Weekly Fixes & Polish (Jul 6-10)

This week's 21 bug fixes and polish improvements touched the following areas of the site:

Free Agents — Player avatars in light mode got a lot less gloomy. The little circular headshots on the Free Agents list (and everywhere else the player lockup shows up) used to sit on a dark team-color gradient no matter the theme — heavy and hard to read against a bright white page. Light mode now uses a soft gray chip with a thin team-color ring instead; dark mode keeps its original moody gradient look untouched. Team defenses finally have a face in the free-agent pool. Tap a D/ST and, instead of a lonely logo staring back, the player card now leads with the unit's headliner — the Raiders' Maxx Crosby, say — his headshot on the team-color gradient and his name in the byline. It's the same trick the Free Agents spotlight already pulls up top, now brought into the detail card so a defense reads like the roster of real humans it actually is. 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.

Rosters — Fixed a cropped team logo on the Rosters page's Cap Hits / Dead Money table. The "[Year] Dead Money" total row shows a franchise crest instead of a player photo, but it was getting squeezed and cropped by the same circular-cutout treatment built for headshots — top of the logo clipped off. It now renders full and uncropped, just like the DEF logo chips elsewhere on the site. The "Step 1 of…" tracker at the top of the contract declaration flow stopped mumbling in the dark. That little progress label had been rendered in a dim gray that all but disappeared against the modal's dark backdrop, leaving you squinting to tell which step you were on. Bumped it to a brighter, theme-aware tone that reads cleanly in both light and dark mode — same understated label, now actually legible.

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. The Schefter Ops dashboard finally turned the lights off. In dark mode the commissioner's rumor-mill control room had been stranded in daylight — every card stayed stark white while the page around it went dark, and the text painted on top all but vanished into the glare. Wired the whole page into the real dark theme so cards, borders, code chips and status text all dim down properly. Commish-only, so nobody else ever saw the flashbang. The "Back to MFL" strip up top got a smoother fade in dark mode. That deep-blue glow band was cutting off to fully transparent partway up, leaving a visible seam where it met the near-black page. Tuned the gradient to fade out at a soft trailing tint instead of hard zero, so the strip blends into the page instead of stopping short.

Other — Live Scoring no longer sits empty in the offseason. With the NFL season over, MyFantasyLeague switches its live feed off — so out of season, tapping Live Scoring in the nav dropped you on a barren "Scores will appear here when games begin" screen. Now, whenever the feed's dark, the page plays back the last completed regular season's final week as if it were unfolding live: real starting lineups built from the actual box score, some matchups final and others mid-play with live win-probability bars, game clocks, and projected finals that land on the real results — all flagged with a "Sample data" badge so nobody mistakes it for a live game. The instant the season kicks off and the feed lights back up, it flips to real-time scores on its own — no toggle, no special link. Live Scoring's matchup detail finally shows both rosters on a phone. Tap into a matchup and scroll to the player-by-player breakdown: your lineup sat on the left, the numbers ran across the middle, and the opponent's entire starting nine spilled clean off the right edge — you couldn't see the team you were playing without a sideways swipe. Rebuilt the row for small screens so both sides fit at once: your player on the left, theirs on the right, each tagged with its own color-coded position chip and score, real headshots on both. Long names now tuck to an ellipsis instead of bulldozing the score beside them, and nothing runs past the screen. The desktop layout — full names, team and game clock, projections — is untouched. The Live Scoring scoreboard stopped running out of bounds on phones. Tap into a matchup on your phone and the big score-header — two teams, their crests, and those jumbo live totals — had been spilling off the right edge, shoving the home team's score clean off-screen behind a phantom horizontal scroll. Reworked it so each side stacks tidily (crest and name up top, the giant number underneath) and the whole card now fits the screen with everyone visible. While we were in there, the "← All matchups" back button got a little breathing room above the scorecard instead of sitting right on top of it. 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. Live Scoring stopped hiding the fine print after dark. When a player was booming — matching or beating his projection — his cell lights up with a green wash, but in dark mode the little "proj" number tucked underneath stayed a dim gray that all but dissolved into that glow, so the one line telling you what he was supposed to score went unreadable right when it mattered. Tinted it a legible mint that sits cleanly on the green in dark mode (and a deep green in light), so the projection reads at a glance whether or not the player's on a heater.

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 "Completed auctions report" link on the homepage auctions card now stays in one piece. It had been breaking mid-phrase — "Completed" clinging to the end of one line while "auctions report" dropped to the next — so the whole link now wraps to a fresh line together when it runs out of room. 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. The player on the Cut Watch hero got a growth spurt. The bubble-player cutout — the face staring back at you while the roster-deadline countdown ticks — was sitting a little small in the corner, so we sized him up to fill the frame the way he was always meant to. More presence, same panic. Mobile is untouched. The Cut Watch bubble player scooted over to claim the wall. He'd been floating a couple dozen pixels shy of the hero's right edge, leaving an awkward sliver of empty gradient between his shoulder and the frame. Now he's pinned flush to the edge where he belongs — same panic-inducing stare down the roster-deadline countdown, just anchored properly instead of drifting. Mobile is untouched.

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.

Live Scoring — Live Scoring's win-probability bars finally show their true colors after dark. A bunch of teams carry near-black or deep-navy brand colors — Music City, the Magicians, Cowboy Up — and in dark mode those bars had been vanishing into the card or getting nudged to a muddy compromise, so you couldn't tell whose slice was whose. Every franchise now has a hand-picked dark-mode primary and secondary: Music City lights up in Titans sky-blue, the Magicians in bright Dark-Magician purple, and the rest in vivid, on-brand hues that read cleanly against the dark scoreboard. Light mode is untouched.