The Pecking Order Stops Grading on Five Curves

The Pecking Order used to blend five ingredients — recent form, head-to-head record, all-play percentage, season PPG and average margin — which sounds thorough and mostly meant nothing moved. Two of those five measure the same thing twice (season PPG and margin are both "you score a lot"), and head-to-head record is the one number the whole column exists to look past. Win a shootout by half a point and lose a 130-point week to the league leader, and the old formula quietly rewarded you for both.

It is now half your all-play record and half your last three weeks. All-play asks the only fair season-long question there is: if you played everybody every week, how often would you win? The rolling three-week scoring average asks the other one: are you any good right now? Nothing else votes. Season PPG and average margin still show on every card as context — they just do not move you anymore.

Both halves are scaled against the field before they are added, so fifty-fifty means fifty-fifty. On an absolute scale a league full of all-play numbers bunched between .300 and .700 would have quietly counted for about half as much as the scoring side, which is exactly the kind of thing that hides in a five-ingredient blend.

The visible effect: teams whose record is better than their football stop coasting, and teams getting beaten by the schedule stop being buried. In this week's issue Da Dangsters climb to #3 on a .710 all-play, and Wascawy Wabbits — a .659 all-play team scoring 93 a week lately — sit at #8, which is exactly the argument the two halves are supposed to have.

Separately, and long overdue: every team accent on the page was being rendered in the franchise's raw brand color, which is fine until dark mode. Bring The Pain is near-black and Cowboy Up is navy, so their rank numbers were effectively invisible on a dark card; in light mode Midwestside's yellow had the same problem against white. Every franchise color in the design system now resolves to a version that stays readable on whatever theme you're in, brand-accurate where it already worked, nudged only where it did not.