The AFL Gets a Throwback Week

The AFL has been keeping receipts since 2003. Every name this league has ever worn is sitting in the config — 117 of them, across 24 franchises — and until now they only ever surfaced on franchise pages as history. On NFL Week 8 they come out of the drawer. Live scoring, the matchup cards and Set Lineup all swap to whatever era you picked, and everybody else's too.

Swiftie 4 Life has thirteen identities to choose between, which is its own kind of confession. Get off my Ditka has nine. Nobody has to settle — pick your era and it sticks until you change it, and there's a Preview link on every card so you can see the scoreboard wearing it before you commit. Skip the whole thing and you still play: every team already has a default, and it's the identity you wore the LONGEST. The Show spent seventeen seasons as No Frills, so that's what The Show wears.

One rule about the defaults, because it matters. A last-place rebrand is never picked for you. Finishing last in this league gets you renamed, and the site is not going to turn around and make that your throwback too — Cock Gobbler, Jesus Killers, Vit's Brother and the rest are all still there in the picker if you want to own it, but you have to reach for them yourself.

Two teams nearly missed the party. Drunk Indians and Fullybaked have never once changed their names in twenty-two years, so their history was empty and they had nothing to throw back to. Turned out MFL never deleted anything: the original art was still sitting on the same servers it was uploaded to in 2003, down to a Half Baked movie poster tiled four across at exactly the width of a league banner, because that is how you made a banner in 2003. Both are in, wearing the real thing.

A word of warning about the names. This league was not tasteful in 2004 and nobody has asked it to be now, so the Week 8 scoreboard is going to say some things. Every era is eligible. That was the point.