Putting Names to the Ghosts
Owners launched with eighty-five people on it who had no names — MFL never stored one for most tenures before about 2016, so their pages were headed by a team name and a blank where a person should be. Sixty-four of those blanks are now filled, including every owner who ever won a championship.
The Full Story
The Owners page went live last week with a hole in the middle of it. The man who ran The Nukes for thirteen straight seasons — the longest single tenure in either league — had a page, a record, a division title and no name. Same for the owner of Las Vegas Elite, eleven seasons and a championship, filed under a team. MFL simply never kept a name against most tenures before about 2016, and there is no clever query that recovers one.
So it got done the slow way, from memory, one at a time. Eighty-five blanks are down to twenty-one. Every championship in the history of either league now has a person attached to it, which was not true on Monday — eight titles were sitting on pages headed only by a team name.
The better find was underneath. Thirteen of those “people” were not people at all: they were one owner sawn in half. The page works out who owned what by watching a franchise slot change hands, so a slot reshuffle or a rebrand reads exactly like a handover. Tom Flanagan renamed NOSX to Brady's Bastards in 2009 and became two strangers, one of whom held the 2012 title. Shane Fitch became Level 3 Inception and lost eight seasons and a ring to his own alter ego. Jesse Schuffenhauer played 2003 and 2004, vanished for nineteen years, came back in 2023 and was greeted as a new arrival. They are all whole again, and their seasons moved with them: 320 and 576 franchise-seasons before, 320 and 576 after — a merge never invents a season or drops one.
Five people also turned out to be running teams in both leagues at once, Rick O'Keefe and Shane Fitch among them, and now read as the same person on both sites. One man is on the board as coinflip, because that is genuinely all anybody remembers about him, and his record says so rather than pretending otherwise.
The League is finished — every owner in its history, back to 2007, now has a name on the page. Nineteen AFL tenures are still blank: none of them lasted more than three seasons, none of them played past 2015, and ten of them are a single season by a team nobody has said out loud since. If Red Dawn, Vinegar Strokes or the Italian Stalions means something to you, the commissioner would like a word.
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