340 Seasons Just Got Their Owners Back

Here is a thing nobody meant to build. Franchise pages are owner-scoped, and correctly so: when a team changes hands, the new owner does not inherit the old one's rings. Midwestside's owner should not be walking around with the Witch City Warlocks' 38-34 on their permanent record, and they aren't.

But the seasons that got subtracted had to go somewhere, and they didn't. They went nowhere. Add it up across both leagues and it is 340 franchise-seasons — 110 in The League, 230 in the AFL — that were played, scored, won and lost, and then rendered on precisely zero pages. Fourteen league championships in there. Seventy-three division titles. The Warlocks won a division in 2007 and until this week you could not find that anywhere on this site.

So: Owners. One page per owner, 128 of them, 87 of whom don't run a team here anymore. Their record, their playoff runs, their trophies, every team name they ever wore, and — because people move slots and share teams — the whole chain of who handed the franchise to whom.

The old "Former Identities" strip on the franchises page is the tell for how bad this was. Twenty-three historical team names in The League, ninety-five in the AFL, every one of them a link. Every one of them a link to nowhere useful, because the page they wanted to point at did not exist. All 118 now land on the owner who ran that team.

And each franchise page now ends with the people who had it before you. Their record on that slot, their seasons, their hardware, one click away. The record above it still belongs to whoever holds the team today. That was never the problem. The problem was that everything underneath it had been quietly deleted.