Chris Godwin's foot facing the wrong way as he was down on the ground, I bet Todd Bowles would like to have that sequence back. But how are folks criticizing him for playing his best guys?
The Bucs lost Mike Evans earlier and are now just about out of wideouts. Baker Mayfield...meet the Flyer's bench. And guys are falling out everywhere. The Niners have their top three players out. And so on and so on... of the Top 25 Wide Receivers drafted NINE are IR'd, Out, or Questionable, and at least three others missed multiple games! FOUR of the first eight RBs taken are currently out... QBs have been luckier. Of the NFL starters only two, Tua T. and Anthony Richardson have been sidelined although Jayden Daniels may now join them.
From my perspective, that MNF'er was a very odd game. At one point in the second quarter, Padilla had crawled within 6 or so points of me, Mayfield was throwing picks like Halloween candy from a firetruck float, and Derrick Henry appeared to be taking a nap. Meanwhile, the Strawmenn had Murray and McBride going for three more quarters. Then, suddenly, Henry does a couple of his 'locomotive on a downgrade' imitations and Mayfield realizes his club is about nine scores behind. Game over. Fantasy is weird.
For a few minutes late Monday, the Nats and Blizzard were about as close as two teams can be in this era of decimal scoring. James Conner's last run sorted it out. Speaking of the Cardinals, I wish I could un-see those uniforms. Horrible.
Random Nonsense and Trivial Crap... the three teams that led their divisions at this point last season (Legends, Strawmenn, Rbacks) have one thing in common...they are all in last place this season!.. the Barenholtz Bunch had the tightest 'race' last year after seven games (all within two games of each other) and that holds true this season as well...
Who's Hot? ...Flyers lost in Week 1, and the Holes lost in Weeks 1 & 2. Neither has lost since... Who's Not? ... the Pirates have dropped three since their 4-0 start. (but they are still on top in the Kuhlmann)...
I was going through my old Hughes News archive looking for something else and saw this from Week 9 of 1998...
One last thing. Here are the Top 10 scorers thru Seven Weeks for 2023 and 2024. Make of it what you will.
I keep messing with a feature for this site.. My Top Ten Musical Artists. The trouble is I can't seem to cut it down to ten. Maybe one day. But when I do decide on 10 I can promise Merle Haggard will be one of them.
As the '23 Champs, the Strawmenn, got off to their 0-4 start (they got a win in Week 5) I began researching both slow starts and what happened to championship clubs the year after they earned the crown. I posted my 'slow starts' gibberish a couple of weeks ago. Now I have the second part done. Call it 'The Aftermath of Glory' Report.
Now, right up front, I would like to point out that over 45 seasons, we've had several different formats for assembling rosters. We had periods of keeping seven players (the famous, "Goddammit Commish, you're moving the line!" period), keeping two, keeping none, keeping zero to three players in a two-phase draft, keeping players based on the prior year's keeper value, and so on. So defending champs have been composed of nearly intact starting lineups, keeper 'stars' and new draftees, completely new rosters, and many things in between.
Add to that the fact that we've had multiple playoff qualifying regulations. The bottom line here is that while the research is fun for me and (hopefully) interesting for you, it can't possibly be used to suggest an outcome for the '24 Strawmenn or any other team in the future that lucks into wins a Hughes title.
Here are the results of my research in chart form. Most of it is self-explanatory. In the right column, the red represents teams that repeated, blue means the team made it back to the Hughes Bowl but lost.
Here are some observations from what I found...
Defending Champs have made the playoffs 27 times while 16 clubs failed to make the post-season after a Hughes Bowl win.
Teams with Hughes Bowl win 'streaks' ie: the '96-'97 Flyers, the '99-2000 Nats, and the '19-'21 Giants, all made the playoffs the year after their streak but fell short of the finals.
12 teams followed up their Hughes Bowl wins with below .500 records. Two of those teams were able to squeeze into the playoffs with 6-7 marks. The 2013 Giants lost in the Wild Card round but the 2014 Bombers went to the Hughes Bowl before losing.
Five HB winners made a return to the title game but lost.
Seven clubs backed up Hughes League titles with double-digit win seasons. The 1996 Flyers and 2020 Giants are the only clubs among those seven to win Hughes Bowls.
The Bombers went 12-1 the year after their 2003 championship. that's the best record of all defending champs. They lost in the Semi-Finals. The 2020 Giants were 12-2.
The worst record for a team coming off a Hughes title is 4-9. That dubious record was achieved by the 1985 Giants and 2007 Sticks.
League Things, Football Things... Classic fantasy move by Dan got him a win. With a Monday Night guy's status up in the air, Dan covered his ass by grabbing Ray Davis to back James Cook. Cook was ruled out late on Monday but with Davis to pivot to the Nats grab a win and they stay in the hunt... there is more entertainment value in five minutes of any MNF Manningcast than in any three hours of an NFL game on any network... the Holes and Rbacks are on winning streaks that have tossed the Barenholtz Division into a top hat. All four are within a game of each other... this upcoming week will mark the halfway mark of the season. You can't rule anyone totally out of contention when you include six teams in the playoffs but the five-loss clubs will need to do some serious rallying ASAP.
Speaking of the Holes...they had a 99.3% Scoring Efficiency Rating this week. Their best possible lineup (Kirk 5.40 for Aiyuk 4.70) would have added 0.7 points to their total. I'm burned out on research but I bet that's close to the best in many years. The fact that Jim didn't have much of a live bench had something to do with it, but still... We had our first 'two TE lineup' this week (only had six last year) and the Strawmenn scored almost 102 with it but they came up short. Yes, I am tracking lineup config data again. LOL
Hughes Quirks... One of the byproducts of research is stumbling across league tidbits I'd forgotten about. One such quirk was our innovative 😉 '13 start' rule. That was my effort to avoid owners going on 'autopilot' and never changing their starters. The rule was that no player could start 13 times in our 14-week season. I'd track starts and late in the year I'd list guys who hadn't yet met the 'sit rule'. We began that in 1984. It was a forced bye weeks thing and in that regard, we were ahead of the NFL which began their dreaded bye weeks scheduling in 1990.
We continued this for a few seasons, I think I stopped when I... a) realized we'd settled into a good group of owners who wouldn't 'draft and ghost' and b) got tired of jacking with it. In 1985 we had set the rule to 11 starters max in the new 13-week season. Here's a look at the pertinent piece of the Week 11 Stat Sheet from '85.
In an unrelated note, I grinned when I saw the following in a newsletter from Week Six, 1983.
Once a stats chump, always a stats chump.
I'm usually up to date on local concerts but I found out I missed a chance to see Tom Jones a couple of weeks back when he played Houston—still kicking myself.
Here's our newest...Aida Jane Glusberg, the Queen of Evanston!
I've never been one to draft with bye weeks in mind and sometimes I get lucky, sometimes I don't. But either way, they are a pain in the butt. I wonder why the NFL can't balance them out more. Why are six teams off in Weeks 12 and 14 and nobody sits out Week 8?
League Stuff... Looks like things are sorting out after five weeks. But the ‘sorting out’ doesn’t mean it's becoming clearer. The Flyers have rebounded from a crap first week and have won four straight. I’m not getting too smug, though. I watched a lot of football this past weekend and kept seeing players getting carted off… the Scofield Mafia took a hit with both the Nats and Pirates falling short. The Rbacks and Holes are on two-game win streaks and now the Barenholtz is up for grabs. Over in the Kuhlmann the Strawmenn flexed some muscle with 124 points, just a fraction off the Sticks total topping the league. Draw your own conclusions.
Not a full-blown research project but a quick observation... I went back over the last five years and looked at scoring for the eventual champ through five weeks. What I found was interesting (at least I think so). Note that the numbers refer to total points scored.
2019..Giants were 5th in scoring, 40 points below the league leader.
2020..Giants were 9th in scoring, 40 points below the league average in total points.
2021..Giants were 3rd in scoring and well above the league average.
2022..Blizzard were 6th in scoring thru 5 weeks.
2023..Strawmenn were 6th in scoring.
They all went on to win the Hughes Bowl. Never Give Up! Never Surrender!
I referenced last week when all teams in a division were at or above .500 in the final standings. The reference was made to the wrong team. It wasn't the Strawmenn from 1991 (they weren't even in the Wice Division) although they did come back from 0-4 to 7-7 as stated. The correct info is the 1990 Wice Division and the Blizzard were the team that bounced back to 7-7, had the best PPG, but missed the playoffs. Here is the graphic again (in a clearer version)...
But looking at that I wondered if there had been other instances of a division having all .500 or better clubs. Turns out there have been four.
1990 Wice as referenced above was the only example across the first 23 seasons of the league.
In 2003 the Barenholtz Division had all four teams, not just at .500, but above .500!
16 years later and we have the next example. In 2019 it was the Kuhlmann Division with four winning teams.
The very next year, 2020, had another full division of teams with winning records. This one probably gets an asterisk since we were in our brief four divisions of three teams mode. But still.
You probably noticed that three of the divisions had a team shown in green. That green color indicates Hughes Bowl losing clubs. Interestingly none of the teams in these divisions went on to win the big game. Italicized teams were Wildcard clubs.
I don't know if any of that means anything but I found it interesting. I have another research project that I will feature in a week or two.
Three unique versions of one of the great songs of the 70s. Hell, one of the great songs, period. Enjoy.
We welcomed in a brand new baby granddaughter yesterday (Monday, the 7th). Aida Jane Glusberg checked in at 7 pounds after an arduous pregnancy that saw her Mama hospitalized for two months. She's doing great despite some early breathing problems that had her on a CPAP for 24 hours. Hopefully, she'll be home with her brother and moms by the end of the week.
Padilla's email on Sunday looking for trades (and expressing disgust with his team) got me thinking. Has an 0-4 team ever rebounded and made the playoffs? So I dug through our old MFL leagues this morning, the kind of research project I enjoy.
What I found was pretty interesting. First of all, I only went back through 2003 which is when we went online at MFL. As I clicked back through time I found the same result, season after season... 0-4 led to buying a ticket to watch the Hughes playoffs. I almost stopped as I got to the mid-2000s since it seemed like a lost cause. A few teams, the Sticks in 2022 and the Heroes in 2021 were able to move into contention at least with 6-8 records. Four other teams had ended up at 5-8 in our 13-game schedule days. But none of them had made the playoffs.
But I kept going and finally arrived at 2004. The late, unlamented S'Rats had started with four losses and finished at 4-9. And the Nationals had started 0-4 and gone on to...wait, they WON THE TITLE!?!? Seriously?
Indeed they did. The 2004 Syracuse Nationals have the honor of owning the best in-season turnaround in league history. Here are some screenshots from the 2004 site with the numbers.
The Week Four Standings:
The Final Standings (Week 13):
The Nats' Road to Glory:
And a deeper dive into some numbers. Check out the Power Rank and All Play Percentage.
Adding to the fun here is the fact that the Nats won the Hughes Bowl with their tie-break player points after they and the Giants ended up at 79-all! If you go back and check the Championship Hughes News you can read more about the Nats unreal season. That Hughes Bowl remains our only 'regulation time' tie in a title game. Here is the Hughes Bowl box score:
What's the lesson here? It's obvious... the odds are long against making miracle comebacks once you stubble off to a lousy September but it is not impossible!
Sidenote... It takes a lot of work to dig through records of seasons before 2004, all of those are in .pdf format now and there is a lot of 'clicking' involved but I'm going to try to go back as far as our first head-to-head season od 1081 and see if anyone else has done what the '04 Nats did.
UPDATE...
It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I dug through the league archives and here is what I found;
34 teams have started the season 0-4 since 1981.
5 teams rallied to finish at .500 or better.
1990 Blizzard finished 7-7
1991 Strawmenn finished 7-7
1994 Giants finished 6-6-1
2002 Flyers finished 7-6
2004 Nats finished 7-6
Of those five, 3 made the playoffs... the '91 Strawmenn and '02 Flyers had WildCard slots but lost. The 2004 Nats, well, you already know about them.
Some other oddities I found. The Bay Queens (Pogge's one-year team that became Paz' Blizzard) started 0-4 in 1982 and finished 0-8 in a strike-shortened season. The '95 Flyers opened 0-6(!) and went 6-1 the rest of the way and finished as the league's top-scoring team. Not good enough for a WC spot though. The '90 Blizzard club listed above was part of a rare occurrence...each of the four Wice Division teams finished at .500 or above. Here is the final division standings for them:
What you can't see is that the Blizz were tied for the highest PPG in the league that year. Unfortunately, they had the 2nd highest Points Against. Fantasy football is a crazy pursuit, yes?
The bottom line seems to be that it's not impossible to come back from a terrible start, but it ain't easy.
League Stuff... It's nice to see some trades being made. As commish, I hold approval over trades but I have never vetoed one. It would have to be obvious collusion for me to ever do that. My feeling is that there is no 'perfect' trade. One team usually has the edge but so much depends on circumstances like team needs, how different owners value different players or positions, and on and on. Let There Be Movement!!
I love this song...
Live studio concert version.....
My pixie spending her birthday haul at the Disney Store. I wish I knew football players half as well as she knows Disney Princesses. She's the Ken Jennings of Disney Princess movies.
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