The Pecking Order Explains Itself

The Pecking Order arrived three days ago and immediately went quiet for a month, because there is nothing to rank until Week 1 has been played. That left both leagues with a page that opened cold on a set of rankings from last December: real numbers, real teams, a live-looking headline, and no way for anyone who had never heard of the column to tell that none of it was current.

The page now knows which of those two situations it is in. Out of season it leads with the column itself — every Tuesday morning, every team in your league ranked top to bottom, and a plain-English pass at the math. Half your score is your all-play record, which runs your points against every other team in the league instead of the one you happened to draw: post the fourth-best score in a given week and the week is worth beating everybody but three, whether you won by 40 or lost by 2. The other half is your last three weeks, so a hot month moves you and one bad Sunday in Week 2 stops following you around in November.

Under that, the six things every issue carries — the ranking cards with their movement arrows, Stat of the Week, Bench Blunder, Heater, Cooler, next week's Matchup of the Week, and the full standings and all-play tables. And the date, spelled out: the first real issue of the season lands Tuesday, September 15, the Tuesday after Week 1.

The issue below all that is still there, still real, and now clearly labelled a sample — a past week published so you can see the format, with its publish date dropped so nothing about it reads as breaking news. The moment a real issue exists for the season being played, every bit of the explainer disappears and the page goes back to leading with this week's verdict.

Both leagues get it from the same component, so neither drifts, and it re-arms itself every February when the season ends.