In a move that no one appreciated, Skyler won his 5th championship. He beat Brady thanks to Lamar Jackson Dropping 46+ points. Skyler led wire to wire with a strong start by the Cleveland DST, an MVP performance from Lamar, and mediocrity the rest of the day. Brady and Skyler only had one player each in the 20+ point group, and that was their QB's. Lamar outscored Allen by ~25 points and Skyler ended up winning by 31.
This championship caps off the 3rd panel of the trophy, and the first name on the 4th panel will begin next year. In 7 years, we will need to find someone who can attach a wood base to expand our trophy. So if any of you know some woodworkers, or want to change your career and need an excuse to get into woodworking, this seems like a great opportunity.
For the season recap, Rob set the single-season scoring record for total points, but Ren still holds the record on a per-game basis. We have gone 6 straight seasons where a team has broken 200+ points in any week. It only happened once in the first 8 seasons of the league. No major scoring or roster changes have caused that (I don't think the key has been the ability to start a TE at flex, but maybe I'm wrong), so we'll assume we are getting better at this game as a league.
To put this championship in perspective, and just how lucky it was -- Skyler is the lowest seed (5 seed) to win a championship since former member Konner won it in 2012, also as a 5 seed. In fact, 2010 (Geoff), 2011 (Skyler), and 2012 (Konner) were all #5 seeds to win it all. Around half of all champions during our league finished below 1700 points (which includes Skyler this year), so from a raw data number, that isn't that shocking or lucky, though he is the first one to do it in the 14-game era. To provide context against competition each year, Skyler was the 7th highest scorer on the season this year. Geoff was the 9th best scorer in our first year, and I believe it was after that year we switched tiebreakers to 'points for' and away from 'head-to-head record'. After that time, only Tyler (also 7th highest) in 2013 has finished outside of the top 6 scorers and won the whole thing. Skyler managed only 8 wins in the regular seasons -- the last time a champion had only 8 wins was Matt in 2016 -- but he had one fewer game to play than Skyler did this year. The last time someone had a winning percentage below 60% and won the whole thing was Konner in 2012 when he went 7-6. Skyler was also 8th in the breakdown (comparing everyone's weeks against each other, with the high scorer of the week being 11-0 and the bottom scorer being 0-11). It doesn't look possible to easily go back and find past breakdown information, but being 8th is probably on the lower end of champions.
For season aggregates, below are the winners of each category, based on the weekly totals.
Highest Scorer - Rob won this award 6 times this year
Lowest Scorer - Brandon and Matt split this award with 3 wins each, however, Matt has an asterisk for one of his as he picked up one of those awards in the semi-finals, so only 4 teams could have won awards that week.
Lucky - Tyler ran away with this one and won it 4 times this year -- double the next closest teams.
Unlucky - There was a 3-way tie of teams who won the unlucky award 3 times this year. Jordan, Kyle, and Tommy each got it three times, with all of Jordan and Kyle's coming in the regular season, while Tommy had 2 in the regular season and one in the playoffs.
King of the Court - Matt held onto this award for 7 weeks this year. He had it in two different runs. He started out as king and held onto it for 3 weeks, and then won it back in week 12 and held onto it until he lost in week 16. To correct a previous blog, Skyler was given the award on the week 7 write-up when it clearly went to Kyle. However, nothing came from that error as it was correctly awarded to Brady the following week in the write-up.
MVP: The Cowboys DST was listed twice, as was David Montgomery -- they were the only two players to be listed more than once as MVP.
If we take the season totals though, Rob is the highest-scoring team, Scott is the lowest-scoring team, Trevor is unluckiest from a missing the playoffs perspective as he was the 4th highest scorer, and Rob is the unluckiest on results as he was the highest scorer and best record but didn't win it all. Skyler is the luckiest in both making the playoffs and winning it all. Skyler also finished with King of the Court since he took it from Brady in the championship. Trying to determine MVP and LVP is a little hard for the league -- so I won't try. Do we give it to someone like Puka or Kyren for being great values, do we give it to CMC for being great, even though he was picked at 1.01, or do we give it to someone like Lamar for being great in the playoffs?
I included a few images of the championship celebration
On a more important note, next year's draft pick order is below
- Trevor
- Tyler
- Jordan
- Kyle
- Brandon
- Scott
- Tommy
- TJ
- Matt
- Rob
- Brady
- Skyler
