Bobby has stepped up and graciously offered his home in Meyerland/Westbury as a place for the Houston crew to get together on draft night. Some of you live a fair distance away, but hopefully you can make it. Being a holiday, I'd expect an easier trip than on a normal weeknight in Houston.
The details:
What: The 2025 EHFL Draft
When: Monday, September 1, at 6:30 Central time (It's Labor Day night)
Where: Bobby's home in Meyerland/Westbury
See the email from Thursday night for the address. A link to the draft on PrimeTime draft, the Zoom link, and important phone numbers will be provided as the draft gets closer.
Other Stuff:
If you haven't yet checked into the 2025 site, please do so. Draft night emergencies are my biggest commish nightmare. I can't help you log in as easily as I could a few years ago.
We will draft 16 rounds. The morning after the draft (Tuesday, the 2nd) will have a FCFS window that opens at 8 a.m. Central so you can add your 17th player and/or fix your draft night errors. 😔 You will be reimbursed for the cost of one pickup that you make during the window, which runs through 5 p.m. Central on Thursday. Additional claims in that window, and all FCFS claims during the season, will cost you the usual $5. This is the ONLY waiver window before Week One games! If you skip picking up a kicker during the draft, you will need to fill that slot by the close of FCFS. Check the calendar on the league site.
Once that FCFS window closes, you can begin making blind bids on players, and those bids will process the following Wednesday, September 10th.
These are probably repeats from past News entries, but they are favorites of mine.
DRAFT INFO: We are set to draft on Monday, September 1st at 6:30 Central, 7:30 Eastern time. Once I draw for the draft order (by Wednesday evening), I'll enter the order in the Primetime Draft site and send the link to everyone closer to draft night. Your draft slot (not individual spots) is swappable with another owner, but you'll need to get that done before I send out the draft site link. Let's put an August 25th deadline on that.
For you local guys, the draft's logistics are still under review. Paz will still be in Colorado, so we won't be on Heights Blvd. I'm considering a couple of other spots, including Cactus Cove, where we have our postseason meetup, the RBar on Houston Avenue just north of Washington (my 'home' bar where I hang out to watch soccer), or a few other spots over on the west side of town. I was at New Magnolia Brewing last week, and it would be a good option, but I can't ask these places to turn down their music. My fallback plan is to have everyone draft from their own location.
In any case, I'll try to set up a Zoom room. If anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears. An in-person draft is always more fun than a fully remote one, but we've been down this road a time or two.
Notice: The previous entry ("Hi-Lites and Lo-Lites" posted last Monday and those going back for a bit) contained some pertinent links in the text. The problem was that they were color-coded to match the rest of the text, so they did not stand out. One example is the paragraph referencing DraftKings, etc. which included a link to a 1989 story about an Austin-based league having its draft busted by the cops.
I've fixed it so that links are now coded as red text.
More Memories... I found a few other notes I'd made that were intended to become part of that memories post. And those led me down a few more 'rabbit holes'. The following is a continuation of that idea.
Did I Win?... In the pre-Internet days, when results went out via "snail mail", most owners got their newsletter/stat sheets by Thursday. But Steve was our first out-of-town owner, and he had a Manhattan PO box which he didn't check regularly. So in most cases, when he called to turn in a lineup, he always began by asking how he'd done the week before. Seems awfully quaint now, doesn't it?
Speaking of calling in lineups, for a few years, my job at the Houston Post had me working quite a few Sunday mornings. The job of recording the lineups fell to my wife, Lorraine. Interpreting what she had written down was, in many cases, an adventure. Leaving her a copy of the rosters so she could just check off starters helped some. But buying an answering machine saved our marriage. I still recall buying the thing at Service Merchandise in Baytown. Somewhere in my closet, I still have a couple of the little tape cassettes it used, probably filled with crummy phoned-in lineups!
The Weather Weeks... Since we kicked this thing off in 1980 we've had 582 regular season lineup weeks. (sidenote...to me that sounds even crazier than '45 years'!). We would have had 583 if it hadn't have been for a week we lost due to Mother Nature.
In November of 1992 (the Saturday before Thanksgiving to be exact) a mile-wide F4(!) tornado rolled through my neighborhood. I was home with my three little ones that afternoon. I've got a lot of memories of that nightmare but those are not the point here. Needless to say we ended up not playing that week.
Hurricane Rita chased my family to San Antonio for Week 3 of the 2005 season. Our games went on as scheduled. (The Texans rescheduled their game) Tom McLean's S'Rats clobbered my Flyers, so in retrospect I should have cancelled the week! 😉
Strike One...The NFL Strike/Lockout of 1982 cancelled six weeks of NFL games. And, as a result, we adjusted to a single playoff game, the Hughes Bowl.
Strike Two...Another stoppage was the reason we cancelled four weeks in 1987. We were able to have a full two-round playoff, which was the usual deal at that time.
Big Numbers... (or "That's a Lot of Kickers under the Bridge!" ) In total, we've had 119 playoff weeks over the years. Added to the regular season weeks, that gives us 701 total weeks of Hughes League play. I got curious and did some digging. Here is what I came up with re: the number of lineups per franchise and owner...
Most Lineups Submitted by Franchise:
Flyers 626
Nats 625
Giants 620
Heroes 617
S'menn 615
But, as most of you are aware, 'franchise' in Hughes terms is different from 'ownership' and 'management'. The Flyers had Rick (1980) and James (circa 2017/18) as GMs during the club's history. The Nationals have been run by Steve, Dave, and Dan. Likewise, the Strawmenn have a history that includes lineups from Mark, Sheri (Mark's wife), and Mike.
So I did a bit of calculating and came up with this list of the folks who have turned in the most lineups over the years.
Most Lineups Submitted by Individual:
Rick:628
Ben:617
Jimmy: 602
Paz:594
Keith: 572
Rick gets credited with 8 weeks as Flyers' GM in the 1980 season. I dug through the newsletters and found that I made the change in the Week 8 edition. (We played 16 weeks that first season). It's impossible to sort out the Nats' early history as far as who was turning in lineups week-to-week in any given season. But both Dan and Dave probably have a couple of seasons' worth to add to whatever total they have as 'soloists'. They are likely at or over 500 lineups each. I am probably somewhere in the Top 5, but it's hard to figure. Subtract a couple of 'James seasons', Rick's eight games in '80, and I'd be in the 590ish range.
None of this amounts to anything important, but I always have fun playing with numbers like these.
Canon's Kid... Only one 'civilian' has ever made it into an EHFL lineup. In Week 4 of the 1993 season, one-day-old Chad Canon debuted as a running back for his father Tommy's team, the Bowie Knives. Tommy was in dire straits at the RB spot and had missed the e-claim window (he had a good excuse, he was becoming a dad!), so he called and told me to just stick the 'new guy' into his lineup. Funny thing... the Knives beat the Flyers 28-25! Chad Canon will forever be an undefeated Hughes League player!
The Hughes News from that week is below. It's hard to read, but you can click to enlarge it.
Some 1980 Tidbits... As I combed through the 1980 Hughes News issues, I came across some interesting stuff, some of which has been rehashed before, some not.
The first-ever draft pick was Earl Campbell by The Bushwackers.
The first-ever trade was a swap of 6th-round slots between the Strawmenn and Flyers. The Flyers were to be compensated with a 6-pack but that never happened!
The first player waived was Atlanta RB Haskell Stanback by the Flyers.
The first trade to include actual players saw the Lepers (Nic) dealing Cleveland RB Charles White (and a 2nd round pick in 1981) to the Bustouts for Richard Caster, TE from the Oilers.
Our first Supplemental draft was held at Don's Seafood (!). Fancy! The Nats had the first choice (via a trade with the S'menn) and took Seahawks' WR Sam McCullum.
Oh, and I've linked to the 1st Hughes News issue many times. But did you know it was sent out with a handwritten second page and stat sheet? Here they are. You can click to enlarge.
Please with your Inbox for any draft venue updates.
My cuties... Ellis....
Aida...
and Leo....
A handful of live performances.
Cyndi Lauper - Time After Time
Coldplay / Richard Ashcroft - Bittersweet Symphony
EDIT..as I was working on this post Sunday morning, I received the news that my uncle, Ralph Straley, passed away on Saturday at 91. He was the inspiration for our league (see the first entry below), our 'Godfather' as it were. RIP Ralph. I'm mulling over an appropriate way to honor him.
Ralph Straley and the Commish, February 2020.
This is a post decades in the making, weeks in the writing. I hope you enjoy it.
As I was renewing the league for our 46th season, I was thinking about some of the more interesting moments in our history. I've started a similar Hughes News article on several occasions over the years, but always discarded it as it felt so much like a 'good-bye' post. But I recently came across a file of 'story notes' I've been keeping, and thought that this may be a good time to flesh them out and publish them. These are in no particular order.
Floating the idea, 1980 (the softball game)... In the summer of 1980, I took my usual vacation trip to Baltimore. As always, it consisted of a couple of weeks of Orioles games, crab feasts, and shuffleboard at the local corner bar. But on this trip, as I've mentioned over the years, my uncle Ralph asked me to make him a 'cheat sheet' for his upcoming fantasy football draft. Now I was aware of the concept through some Sports Illustrated stories about the Raiders employee who is credited with inventing it. But I had never gotten involved with it until that afternoon.
I went to the nearby market and bought one of those 'pulp', printed in June, football mags off the newsstand and got to work. I was back in Houston before my uncle had his draft, but the idea had intrigued me. At our next softball game, I brought up putting together the draft list. It sounded interesting to several of the guys. One thing led to another, and we had a draft of our own scheduled.
The birth of the Hughes League 45 years ago sometimes feels like yesterday. At other times, it feels like a really long time ago.
Moving The Line...Our old friend Gary Hamman started a day late in the league, but he wasn't a dollar short. He formed his team, the Organs, from the 'free agents' available the day after our first draft in 1980. And he did pretty well with them, too. He won two weeks, more than Kuhlmann, Sam, or Fauser/Andrich could manage.
Gary got pretty involved in the league during his time with us. And that led to the first 'constitutional crisis' that I can remember. We were a keeper league, and we started by keeping eight players going into Year Two (1981). I decided to change the number of keepers at some point (either after that first keeper draft or the next), much to Gary's chagrin. I recall discussing it over beers at Griff's and Gary getting frustrated that I wouldn't see it his way. He kept telling me I was 'moving the line, dammit!' and I kept asking him WTF he meant by that. It got intense but not ugly, and I don't even remember what the end result was, but I suspect I did what I wanted to do with the keepers. I miss Gary; he was a troubled soul. RIP
The Marino Factor... Beginning in 1984 and running through 1990 we crowned seven champions. Of those seven, six had one thing in common...they had Dan Marino as their primary quarterback. Here is the list:
1984 Giants
1985 Blizzard
1986 Sticks
1988 Attica
1989 Heroes
1990 Flyers
Pretty amazing.. or maybe not when you consider that we were a TD-only league and Marino was the most prolific TD-tosser of the era (maybe any era). Interestingly, the Giants, Blizzard, and Sticks ('84-'86) had one more thing in common... they all had Marino's two favorite targets, Clayton and Duper, aka The Marks Brothers, on their roster.
What was up in 1987? Glad you asked. The Blizzard had Marino and finished 3-6-1 in our second strike-shortened season. Hogan won the title that year with Randall Cunningham (and Mark Clayton)..
David Overstreet & Jarvis Redwine... Jarvis Redwine, then a rookie running back with the Vikings, was Gary Hamman's first pick in 1981. I doubt he was on anyone else's radar at that point. But looking back, in that moment, it wasn't as terrible a pick as we've always claimed.
For one thing, the ''first round' was roughly equivalent to a 9th round since we kept eight players that season. And looking at Gary's keepers, it is obvious he needed a running back.
The Vikings' running game was headed by fullback Ted Brown and the mediocre Rickey Young. Redwine was a 2nd-round pick by the Vikes and had been a Heisman contender his senior season at Nebraska until a rib injury slowed him. He had an opportunity to take the lead back job. It never panned out for him. He started one game in his three-year NFL career and totaled less than 100 yards. He served as the Vikes' kickoff return guy in '83 and then was out of the league.
But no matter how one views the Redwine pick, the David Overstreet choice in 1984, which we've chronicled many times, was inexcusable. After all, he was, well, dead.
Where's My Money?... In 1983 Sam's Bombers beat the Nats in Hughes Bowl 3, 38-6. I was happy for him, I knew he put a lot of worry into his weekly lineups. I decided that he deserved a trophy (that would be the first time a Hughes champ would receive one). I bought a nice one, had it engraved appropriately, and looked forward to presenting it to him in front of a bunch of friends (including most of the league) at that Spring's OB Open afterparty.
The big moment arrived and I made the presentation. Sam, as only Sam could, loudly declared "Fuck this trophy, where's my money!?!" Everyone laughed but truth be told, I'm STILL not sure if he was serious or not. LOL
Our First Draft... (aka the Wendell Tyler pick, aka Tropical Storm Danielle) I've already mentioned the first discussions of starting up the Hughes League. We settled on a draft date of Friday, September 5th, two days before the NFL cranked up its 1980 season. We had a plan in place that made sense. Since most of the guys played flag football on Friday nights in Memorial Park, the draft would be at Jimmy's and my apartment, on Wescott at Washington Avenue, right next to the park. We hadn't planned on Tropical Storm Danielle coming ashore that day SSE of Houston. The winds were not terrible, but the rainfall was brutal. For some reason, the football game went on in Memorial Park, and the guys showed up afterward soaked and muddy. But that didn't stop us!
Steve Heinen (The Bustouts) made the first 'unfortunate' draft pick by taking the Rams' Wendell Tyler in the first round. Tyler had been in a car wreck in July and had dislocated his hip. I'm not sure why, but the story among our owners had always been that Tyler had two broken legs, and that's what we rubbed in Heinen's face. Either way, he was unable to walk when Heinen took him.
Tossing Pogge's Girlfriend... In 1983, thanks to an invite from Steve Barenholtz, we ventured out to draft at Barry's Pizza in the Windsor Plaza on Richmond. We had a nice private space, it seemed like a perfect setup. Joe Pogge wasn't able to make it but sent his then-girlfriend to draft for him. Which didn't happen. Two of our owners, neither of whom is still in the league, objected to this in no uncertain terms, and out the door went Joe's gf! Luckily for the league, Paz was there helping someone draft, and he immediately took the reins of Pogge's franchise and drafted. The rest is history.
The aftermath... This whole episode is something I've 'laughed' about, but it's actually a pretty crappy deal. It happened quickly; she was there, and then she was gone. I didn't instigate her getting tossed, but I could have, and should have, stopped it. I'd bump into Joe at UH events, but he didn't speak to me for nearly 20 years. And I don't blame him. We patched things up (more or less) when we met at the Texans' uniform unveiling in the fall of 2001.
The silver lining here is that Paz has been such a great owner since that night at Barry's. I just wish the circumstances had been different.
Permutation Tuesdays...Starting sometime in the late 80s/early 90s, I began doing Permutation Tuesdays. Basically, it was me, a legal pad, pencils, and a shitload of coffee sitting down on the Tuesday before the next-to-last weekend of the season. I'd plot out all possible game results for the final two weeks and calculate playoff qualifiers for each possible scenario. It was great fun, my second favorite day of the fantasy football year. I remember doing it at the McDonald's next to UH, probably in '88 or '89, when I'd return to get my teaching credentials. Other years saw me at the big Starbucks off I-10 in Baytown (I think I took a comp day to sit out there and get it done...what dedication!), the Pasadena Public Library, and once even at home! I'm not sure why I preferred doing it on the road. I think it just became a tradition for me. I gave it up at some point after we began using Myfantasyleague. They had a Projected Playoffs module that could do instantly what had taken me all damn day.
Charo! (aka Drafting With Jerry)... Our second draft (1981) began our first real tradition.. Labor Day drafting at the Parkwood Apartments on Staffordshire near the Medical Center. For six of the next seven years, we gathered at that huge apartment (residents included Hogan, Sam, Jimmy, me, and many non-Hughes guys over the years). We'd start drafting in the early afternoon, take a break to eat (steaks, pizza, etc.), and always have the TV tuned to the MDA Telethon. Jerry Lewis' goofiness and parade of cheesy 'B-listers' always kept us entertained. The highlight was the appearance of Charo, who Wikipedia describes as "...a Spanish-American actress, singer, comedian, and flamenco guitarist." That's pretty accurate, but it doesn't convey the ridiculously oddball vibe she brought to Labor Day afternoons. For the full effect, check out this clip from 1991's Telethon and stick with it to see Jerry Lewis' usual schtick:
The Reserve Team Concept, Forced Byes, and other weird shit... I can't recall what year it was, and I'm too lazy to go through the archives, but one year we had a waiver system that consisted of two drafted (or claimed) NFL teams. The idea was that you had 'exclusive' rights to the players on those teams who were not otherwise on a Hughes roster. In other words, if you needed a replacement for an injured/waived guy, you would choose a free agent from your two 'owned' NFL teams. The idea was that we could do away with weekly waiver claims, which had required me to hang out by my phone on Wednesday nights. You just let me know who you wanted to activate, and that was that. No bidding, no bother. It was a one-year thing, and it wasn't a bad idea, but it was too restrictive. I recall you could 'trade in' an NFL team for a different one, but I can't remember how that worked.
Back in our early days, before the NFL instituted the 'bye' system, I had in place a 'cap' on starts. I was trying to ensure that an owner wouldn't just set a lineup in Week One and 'let it ride' the rest of the way. I tracked player starts on graph paper. As the season wound down, usually around Week 10, I'd post the list of players who still needed to sit out a game (or two). The NFL began putting bye weeks into the schedule in 1990, and I started to use that stack of graph paper to make paper airplanes.
Seems rather quaint now when half the commercials during any given game are for DraftKings or Fan Duel and MLB and the NFL run fantasy leagues, but back in 1989, fantasy participants were getting busted for 'gambling'. LOL
We started 1985 with a week of 'exhibition' games, meaning we began the season in NFL Week 2. We played through their final regular season week, which we even then tried to avoid. I'm unsure of why we did this, but I suspect it had to do with an owner's availability for drafting. Moose must have used that exhibition week to perfect his lineup because when we cranked up the real games, he came out of the gate with a 90-point explosion. That sort of scoring was unheard of back in those TD-only days.
Mac's (aka the Westcott Drive-In)... This spot was an old school ice house located on Westcott Drive near Memorial Park. (It is now Canyon Creek Bar and Grill, a member of the same group as our postseason party spot, Cactus Cove.) In the early days, we'd hold 'supplemental' drafts once or twice a year. In 1990, we held one after Week 4. The hot name was Derrick Fenner of the Seahawks, who was coming off his second consecutive three-TD game! At Mac's that Wednesday night, we drew out of a hat and the Strawmenn, after a trade with the Knives, had the right to pick first and took Fenner, of course. That night was great fun because there were three or four trades made right there on the spot. Fenner helped the Strawmenn go 5-3-1 over the rest of the season but they missed the playoffs by half a game. Fenner, meanwhile, went on to play in the NFL through 1997 but never came close to matching that 15-td 1990 year.
Giants win 3 consecutive titles...Rick took home trophies in 2019, 2020, and 2021. That's crazy tough to do under any format. In building our site every year, I poke around a bunch of other MFL sites for ideas, and I've never seen a back-to-back-to-back run other than Rick's. I joked around that I'd burn the Hughes down before I'd see Rick win that fourth one, but truth be told, I was burned out on all the machinations that went into the keeper system that we had in place. Redraft is so much easier to do.
BTW..I went back and checked on the two back-to-back runs we had before Rick's string. Both the Flyers (1996-1997) and Nats (1999-2000) went to the wildcard game following their second straight title and lost there.
Papa Joe's... Speaking of Rick, in 1980, he and Steve B. had a seafood place on Richmond near Greenway Plaza. I was working at the Houston Post, and I hit up Papa Joe's for lunch pretty frequently during that first Hughes season.
It was there at Papa Joe's bar that I turned over the management of the Flyers to Rick about midway through that inaugural season. Papa Joe's, btw, is not to be confused with Steve's Dockside, which he opened on West Alabama a few years later.
Moose's Rant... In late September of 2017 (Friday the 29th to be exact), I was with my wife and boys at the Karbach Brewery in NW Houston. We'd had dinner and were out in their back patio area waiting for the live music. I got a call from Moose. He had been trying to make a FCFS waiver claim for his Attica team. He was getting a message that said the player he was trying to drop was 'locked' and could not be dropped. I recall two things from the beginning of the conversation. It was hard to hear him, and it sounded like he'd had a few beers himself.
I quickly figured out the issue. Moose was trying to drop Bears receiver Kevin White. The problem was that the Bears had played in the Thursday Night game, and a basic rule of every fantasy football league in existence is that once a team kicks off, the players on that team are 'locked', either in or out of your lineup. I explained that to Moose. But he was having none of it. This went on for a while, but I could never get Moose to see my side of the issue. He wasn't happy, and I hate it when an owner is unhappy.
Moose left the league after the 2018 season. I don't know for sure, but I suspect the 'Kevin White Affair' had something to do with it.
The irony in this tale is that Moose won his game that week without making a roster move. He did drop Kevin White via waivers that next Wednesday and replaced him with Latavius Murray, a smart move as Murray was a strong player the rest of that season.
And finally...The News, The Post, and What's Next... I have no idea what motivated me to begin a 'newsletter' when we cranked up in 1980. I think I was just interested in stats and figured everyone else would be as well. The first issue was typed on Houston Post stationery with a handwritten stats sheet and updates, then photocopied in the Post sports department. If by chance you've never seen it, look here.
By the mid-80s, I was "publishing" the News from home on EHFL letterhead I'd ordered from Kinkos, but I still filled in the numbers on the 'Stat Sheet' by hand. We went cutting edge in the late 80s as I bought a Gateway 2000 desktop 396sx-16 with two (count 'em 2!!) mb of RAM, and a 40 mb hard drive. Add to that an AOL account, a 1440 baud dial-up modem, and we were in high damn cotton!
Things snowballed after that. Windows came along, and I used WordPerfect and Quattro Pro for newsletters and stats. Then MS Word and Excel. Somewhere along the line, I stopped mailing out results and newsletters and started emailing. We had a period when I was using an early commish software. I'd get home from my teaching job on Tuesdays and fire up the computer and download the stats file from the weekend. From that file, I could upload standing, etc. to a webpage and publish a newsletter as well.
In 2003, when I jumped into Myfantasyleague.com, life changed. Everything was done for us, instantly. I won't even attempt to put the changes the league has gone through into a timeline (TD-only, --->performance scoring, no TE ---> 2 flex spots, etc.). And I'd rather not think the late 80s and making copies at the gypsy 7-11 on Highway 90, collating those into envelopes in my car, and dropping them down a mail slot at 4:30 am on Tuesdays on my way to work.
Right now, I think we are in a sweet spot. I can't see any reason to make any changes as we (hopefully) head to our 50th season in 2029. But I never thought we'd use a TE spot, so who's to say what the future will bring?
I hope you've enjoyed this entry. I had fun putting it together and traveling down our Hughes League 'Memory Lane'. Drop a comment below if you feed the need.
