Weekly Fixes & Polish (Jul 6-14)

This week's 16 bug fixes and polish improvements touched the following areas of the site:

keeper-planner — Finalizing keepers no longer gaslights you into thinking it failed. The cuts were landing on MFL just fine, but the page reloaded from a roster snapshot that syncs about once an hour — so your just-cut players were still staring back at you, and re-running finalize spat out a wall of scary (and wrong) errors like "You can only cut players from your own roster." Three fixes: the AFL rosters page now reads live MFL data for the current year (same 2-minute freshness TheLeague already enjoys), the finalize screen confirms your keepers are locked in with a button that shows your actual new roster, and a re-run recognizes already-cut players as done instead of calling them failures.

Rosters — AFL player avatars sized up to match TheLeague. Rosters, the NFL/College analytics grids, the trade builder, and the keeper planner were all quietly running smaller headshot circles than TheLeague's equivalents — now they're the same 40px size across both sites. The AFL Keeper Planner finally read the room. Flip on dark mode and the drag-the-line tool had stayed stubbornly, blindingly white — every keeper card, the above/below-the-line zones, the status bar and the finalize modal glowing like a lightbox on the navy page. Now the whole planner dresses in the AFL night palette: navy cards, slate borders, a green wash on the keepers you're protecting and red on the cuts. While we were in there, the Roster/Analytics/Planner toggle stopped rendering its active tab as a stark white chip, and the roster table's "Opp #" matchup badges swapped their bright pastel pills for the same muted greens and reds every other page uses after dark.

Design System & Theming — The Pacific Pigskins and Vitside Mafia crests finally got dark-mode variants. Both teams' logos used to stay stuck in their light-theme colors when you had dark mode on, standing out (in a bad way) against every other team's icon smoothly swapping over — now they blend in like everyone else, on both TheLeague and AFL sites. Team logos now dress for the dark. Marks with black outlines — the Raiders shield, the Steelers hypocycloids, the Jets, North Carolina's navy interlock — used to all but vanish against a dark background, a smudge where a logo should be. In dark mode every NFL logo across the site (matchup heroes, the composite banners, roster player rows) now swaps to its dark-optimized cut, outline flipped to white so the crest actually reads, and the college logos in the Free Agents and roster player tables get the same treatment. Light mode is untouched, and the switch follows your theme toggle in real time.

Homepage — What's New finally moved into the AFL homepage. The League has had that little row of recent-update cards on its front page for a while; now AFL owners get the same feed on afl-fantasy.com, browser-frame screenshots and all, pointed at the right domain. While we were in there the whole card treatment got a glow-up on both sites: the category accent colors — the little stripe and pill on each card — were a muddy, muted set that barely registered, so they got brightened to punchier greens, blues, violets and reds, and they now light up even bolder in dark mode instead of sulking. The cards themselves stopped floating shapeless against the page and picked up the same proper border and drop-shadow depth every other card on the site already wears, in both light and dark. The homepage and season heroes stopped whispering in daylight. In light mode the whole family — the What's New announcement, the weekly recap, the waiver and weekend-preview articles, the auction and cut-watch panels, the champion-crowned card, the AFL event hero and more — had faded to pale, near-white washes that all but vanished against the page, hoarding every bit of drama for dark mode. Now each wears a bold saturated card in every theme, keyed to its own color: deep league-blue for most, warm amber for the auction, alarm-red for breaking news and roster cuts, trophy-gold for a champion crowned. White headlines, on-brand glow, and the featured player bigger than ever — the daylight version finally hits as hard as the night one.

site — Wander off the map and you no longer hit a broken-looking dead end. The old 404 page had two lines of text hard-coded to near-black, so in dark mode "Page Not Found" all but disappeared into the void. The whole page got rebuilt as a Claude Schefter breaking-news alert instead: a red BREAKING banner, Schefter's mugshot on the byline, a giant 404, the headline "Sources say this page doesn't exist," and a LIVE ticker scrolling league-flavored bulletins along the bottom ("Developing: URL reportedly entered the transfer portal"). Reads perfectly in both light and dark now, and instead of making you pick a league, a single button — labeled "Back to AFL" on afl-fantasy.com and "Back to The League" on theleague.us — drops you on the homepage of whichever site you wandered off of.

Standings — The Premier League standings card on the AFL homepage stopped crowding its own headline on phones. Its "Full standings" link had been wedged into the top-right corner, sharing a cramped line with the title, while the American League playoff card right above it politely dropped its "Full bracket" link onto its own row on mobile. Now the two cards match: on phones the Premier League link tucks under the heading the same way, giving the title room to breathe.

Other — Claude Schefter is back on the beat. His scanner — the one that breaks transaction news and fires Roger's event reminders — had quietly flatlined: a duplicate line snuck into its scheduler config, which is the kind of typo the robots refuse to forgive, so the whole job got rejected before it ever woke up. Every run since had failed silently. Cleared the duplicate and the newsdesk is live again.

Navigation & Routing — A handful of AFL links had been sneaking you across the border into The League. Biggest one: tapping "Set Lineup" while signed out bounced you to The League's login page instead of AFL's — now it sends you to the AFL sign-in and drops you right back on your lineup. Same treatment for the "View all" on the Schefter Report card and the Trade Builder buttons on the trade-offer popup, which had been pointing at The League's versions. And the header search icon, which had no AFL home to go to, steps aside on AFL until an all-pages search lands there.

Free Agents — The AFL Free Agents hero gave its defenses a face. Land on the DEF tab and instead of a lonely team crest, the spotlight now leads with that unit's marquee defender — his ESPN headshot front and center, the team logo faded behind as a watermark — exactly like the offensive players already get. Each defense carries a rotating cast of its top defenders, so it opens on a different face each visit and cycles through the rest while you browse. It's the same broadcast treatment The League's board has run for weeks, now brought home to AFL. The Free Agents hero stopped reaching for the shoebox photo. When the spotlighted player had no ESPN headshot, the panel used to fall back to a tiny, grainy MyFantasyLeague mugshot (or a gray "no photo" placeholder) — a blurry face is worse than none up in the hero. Now it simply hides the cutout and lets the team logo carry the panel, so the spotlight only ever shows a crisp headshot or a clean crest. Both The League and AFL boards get the fix. The AFL Free Agents page stopped sending you to the wrong stadium. Type afl-fantasy.com/players and instead of the free-agent board you'd land on a 404 wearing The League's colors — the page had been built to render ahead of time, which quietly broke the behind-the-scenes routing that maps the clean AFL web address to the right page. Rewired it to render on request, the same way its League counterpart already does, so the AFL Free Agents board now loads exactly where it should.

Calendar — The AFL calendar got its offseason clock reset to match the real thing. The homepage had the American League draft gaveling in at 9 a.m. — it's actually a 12:30 p.m. Saturday affair — while the World Championship countdown was firing a full week early, landing on Week 16 instead of the real title week (Thursday, Dec 31). The keeper-deadline lock nudged to its true 8:45 p.m., and the "new league year" rollover moved off its stale mid-February slot to June 1, when the new AFL season actually spins up on MyFantasyLeague. Every date now lines up with the league calendar to the minute.

Trade Builder — The AFL trade alert was having an identity crisis. Send an offer to Team Minty Fresh and the popup would proudly announce a trade with... Maverick? That's a TheLeague team. The modal was reading franchise numbers off the wrong league's roster sheet — AFL team #3 and TheLeague team #3 are very different people. Trade offers on the AFL side now name (and badge) the actual AFL teams involved. Bonus fix: the player headshots inside the offer had lost their styling on AFL pages and were rendering as glorious full-screen portraits. They're back to sensible thumbnail size.