The Dead Tile on Your Team Card Finally Says Something
"Keepers — of 7 protected" has been sitting blank on the AFL homepage since the day it shipped, because there was never a number to put there. It's gone. In its place: your earned round-1 draft slot until the conference drafts wrap, then your last trophy for the rest of the year. The roster count next to it is finally counting this year's team, too.
The Full Story
If you have looked at your team card on the AFL homepage any time in the last while, you have seen a small grey dash where a keeper count was supposed to be. It was never going to be anything else. AFL does not have keepers the way MFL means keepers — the offseason auction wipes the slate every year — so the tile was measuring a thing that does not exist. Even if we had wired it up to the roster feed it would have read "7 of 7" for all twenty-four of you, which is a fact about the rules, not about your team.
So the slot now rotates with the calendar, and it always has something to say.
From June 1 until your conference finishes drafting, it shows your base draft position — the pick you earned out of last season's standings, run through the same tiebreaker chain the Draft Predictor uses. Smokane sits at 1.10 in the AL. If a trade has moved you off that slot, the number gets an asterisk and the line underneath tells you where you actually pick, so you can see both the pick you earned and the pick you own without opening another page.
Once the drafts are in the books it flips to hardware: the most recent title you have won, with your best one appended when the two are not the same trophy. That distinction turned out to matter for half the league. Smokane's most recent title is the 2025 AL North, which is real, and also not the thing worth leading with — so the tile reads AL North, then AFL '13. Ranking runs AFL Championship, Premier League, conference, division, D-League, NIT.
Four franchises have no hardware at all. Rather than hand them a counter of how long it has been, the tile falls through to the all-time record — the Micks have gone 78-72 since 2005, which reads a lot better than the alternative. And while we were in there: the roster count on that same card was reading off the season clock instead of the league clock, which meant it spent every offseason counting a team that no longer exists. It counts the roster you have right now — which, eight days out from the draft, is your seven keepers and nobody else.
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