Claim Him From Wherever You Found Him

Until this week, adding a free agent meant being on one specific page. The button lived in a column on Free Agents and nowhere else, so a name you stumbled across in a matchup, on someone's roster, or halfway down a Schefter Report post was a name you had to go and look up again somewhere else before you could do anything about him.

Now it is wherever he is. Tap a player's name and the card that opens carries two buttons side by side: Watch player, and — if he is genuinely available to you — Claim player in the AFL, Bid player in TheLeague. Same claim form, same drop picker, same waiver window; it just comes to you instead of the other way round.

That last condition is doing real work. The button only appears when the player is actually unrostered in your league, in your conference, and you have a roster to drop from — the AFL holds the same man once in each conference, so "free" there is a per-conference question, not a league-wide one. Anyone already rostered, and anyone you could not file for anyway, simply gets Watch. Nothing about who may claim whom has changed: the same server checks run on submit as always, against MFL rather than against anything the page believed.

On the Free Agents table itself, the pill that used to sit beside the ⋮ is gone and the ⋮ column now says what it does — Claim, or Bid — with the claim, the sign-in for signed-out visitors, and Watch all inside it. One column instead of two, on a table that already scrolls sideways on a phone.