The Hughes News: That's Week One and Done!

46 seasons! And I never fail to be despondent when my team lays a first-week egg. LOL Even though I've suffered four Week 1 losses in the years I've won the championship.

How was your Sunday night? I had a thirty-something-point lead at 7 pm, then...

This is where I give my annual advice...don't panic or get too cocky after one week! Your team is NOT where it will be in a month or so. I did some research and found that across our 44 head-to-head seasons (beginning in 1981) the eventual champ has gone 24-20 in Week One. As noted, in my six title seasons I am 2-4. Never give up! Never surrender!

Sure, I'd rather have won, but, TBH, I'm fine with my team, and you should be as well. Scoring was relatively balanced across the league, and the two bottom scorers had either an early-game injury to a top receiver (Worthy/Bombers) or a freak off-week for a star (AJ Brown/Joliet). The league averaged just a tick over 90 points per team. That's down a couple from 2024 but up six-ish from 2023.

More thoughts on our draft.... and I'm talking in a technical sense, since how we get together works fine. No, I'm talking about PrimeTime Draft, allowing rankings/ADP to be displayed, installing a timer, and related issues.

First of all, I (mostly) like the PTD application. It's pretty cool visually; its nice to see positions coded by color, and other than a bit of an issue this year with a few owners getting started, I can't say there have been any problems making player selections. It's a piece of cake to upload the results to our league site.

Having said that, there are some things I dislike about using it, both as a concept and in the execution. In no particular order...

1) I dislike the lag between when a pick is made and when it is announced (pops up) on all the screens. The app is intended for use as an in-person draft tool with no more than an owner or two drafting remotely. The idea is a podium-style draft where owners use a shared device that is hooked to a big screen. Having 12 guys on remote slows the system, or so I am led to believe.

2) The app can't be tied to draft eval sites. When I was in a serious baseball league, I drafted using the FantasyPros site alongside the ESPN (or maybe it was Yahoo) draft page. As picks were made, it showed my 'best' options for my upcoming turn. Now this is going to conflict with something I'll say below, but it is a consideration. Those third-party draft advice sites can work directly with MFL's native draft room if that's your thing.

3) PTD may be an 'orphan' app/site soon. While this year's download was branded and the 2025 version, I wonder how long they will stick around. I say that because they don't maintain or respond to their FB page anymore, ~~and they didn't announce a winner in their annual random drawing for a free season of PTD~~.* There is an alternative app, Fan Draft, which also works with MFL and looks like it may be more user-friendly for remote users.

*=I no sooner typed that than a winner's name popped up in my FB notifications. LOL My skepticism stands. They used to award four or five free licenses; lately, it has been one.

4) Speaking of the issues a few owners had to start the draft, my view as commish isn't quite the same as everyone else's. That made it tough to know what the issue was when an owner couldn't see a part of the screen, etc. I figured out later, when testing things, that I can more easily troubleshoot issues like that by using a second screen, one where I am strictly an owner. That is a real hassle, especially since I already have multiple screens in front of me to administer Zoom, etc.

5) Other things I bitch about are directly related to the fact that this is supposed to be used with an in-person draft:

No chat function
No easily accessible 'Pause Draft' function

The native MFL draft room shows me who is online and 'in' the room, ready to draft. With PTD I was guessing (hoping!) we were all good to go. Unless you contacted me, I couldn't be sure until your first pick came around and you responded. I should have asked everyone not present or on Zoom to text me, and I will try to remember to do that in the future. (Thanks for the text, Dave!)

If everyone is present in a room, the commish can halt proceedings easily. In the MFL room, there is a pause button. In PTD, no such function exists. At least none that I can find that alerts the room that we have stopped.

Without a chat window, there is no way for us to kibitz while drafting. For me, that's a lot of the fun. I know there are ways to set up a web-based chat room to use, but I have enough trouble getting some of us to read a simple email (:::cough::: "Do we use a tight end?" :::cough:::) 🤷

I was doing some digging over the weekend, and I saw that Fan Draft has a chat function. I may have to look closer at it next year.

ADP... i.e. Average Draft Position, gets a lot of run. PTD has the option to display ADP, and I turned it on this year at the last minute. Lots of outside draft advice rankings will give you ADP data. The issue is that ADP in PrimeTime Draft, and most other places, can be misleading. Unless you can filter the results to take into account only leagues with the same parameters as the one you are drafting for, you are getting bad intel. A 'two-flex spot' league like ours is far different than a standard league. Or a 'super flex' league. Scrambling things further is the fact that there are ten-, fourteen-, and sixteen-team leagues out there. PPR, Half PPR, No PPR, TE-heavy...all these have different values for nearly every position.

I'm bringing that up because I saw some really weird rankings while we were drafting last Monday. Maybe "weird" is the wrong word, but I for sure saw players ranked in conflict with every rankings list I was familiar with, and that is quite a few lists. This is an issue I'd need to take feedback about. A poll next summer may be in order.

I sometimes think we could go to a draft pick timer, but with another draft that came in at around three hours, I think we are ok using peer pressure to keep things moving. LOL

ChatGPT to the rescue... I'd been playing around with creating graphics using it in recent days. Then a saw a discussion somewhere about using it to clean up HTML coding. I thought I'd give it a shot with the mess that had become of the Ed Hughes Tribute page. Damn, in about 10 seconds it returned my code with pics centered properly, text cleaned up and rendered in a more readable font, etc. Check it out by clicking the link over on the right.

Site Tips... If you have more than one team in the MFL system, you can check their scores under the My Team tab. On the right side, you will see all your matchups listed under the All My Leagues module. One tip: You can click the little gear icon at the top of the module and change the view for the matchup to 'text' by clicking the little arrow to the right. Using 'text' rather than 'logo' or 'icon' is a much cleaner look.