Future Changes (Suggestions Welcome) 2024-25 Edition

Mike

ModeratorMike

Six-man master
Administrator
It's that time of the year that I start looking ahead, thinking about what to change/add before next year and, as always, your input is highly encouraged. This site is for the fans, coaches and players, and I want it to always work in a way that is easiest for y'all to find all of the information that you're looking for and that you have a fun way to discuss six-man football and all the teams that play this game we all love.

So, before you guys disappear into off-season, please let me know if y'all have any suggestions for next year.

Here's a list of things that I already have on my list (in no particular order):

  • Embeddable scores. I actually got this idea from the Texas 1a Fan website, and thought it was a really neat idea, and maybe something that other folks could be looking for. Next year (or hopefully within the next several months) we'll have code that anyone can embed into their own website, that will allow them to display all of the scores that we have available to us during the current week. Members will be able to display scores from a single team, district (or districts), league (or leagues), or just list all six-man scores. Of course, in exchange for being able to display these scores directly on your site, with a simple line of code, there will be a link back to this site also displayed in the block.
  • Separate rankings for playoff teams. This has actually been on my list for the last few years but I just haven't found the time to work out what needs to happen to make this work. Hopefully something I can finally get done this year, but with everything else I've got on my mind, it's not looking too good.
  • Team rosters. This is something that's been suggested many times before and, originally, I didn't like the idea because of the amount of work it would take to keep it up-to-date. I've since (possibly) changed my thought process to such that it doesn't really hurt anything if it's not up-to-date for some teams, as long as we're culling out players as they graduate (this could be an automated process). Then, at worse, we're showing a few players who may have moved schools or who no longer play football. So, yeah, this is something that I could see being added before next season. Hopefully we'll be able to get some fans/coaches/players to help us out in keeping all the rosters up-to-date. More details will come out on how this will work as the coding process starts.
  • Better favorite teams. Right now you can select a single team as your favorite team, to get notifications when their score is accepted as final, quicker access to their schedule and overview pages, etc. I'd like to expand on this, allowing members to "favorite" multiple teams and having a full landing page to quickly find out some basic info about the teams in your list.
  • Playoff bracket challenges. I still haven't looked into this to determine how I want it to look, or work, but I'm thinking next year I'd like to have some brackets here on the site that folks can fill out. Thanks to @Bulldog5255 and @gameofsix for taking on that task this year. I thought it was a fun thing to do for some folks.
  • Pick 'em changes. I'm still not 100% sure what I want to do here, but I definitely want to make a change. I don't think 30 games was too many, but I think also having to pick a spread for all of those games made it a bit too much. I'm thinking next year I may try to separate things by division, then only have 1-2 games where a predicted score is picked as the tie-breaker. Like I said, I'm not 100% sure. Mostly just putting this here as a reference because it's my current plan, which is still likely to change at any moment.

So, that's it so far. I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, and I'm sure more will be added as more suggestions come in. As always, I'll try to keep this list up-to-date and try to keep folks in the loop when new features are knocked off the list.
 
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Mike,
I confess I am the one that made the comment that picking 30 games is a little much. To be honest it wasn't really too many, I was attempting to be politically correct and say that I didn't enjoy picking the private school leagues. Just don't care much about those games therefore don't really commit to following them, thus making it hard to make picks. Separated by divisions as you mentioned would be awesome. Totally up to you sir but you asked for input so that's my take on the pick em'. The idea of team rosters would be absolutely awesome. I agree it would be hard and need lots of assistance keeping them as accurate as possible. But if a data base was ever built that stayed fairly accurate with Senior losses, move ins, coaching changes, etc. it may very well create a more accurate pre-season ranking baseline which is huge as the season progresses from what I can tell. I believe even late in the season there were a handful of teams either substantially over ranked or under ranked and I think it had to do with preseason (baseline) ranking. But I admit I don't know that for sure but seems to be the case. Thanks for everything you do. Still so thankful you brought this site back, it means a lot to a has been like me that loves Texas 6-man football and just a little too far away to make a lot of games.
 
SimplyPut said:
Mike,
I confess I am the one that made the comment that picking 30 games is a little much. To be honest it wasn't really too many, I was attempting to be politically correct and say that I didn't enjoy picking the private school leagues. Just don't care much about those games therefore don't really commit to following them, thus making it hard to make picks. Separated by divisions as you mentioned would be awesome. Totally up to you sir but you asked for input so that's my take on the pick em'. The idea of team rosters would be absolutely awesome. I agree it would be hard and need lots of assistance keeping them as accurate as possible. But if a data base was ever built that stayed fairly accurate with Senior losses, move ins, coaching changes, etc. it may very well create a more accurate pre-season ranking baseline which is huge as the season progresses from what I can tell. I believe even late in the season there were a handful of teams either substantially over ranked or under ranked and I think it had to do with preseason (baseline) ranking. But I admit I don't know that for sure but seems to be the case. Thanks for everything you do. Still so thankful you brought this site back, it means a lot to a has been like me that loves Texas 6-man football and just a little too far away to make a lot of games.
Click to expand...

I do think it's a good idea. I realize not everyone wants to pick every game, so I'm going to work on a way to have it so that members can just pick whichever games they want (probably out of let's say a max of 10 games per division) and we'll have different scoring for overall, UIL, TAPPS, TAIAO, TCAL, TCAF, etc. Again, it's all pretty much up in the air right now but I'll work something out. The main thing is I don't want folks to be required to pick a spread for every single game. To me, that was probably the most daunting part of it and I really don't think it was necessary for breaking ties.

I did get some tips from @6manfanNate on how to handle pre-season rankings, so I'll be utilizing his tips this season to see if that helps. That said, yes, it would be very informative if we had rosters for every team, or at least most teams, so we could easily see who the seniors are each season. If we could eventually have collective stat data, even better, but I have a feeling we're at least a few years out from that, mainly because we don't have a way to input and/or store that data right now.

Baby steps and, God willing, I'll keep adding more and more every year until there's not a single bit of information about six-man football, and the teams that play it, that can't be found right here on these pages.
 
Love the idea for changes to the picking of games each week. Breaking it up into separate divisions seems pretty smart and might get more people involved. I also don’t know the private schools very well and hesitate to pick schools that I don’t know much about. As always another great year, Mike.
 
kdstew3 said:
This is something that you could get help from coaches/family/fans on as well. Still more work on your end, but a little bit helps, I suppose..
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Oh, I'm just hoping that's the case! If not, we'll just have a lot of empty roster pages. I've got a few ideas in mind for using the data off these pages that will, hopefully, entice folks to make sure their kids are listed. We'll see what happens, and I'm sure it'll be a slow process to get the initial rosters. After that it's really just keeping up with move-ins, move-outs, and incoming freshmen. Again, I'm hoping to get a lot of ongoing help with this, but we'll see what happens.
 
I may be the only one, but this is what I typically see when I try to read the message boards.
 

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SicEm said:
I may be the only one, but this is what I typically see when I try to read the message boards.
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If you log in to the site you see far less ads. I can't be 100% certain, but I don't think either of those larger ads would even display if you were logged in to the site. They both look like locations where ads wouldn't display for logged-in members.
 
I only ever see 2 ads. One at the top and one at the bottom but the one at the bottom is always there. Can't scroll past it.
 
TheJoker said:
I only ever see 2 ads. One at the top and one at the bottom but the one at the bottom is always there. Can't scroll past it.
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If you're logged in, that's all you'll see on most pages. There may be a few pages where you might see an extra one at about mid-page, but those should be fairly rare.
oldfolks said:
I don’t see any adds, just SixManFootball.com.
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You have a supporter membership so you won't see any ads.
 
Mike said:
If you're logged in, that's all you'll see on most pages. There may be a few pages where you might see an extra one at about mid-page, but those should be fairly rare.

You have a supporter membership so you won't see any ads.
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That is what everyone needs to understand. There are no free lunches. I’m very pleased with my setup.
 
Just wanted to post an update related to this. This off-season I've been purely focused on getting some of the historical data on the site updated so none of the things I'd planned on getting done this off-season (the things listed in the original post) have been done yet. I will still get the changed to the pick 'em made before the season starts but it's highly unlikely that any of the other stuff listed is done before the season starts. It could all still happen this year, but not likely before the season begins.

What I've been spending all my "coding time" on this year is building a system that will allow me to store, and display, old ranking archive information. That information does still exist, but before I took over the site most of that information is stored in individual html pages. That means all that information has to be manually entered into the database, one team at a time. When you consider the number of teams there are, and the information that has to be gathered to enter for each one (team name, team id, division, team rating, win/loss record), plus the number of years there are, you can see that it's a lot of information and will be very time consuming work to get entered. I've tried my best to build a system to automate a lot of it but some things just have to be done manually.

I've also been combing through old database files, scraping every bit of game info I can find to add into the current database. Data such as game dates/times, locations, and whether games are district games or not. I was able to find that information for a large portion of games dating back through the 2009 season. I spent quite some time building an import system to import that information into the current database, but it was something that had to be re-coded for each year so definitely a lot more time-consuming than I would've liked. That said, as of yesterday, the importer has been run on all the info I had and most of the games in the archive from 2009 to current should have all that information entered. I did notice already that a lot of district games weren't marked as such in the old database file so there could be some errors there. Also, if the system was unable to determine an exact match on the teams playing in each game being scanned (the team changed names for example) I didn't import any new information. Likewise, if the system couldn't interpret the date/time data, or the location, it just skipped over that data. So, there is probably still some missing data in the database but I'd guess that well over 95% of the data is updated and as accurate as it can be from 2009 to current. As with the rankings, I'll slowly be working on 1994-2008 but this is something that will likely take years to accomplish.

Please note that each game listed in the team archives has a "report" button next to it. If you notice some incorrect, or missing, data on any of the archived games, please report that game and I'll do my best to get it fixed as soon as possible.

Again, I just wanted to add some transparency as to why you're not seeing posts about this year's future changes being implemented. All of these things are still a high priority for me but, as someone who is growing more and more interested in the history of six-man football with each passing year, I really wanted to get to work on getting these archives updated. For those of you who might have been looking forward to any of the changes I'd listed for this year, just know they're still planned. They'll just be delayed a bit.
 
Today I've installed a new update that adds team roster to each active team. I'm assuming this information will take quite some effort to add, so I'm really counting on players, coaches, and fans to all help out in keeping this information up-to-date.

To update a team's roster, simply search for the team on the teams page, then click on the "Roster" tab. Once there, you'll be able to view the full team's roster (if available) as well as add new players to a team's roster.

If you're a coach, with your account associated with your team, or if you have selected a favorite team on the site, then you will also see direct links to your team's rosters on the Coach and Fans tabs, respectively.

Here are a few things to note about how this system works.

When you add a player to a current team roster, they will be automatically added to subsequent year rosters as well, even though future rosters aren't yet viewable. The system will simply use the same data for all years, through the player's senior year. So, if you add a player to this year's roster and they're just a freshman, the system will automatically add them through 2028. If you add a senior, they'll only be added to this year's roster.

Coaches, just like with schedules, you all will have the ability to edit/delete players that are on your schedule, as long as your account is associated with your team. Just like with adding a player, any changes made to the current year's roster will automatically adjust future year rosters too. If you change a player's number, height, positions, etc for the current year, they'll be updated for future seasons too. Changes are not automatically made to past seasons, though. So, if you add a player this year that is 5'10" 150 lbs, they'll be added to the 2026 roster with those same stats. Next year, if you change that player to 5'11" 175 lbs, the 2025 stats will remain untouched and only 2026 (and any necessary future seasons) will be changed. Likewise, deleting a player from your schedule will delete that player from the current year, and any future years, but will not remove them from past rosters.

I've tried to make the form for adding a player as simple as possible, and I'm hoping most of the fields are self-explanatory, but I do need to mention one thing. I wasn't able to code the system to know the difference between someone entering a jersey number "0" and jersey number "00", while also using the number box spinner, so if you want to add someone with a "00" instead of just a "0", you'll want to click down a number to "-1", at least for now. There is a note on the form about this.

Y'all please let me know if you come across any issues adding players, or think of a way to make this thing easier to use.

Here's a look at the form, followed by a list of positions.

Screenshot 2025-07-22 161406.webp

Screenshot 2025-07-22 161322.webp
 
Legacy Zebra said:
Shouldn’t be a problem since players aren’t allowed to wear 00 (or any other number that starts with 0 like 07).
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Well that's good to know. I could've sworn I've seen a 00 before. Evidently I just made that up. 😂 Guess I'll just remove that as an option in the next update then. Thank you for the info!
 
Today came with it a quick update, mainly because it was something I wanted to be able to see to keep up with changes, but I thought other folks might want to see it too. Not something I had in mind, until I added the rosters, but I've added a new page to look at team update times.

The first page just shows the last time any team data was updated. This can include, but isn't limited to, things like if the coach is updated, a team changes their name or mascot, the team's logo is updated, or if any of the information on the team's overview page is updated. I've never kept logs on these changes so I wasn't able to backfill any of the team update dates, but I'm sure before long all the teams will eventually be listed on there.

The second page will show the last time a team's schedule was changed. This will update pretty much any time a game is saved for any team. So something as small as just changing a game's start time will trigger this update. I only recently started logging game changes so I was only able to backfill game changes to July 11.

The final page will show any time a team's roster is updated. This will update any time a player is added, or removed, from a team's roster.

Again, just something mainly for me but I thought some of y'all might like to see some of this stuff too.

Here are the three pages:

sixmanfootball.com

Lastest team updates

This is a list of active six-man football teams, ordered by latest team updates first.
sixmanfootball.com sixmanfootball.com

sixmanfootball.com

Lastest team schedule updates

This is a list of active six-man football teams, ordered by latest schedule updates first.
sixmanfootball.com sixmanfootball.com

sixmanfootball.com

Lastest team roster updates

This is a list of active six-man football teams, ordered by latest roster updates first.
sixmanfootball.com sixmanfootball.com
 
I've adjusted the form to not allow the 00 option anymore. Now it's just strictly 0-9. Thank y'all for the info!
 

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