I was going to lead with this in my Week 7 post but it's too nuts to hold off on. Check out this box score from Week 6 whose significance I somehow missed!
The Holes beat the Bliz by 0.08 of a point!! I'm no math guy but that's 8/100th of a point! EIGHT ONE HUNDRETHS OF A F'ING POINT. Crazy, yes? But wait... he did it with three guys getting blanked! Three doughnuts! Skattebo fumbled early in his game and was benched. Tyler Warren got hurt early in his game and never returned. Brian Thomas, well, he did Brian Thomas things, 2 targets, no catches, no yards. As I type this I've noticed that Jim has dropped BT Jr. The dude sucks.
Bottom line.. with passing yards being worth 0.04 each, Jim won his game by TWO YARDS PASSING. Two. 2. 1+1. A dude falling forward after a catch instead of being stood up! Unreal. Even before I do any research on this I'm pretty confident this is the closest game (outside of when ties were a thing) that we've ever had.
Oh, and here's how ChatGPT describes 8/100ths of a point:
2. In Sports & Games
• If a team's betting spread, a player's statistics, or a gaming score changes by 0.08, it is a very tiny fraction of a single whole point (just 8% of one point).
This should have been the lead in the last Hughes News but with some extended grandparent duty plus my shit Week 6 result I confess to being a bit 'meh' and I didn't dig into stuff as I normally do. I didn't notice this weird-ass game until I was doing my Lineup Research yesterday (Friday). Damn, this is crazy shit.
Back to my usual bullshit...
Nice to see Jack working the proverbial phones here as we approach the turn. He's been tossing offers out there and he made the deal with the Sticks Friday, his second of the year. I've been working to find a QB trade that works for both sides but I'm not finding a good matchup. I'm gonna keep trying so watch your inbox...
Just when I thought I had things going my way, the Flyers had their worst game in years. What a cruel mistress fantasy football can be. But I wasn't the only one to hit the pavement hard. In fact, it was an 'off' scoring week across the board.
Yes, I suck at Excel stuff but you get the gist. Some of this is due to Bye Week teams but a lot of normally high scoring guys had shit weeks. And so it goes.
Speaking of how it goes... more players are falling by the wayside. Let's see... Rice, Evans, Hurts, McLaurin, Davante Adams. Who am I missing?
Only two teams, the Rbacks and Holes are more than a game out of first place (they are both two back in the Barenholtz) but both are trending up. Hey, look at the Rbacks' Points Against, almost 730! That's over 50 more than the next most scored against team, the Legends. That's crazy talk.
Here is some Johnny Cash for those of you feeling busted flat in Baton Rouge.
I'm happy to see that waivers are so busy, at least through last week. Makes me more convinced that the roster reduction is doing what it was intended to do. I'm not so happy that I'm getting outbid on most of my guys. I guess I've gotten cheap in my old age....Speaking of waivers, I've stopped tracking the team totals. I fell behind a week or so ago and with the numbers meshing I think the MFL system has been working correctly. If you notice any issue with your FA cash, let me know and I can check it out.
Did I put the whammy on the Giants with this 300 Wins stuff? They've lost a couple in a row and Rick won't find it any easier this week going up against a pretty stout Strawmenn club. He'll get that milestone sooner rather than later. Speaking of wins... Here's a look at the Week 6 standings from 40, 30, 20, and 10 years ago!
1986, a ten team league and Keith took the title...
1996, this was the first of back-to-back Flyer championships (sigh).
2006, another title for the Sticks.
2016, a decade back, the Holes reigned supreme when it was over.
I'll do stuff like this from time-to-time. I might as well get some use from the websites I compiled over the summer for every one of our seasons. BTW.. in case you haven't had the chance, you can go to this page and find links to all our season sites. Some of those old Hughes News editions were pretty tasteless and would get me cancelled in this more enlightened age.
Thursday Morning EDIT:A question came up and I realized that players who started the season on 4-game IR may be coming off it now and I should probably clarify the procedures.
We are set up to where a team with an 'IR Violation' cannot submit a lineup until the violation is corrected. In other words, once a player in one of your IR slots is activated by his NFL team you will need to move him off your IR before you can submit or revise your lineup. That does NOT mean a legally submitted lineup is suddenly invalid when the player is activated. Here is an example.
I have Tank Dell on my IR and he is now practising with the Texans but still on IR. I have already set a lineup for this week. If Dell is activated for this weekend, say on Saturday, my lineup would stay in place and be valid. However should I want to change it (re-submit it) I'd have to deal with Dell (activate or drop him) before doing so. And I'd have to fix it in any case before submitting a lineup next week.
Let me know if you have any questions.
How About Those Pirates?
I don't put much stock in post-draft analysis but I do check stuff out just for grins. This year the draft site gave out one failing grade after the draft...to the Pirates. And it gave out two "A" grades... to the Legends and Holes. The Pirates are 4-1. The Legends and Holes are a combined 3-7. I guess my point is.."You never know!" I mean Dameon Pierce and someone named Germie Bernard are at the top of this week's recommended waiver priority lists. Crazy talk for sure.
There is no reason to pay attention to the Playoffs tab on the league site yet. I mean we are still two weeks from the midway point of the season. But if you go there be aware that the Populate Playoff Seedings thing is A) slow to update, it usually takes a couple of days, and B) it gives bogus results until everyone has played everyone else and the tie-breaks are established.
The Giants fell short in their quest for 300 this past weekend. Rick will give it another whirl against the Sticks in Week Six.
It took 46+ seasons but I finally had a Hughes League-related dream last night. In it Jimmy O called me angry about something I wrote in this newsletter. 😂 Since I wrote that first paragraph late Monday night maybe I dreamt I'd already sent it and he was mad about being used as an example. Jimmy, feel free to weigh in on this!
Scoring was up three points per franchise over last week. Eight teams broke the 100 points barrier (and the Flyers were very close) which is the highest since Week One. There were far fewer 'extremes' than we had last week, that's for sure. If you look at the Scoring Bar Chart on this page, the sizes of the purple areas (Week 5) are much more uniform than they were in the yellow (Week 4). It's like someone squashed the Bell Curve, or something. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's it for this week. Almost five straight days of grandpa duties wore me out for sure.
30->26
AÃda at her recent 2-year checkup. She's 90th Percentile for height, 75th for weight, and 200th Percentile for Adorableness!
I mean it sucks for reals. I'll finish my post and find that text above and below a picture/embedded video/subheadline are in two different font sizes despite my not making any changes. I'll type the entire post in one size font and then use the exact same settings to enlarge the headings and they all look different. The fuck?
All efforts to fix the problem come to naught. Last week for example, I had the top photo (the dead flies) in the middle of the first paragraph but moving it to the top screwed up the text in that paragraph.
This week I had a couple of captions for my grandbabies pics and I couldn't for the life of me get the text correct. It was so small it looked like ants crawling across my monitor. I don't relish the idea of switching platforms (again 😒 ) so I doubt I'll go back to WordPress or try to learn the ins and outs of Wix. I may try them out in the off-season. That means I'm stuck here for at least this year. Ugh. The shame of it is that for a long time Blogger was a top notch site. I just think Google sees the world moving away from blogs and doesn't give a shit if this place goes to hell.
Let's take a moment to watch my guy, Igor Shesterkin score a goal. The first Ranger goalie to ever nail one! This cheers me up every time! LGR!!
And check out this tour poster. I know there was a heavy drug culture in the late 60s but what was the promoter doing booking Jimi Hendrix, Cat Stevens and ENGELBERT HUMPERDINCK together? Holy shit. BTW...if, like me, you're wondering who the hell the Walker Brothers were...they were a mid-60s LA-based trio of non-brothers who had some success in the UK. Their biggest record was 'Make It Easy On Yourself', written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, which was covered far better by the legendary Jerry Butler.
And Now For The Usual BS:
I would have bet heavily against ever rostering Deshaun Watson again, but here we are. Full disclosure, he was my 3rd choice waiver priority but I got outbid on Penix and Geno Smith... Okay, here is the Week 4 Roll Call of Tears: Lamar, Chase AND Higgins, Barkley, DeVonte Smith, McConkey, Rice, Mariota, DJ Moore... did I miss anyone?
The Strawmenn have picked up their 300th win! Under the guidance of Mark Kuhlmann and Mike Padilla this original franchise has joined an exclusive club. The 300 Win page has been updated to reflect it. Congrats, Mike. You are an asset to the Hughes League for sure. The Smenn defeated the Nats for that milestone win and the Nats will face the Giants this week who have 299 and are looking for one to get their franchise over the line.
This week was the third time in our history that two teams had over 150 points. Unless my quick research missed anything, it last happened in 2019 when the Smann and Holes both were above the 150 mark in seperate games. But prior to that we had the 'Agony Bowl' in which the Bliz beat the Holes 155-151 in Week 8 of 2015. Ouch.
This is the second week of four this season that the Rbacks have had above average games and gotten beat. Sorry, Dave. At least you can gloat over the Cowboys...the Heroes had the top score last week and the worst score this week, chicken salad to chicken feathers (or something).. the Sticks rolled off the edge of the table as well... even with the two 150+ teams we only jumped 5 points per team over last week...
I'd already won my game going into Monday night but if I hadn't, and had lost by a handful of points, Brian Robinson poaching three TDs from Bijan would have...well, you wouldn't have this news blog post, or maybe this league. 😟... here come the Bye Weeks. I dunno why the weak-ass NFL players need a week off. If we can play every week, so can they!
After completing most of this post I decided that maybe I'd use Google's Gemini to clean the code and I could avoid the issues I mentioned. I tried it, asking why Blogger screws with the post and here is what I got back (along with cleaned-up code):
Blogger's visual WYSIWYG editor is infamous for wrapping text in random inline HTML tags (like <span style="font-size: large;"> or <div><br /></div>) whenever you cut, paste, press enter, or move images around.
If one Google product says another Google product is 'infamous', well, who am I to argue? And I may just have to try cleaning the code that way from now on. It's certainly quicker than redoing the whole f'ing thing from scratch three times like I did last week.
35 --> 31
Here's a bonus, Jerry 'The Iceman' Butler from 1962. Enjoy!
BTW... Jerry Butler will appear later in my Top 50 list.
Aida is normally the happiest kid around. Dunno what this is all about. Maybe she drafted Puka, Achane, Jefferson, Bowers, and Dart.
.png)
.JPEG)
.JPEG)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.png)
.jpg)
.JPEG)
