The Hall of Fame page does not change often. It is not supposed to. But this week the network historian's office is doing something it has not done in the thirteen seasons this archive covers: adding a column.
Effective today, every franchise page and the Hall of Fame itself carries a new stat alongside career winnings. It is called the Inflation-Adjusted Net, and the math is not complicated, which is the point. The Heavyweights buy-in has climbed from $100 in 2013 to $500 today. A championship check written in the founding season was real money then, but it is not the same money now. The adjustment replays every single season at today's $500 entry fee — scale each year's winnings by 500 divided by that year's actual buy-in, price every buy-in ever paid at $500 regardless of the year it was paid — and let the ledger tell you what actually happened.
What it reveals is not a footnote. It is a coronation, and the man it crowns is not the man you think.
For as long as this column has run, the nominal ledger has settled the money argument with a single number: Ben Cunnion, $5,830 in career net, a runaway lead built on real, recent championship money — $3,400 in 2024, $2,900 this year alone. Next closest was John Penney at $3,650. Kevin Jones sat fifth at $915, closer to Elliott Simmonds's $730 than to the top of the table. If you'd asked anyone in this league who the all-time money king was, they'd have said Cunnion without blinking, and they'd have been right, by the only measure anyone had ever bothered to adjust for.
Nobody had adjusted for anything. That was the problem.
Run the same thirteen seasons at today's $500 standard and Kevin Jones's adjusted net comes back at $7,700. Cunnion's comes back at $5,800. Report it straight and do not mix the two ledgers: nominally, Cunnion still leads, $5,830 to $915. Adjusted, Kevin leads, $7,700 to $5,800. Two different truths on two different bases, and the second one is the one that belongs on the Hall of Fame page from here forward. The reason is sitting right there in the per-season ledger. Kevin's biggest early paydays came cheap: an $800 payday in 2013, when the buy-in was $100, and a $1,200 haul in 2015, when it was $150. Priced at today's rate, each of those seasons alone is worth $4,000 — eight grand total from two seasons that nominally combined for just $2,000. Cunnion's championship money, by contrast, mostly landed after the league settled at $500 in 2021. His money was already priced in real time. Longtime readers know what comes next: those two founding-era paydays were quietly worth four times what the record book ever credited them for, combined.
Kevin Jones and Cunnion are still tied at three championships apiece — the Hall of Fame is not rewriting titles, only dollars — but the adjusted stat settles an argument the trophy count never could. When it mattered, whose money was worth more? History, corrected for inflation, says Kevin's.
He is not the only one the ledger owed an apology. Evan Sinn climbs from $2,150 nominal to $3,700 adjusted on the strength of a 2019 haul that landed when the buy-in was still $350 — that $2,835 payday is worth over $4,000 in today's terms alone. Brian Jones jumps from $1,595 to $3,190 — his adjusted net exactly doubles under the correction, the sort of round number this ledger does not usually hand out for free. He is a champion who has also lost three finals, and readers who want to call him ringless can take that up with the record book, not with me. Meanwhile Penney, whose nominal $3,650 looked untouchable, slides to $2,430, because his biggest payday came in 2021 at the full $500 rate and got no multiplier at all. Justin Waitt takes the hardest hit in the league: nominal net of -$260 looked almost respectable, survivable even. Adjusted, it's -$2,040, because his one big score came in an already-expensive 2023 while his cost basis — thirteen seasons, now priced at $500 apiece regardless of what he actually paid — got restated upward like everyone else's. The archive does not forgive you for winning at full price.
Even Elliott Simmonds, quietly in the black at $730 nominal for years, slips underwater to -$20 adjusted. There is no dignity left in these margins.
A word, too, for the ringless. Nick Inman's adjusted net falls from -$1,320 to -$1,650, and Ollie Simmonds's from -$1,550 to -$1,950 — the two finalists this office has spent years arguing deserve Hall of Fame recognition simply for reaching a final without a ring both get poorer under the correction, which feels almost thematically appropriate. Inman's lone runner-up finish is, of course, this year's — the final he lost to Cunnion, his first ever. The archive doesn't do irony on purpose. It just keeps landing on it.
I will note, because someone has to, that this update does not flatter everybody. Jamie Sinn's adjusted net now sits at -$4,800, the worst figure in the entire ledger, nominal or adjusted — worse than Chris Boyle's -$3,250, worse than Charlie Koepsell's -$1,900, worse than Hunter Koepsell's -$1,000. Eleven seasons played, $165 in total career winnings, and the correction did not find him a nickel he hadn't already lost. Some corrections crown a king. This one just confirms who's been holding up the bottom of the standings the whole time.
History will remember this. Kevin Jones's plaque gets an asterisk it did not need before, and it reads: worth more than we said.