The Moments

The league's first championship roster came with a second-round Steven Jackson, a seventh-round Frank Gore and a few December additions who skipped the orientation. Andy added Ron Dayne the Monday before the semifinals and Desmond Clark that Saturday, with the semifinal already under way. By December most rosters are set. Andy was still hiring.

December was not Andy's first trip to the waiver wire. Andre Johnson went in the fifth round of the league's first draft and was released before the season started. Kyle claimed him and dropped him the next day for Mr. Jurevicius. Andy claimed him three days later. Johnson never saw the bench again. That year he led the NFL with 103 catches.

Clark was a rehire. Andy dropped him for Trent Green on December 3. Back on the roster for the semifinal, Clark caught seven passes for a career-high 125 yards and two touchdowns at Tampa Bay. His 21.75 led the lineup, and the front office got to take credit for reversing its own decision. Carson Palmer, the first-round pick, contributed 2.07. Andy beat Adam 104.82–78.29 anyway, a week after beating Evan by thirty-four.

David arrived in the final after eliminating Kyle. Andy arrived with Dayne in the flex. The former Heisman winner spent Christmas Eve running for a career-high 153 yards and two touchdowns against the Colts, a considerate way to introduce himself to a fantasy starting lineup. His 22.30 joined Jackson's 27.60 and Gore's 19.30. Three running backs, nearly seventy points, and very little room left for David's Cinderella story.

Andy won 119.03–83.89. He finished the regular season 9–4 and fourth in scoring. In the playoffs he broke a hundred every week, scored more in each round than the one before, and won every game by a comfortable margin. The league learned a lot that first season. Mostly it learned to check the waiver wire.

A quarterback and receiver is a stack. Add the kicker and defense, and you are beginning to look like a season-ticket holder. Jim started Herbert, McConkey, Dicker and the Chargers defense in Week 2 of 2025. By Monday he trailed Steven by 46.87. He also had Ashton Jeanty, which brought his interest in Chargers–Raiders to half a starting lineup.

Herbert threw two touchdowns. Neither went to McConkey. One went to Keenan Allen, who was on Jim's bench. The quarterback supplied 21.89, leaving a considerable amount of work for the less glamorous departments. Dicker made every kick. The defense picked off Geno Smith three times, added three sacks and allowed no touchdowns. Geno was not in Jim's lineup, but spent a respectable portion of the evening contributing to it.

The Chargers won 20–9, a score that does not ordinarily suggest somebody just recovered a forty-seven-point fantasy deficit. Jim's five players supplied 51.49, enough for an 87.64–83.02 win. McConkey and Jeanty managed only 8.60 between them. This was not an offensive masterpiece. Jim simply had a way to benefit when the offense left the field.

His four Chargers scored 47.79. He could have left Jeanty's spot empty and still beaten Steven. Most owners spread their risk around. Jim put it all on one sideline, and one sideline was enough.

The consolation bracket is where a fantasy league asks you to keep doing your job after it has fired you. Adam took the assignment seriously in 2017. At 6–7 he missed the playoffs by a win, then spent the last two weeks demonstrating why the remaining competition should have been grateful.

Todd Gurley scored four touchdowns against Seattle and was on the bench by the middle of the third quarter with the Rams up 40–0. One came on a third-and-twenty handoff that he took 57 yards, an excessive response to a fairly modest play call. Adam's second-round pick supplied 36.50 in a 120.89–67.12 demolition of David. Nobody still competing for the title scored as much as the man competing for permission to play Craig.

Gurley apparently considered the occasion worthy of another 276 yards and two touchdowns. Against Tennessee he took a screen pass eighty yards and became the first player since Herschel Walker in 1986 to run for 100 yards and catch for 150 in the same game. It was worth 32.80. Adam beat Craig 100.47–70.49, outscoring both teams in the championship game. Gurley's 69.30 across the two weeks remains the second-highest consecutive two-week total by a running back in league history, four points behind LaDainian Tomlinson's 2006. Nothing was left on the bench and nothing was in dispute. The points were real. The only regret was the trophy they were chasing.

Every eliminated owner since the dawn of fantasy football has believed he would have won it all if the bracket had let him in. Adam is the rare one with the receipts. He led the league in scoring on semifinal weekend and again on championship weekend, and finished seventh.

Willie Parker. Laveranues Coles. Ben Watson. Josh Scobee. An old fantasy roster reads a little like a list of former coworkers. You haven't thought about them in years, but you remember which ones made your life difficult. All four were in the lineups for David and Evan's first meeting in November 2006. Scobee would be the hard one to blame.

Ten weeks into the league's inaugural season, Evan was 7–3, averaging a hundred points a game, second only to Kyle. David was not particularly impressed. Drew Brees threw for 510 yards. Parker scored twice in the last five minutes at Cleveland to wipe out a ten-point deficit. Vanderjagt missed both of his field goal attempts, which looked like a gift until Evan spent Monday trying to make up the difference. David crossed the finish line Sunday night at 96.75, just under Evan's weekly average. Evan, set back by a lackluster afternoon from Peyton Manning, had 81.38 and one player left, his kicker, in Jacksonville. He needed 15.38 from Scobee.

Scobee answered six times. Field goals from 39, 24, 23 and 48 yards, both extra points, no misses. The last one came with 5:44 to play and brought Evan to 96.38. Jacksonville had a sixteen-point lead and no reason to share Evan's sense of urgency. David won 96.75–96.38, the first game in league history decided by less than half a point.

Thirty-nine yards is the least rewarding place to make a field goal. The kicker gets the full examination and the chip-shot credit. Scobee's first kick of the night went 39. From forty it pays four. His last went 48, two yards shy of paying five. Either one from a little farther out and Evan wins.

Evan would not win another game that mattered the rest of the season. Andy beat him the next week, Kyle the week after, and Andy again in the quarterfinal. Four straight, then out, with the second-most points in the league and a fifth-place finish to show for them. David won five in a row from that Monday and played for the championship. Thirty-two meetings later, David leads the series 19–14. It started with Evan getting a perfect night from his kicker and still needing the field to be a yard longer.

Every owner has lost a waiver claim by two dollars and thought about it for a month. Overpay and somebody screenshots the transaction for the group chat. So the bid gets all the attention: what he's worth, what the others will pay, what a dollar more would look like on the transaction log. Winning the claim feels like the whole job. Starting the player is a detail nobody budgets for.

Christian paid $25 for the privilege of being the only owner who could bench Jauan Jennings. The claim cleared on the Wednesday before Week 3 of 2024. By Sunday, San Francisco was missing Deebo Samuel and George Kittle, and Jennings caught eleven passes for 175 yards and three touchdowns against the Rams. His 32.25 was more than Christian got from all three starting receivers combined, and the second-best receiver game anyone in the league saw all season. The roster was good enough to win that week. Then the owner set the lineup.

Zamir White kept the flex job and produced 1.70. Steven won 85.37–84.85. A loss by half a point invites some fairly creative accounting, but Jennings made this one easy. Put him in White's spot and Christian wins comfortably. A loss this close usually leaves an owner replaying one start-or-sit call for a week. Christian's bench spared him the suspense. DeAndre Hopkins, Michael Wilson, Braelon Allen and Christian Watson all supplied enough to win in White's place. Even Curtis Samuel managed it with three catches for twenty-two yards. Christian had seven choices for that spot. White was the only losing answer.

Over the next six weeks Christian would start Jennings twice, cut him, pay double to reacquire him, and cut him again. Evan claimed him for four dollars and started him the rest of the year. Christian lost seven in a row that fall, two of them by less than a point, and finished 5–9. The division was won at 6–8. He was one game out of first, and the game was this one.

Steven found Jarvis Landry on the free-agent list and, seventeen minutes later, found someone willing to pay for him. On October 25, 2014, Landry joined Steven's roster at 4:08 p.m. By 4:25 he was headed to Scott with Darren McFadden, in exchange for Le'Veon Bell. McFadden came off the same list six days earlier. Neither started a game for Steven, but apparently both were indispensable enough to require compensation.

There is one owner in every league who can move a player he doesn't want to a man who didn't know he needed him, and in this league it has been Steven for twenty years. Fifty-six trades, third-most on the books, and that only counts the ones that went through. Nobody keeps a number on the offers. It would need a bigger spreadsheet. The trades themselves come in two flavors. Some are the deal that helps both sides. Some are the result of the fourth text on the subject. Maybe you like the offer. Maybe you type "send it, I'll take a look" just to get your Sunday back.

Every league knows this offer. Two players you can spare for one you would very much like to have, with the quantity doing some fairly ambitious work on behalf of the quality. Steven added the refinement of barely owning the players in question. Landry did become a weekly starter for Scott, so this wasn't a package of expired goods. That is the charitable reading, and it comes with the benefit of hindsight. At the time of the deal, it was merchandise Steven found on the giveaway table and promptly marked up.

Bell made the markup look substantial. By December he had run off three straight games of 200 yards from scrimmage, something only Walter Payton had done, and the third one landed in the quarterfinals. Peyton Manning gave Steven barely three points against Adam that week. Bell gave him 34.75, and Steven advanced. The following week Bell led the lineup again with 20.45, Steven beat Kyle, and two free-agent pickups had become 55.20 from his leading scorer in the two wins that sent him to the championship.

Seventeen minutes, two players off the street, and the best running back in football. Steven would like you to know Scott came out fine.

Nothing in the sixteenth round is supposed to matter. Kickers go, defenses go, and half the room is already looking for their keys. In 2018 Andrew reached for the running back sheet instead, which had nothing left on it, and came back with James Conner. Three other owners were just about to take him, apparently. None of them mentioned it in the fifteen rounds before. There are early ways to get the room's attention, a first-round reach, a sixth-round rookie the rest of the table has to look up. Andrew's way is to let everyone forget he's there and take his heat check while they're packing up. Fifteen rounds prior, Craig spent the fifth overall pick on Le'Veon Bell. Same backfield, two very different price points, and only one of them would pay dividends.

Bell wanted a new contract and stayed home. Conner took the job in week 1 and ran for 135 yards and two touchdowns in Cleveland, with 57 more through the air. That is 24.10 from a sixteenth-round pick in his first NFL start. The Steelers kept feeding him while Bell's return stayed a rumor, and on November 13 the league's deadline passed with Bell still unsigned. He would not play in 2018. Craig cut him that afternoon, two months of zeros after the pick.

The running backs were the one position Andrew had already solved: McCaffrey tenth overall, Mixon as the keeper, Ingram in the sixth. Conner was a luxury pick, and he turned a strong room into an embarrassment of riches. The group scored 546.65 in fifteen games that season. Only seven in league history have scored more, and this one was anchored by two players drafted fifteen rounds apart.

Andrew went 10–3 and finished third. Most sixteenth-round picks are gone by October. The good ones stick. The unicorn starts. Conner went 183rd and finished seventh among running backs, ahead of every back drafted after the twelfth pick. Everyone drafts the first round like it matters. Andrew drafted all sixteen that way.

The Snow Bowl was the best game of the 2013 season, provided you had nobody in it. Christian had Reggie Bush and Calvin Johnson. His quarterfinal opponent, David, had LeSean McCoy and DeSean Jackson. McCoy had arrived in October, in a trade with a story of its own. The bracket said first seed against eighth. Philadelphia was about to introduce a few variables.

Bush's afternoon ended in warmups, when he aggravated an already troublesome calf. By the time the announcement came, the first quarter was already underway. Christian was left with a starting running back who would never enter the game and a superstar receiver who contributed 4.10. Somewhere beneath all that snow was an NFL offense. Very little of it belonged to him.

The forecast called for heavy snow. Shady McCoy brought the avalanche. He ran for 217 yards, the last two touchdowns from forty and fifty-seven yards out in the fourth quarter. DeSean helped bring their combined haul to 35.65. Christian and David had each committed two starting spots to the same storm. Only one of them would be asking for a refund.

Christian went to Monday night needing 26.45 from Matt Forte and got 20.25. David advanced, 99.78–93.59. The cruel part was who Christian had on his bench. Joique Bell was Bush's backup in Detroit, and Christian had him for exactly this scenario. Bell posted 12.35 in the snow, twice the margin. The announcement came too late to do anything about it, so Bell spent the afternoon on Christian's bench. So did Chris Ivory and Cecil Shorts, and either would have won it too. Detroit had not won a playoff game in over twenty years. In hindsight, a Packers fan counting on three Lions to win one for him was always a long shot.

Ryan Fitzpatrick was the sort of quarterback who could win a fan base over a long weekend. He had a Harvard education, the beard of a man recovered from a shipwreck, and an arm that could briefly render a franchise's long-term plans irrelevant. You brought him in to get you through a few games. Suddenly the touchdowns were coming in bunches, and the temporary help was conducting his press conference in DeSean Jackson's clothes. It was difficult to insist this wasn't your quarterback while he was busy being the best thing on television. The sensible objections could wait until Monday.

Fantasy owners were no better equipped to resist. In 2016, Scott picked him up after a 374-yard game and received six interceptions by way of introduction. Andy got a different version in 2020: a perfectly useful replacement for an injured Dak Prescott, right up until Miami replaced him with Tua Tagovailoa. The trouble with Fitzmagic was that enough of it was real to keep you coming back.

Steven's turn came in November 2018, and the sales pitch was hard to fault. Four touchdown passes against Carolina, 30.01 in his first start for Steven, and a win, with Russell Wilson watching from the bench. This was how Fitzpatrick got you. The decision looked good because, for one entire Sunday, it was.

The next week he threw for 406 yards of empty calories against Washington. An interception at the goal line on the opening drive set the terms. Two missed field goals enforced them. Late in the fourth, with first down at the Washington two, Fitzpatrick took a sack and lost the ball. By the end Tampa Bay had gained 501 yards and scored three points. No team in NFL history had ever done that.

Steven got 12.37 and lost 121.42–102.32. He had three quarterbacks that week and started the one who scored twelve. Russell Wilson had 28.12 on the bench. Mitchell Trubisky had 42.00 beside him, enough to win the game by himself, and it was the second time that season Steven had left a forty-point Trubisky sitting. A week earlier, Fitzpatrick had made benching Wilson look shrewd. Now it looked like a habit. Across the matchup was Scott, two years wiser on the subject. Fitzpatrick was much easier to appreciate from the other sideline.

Most trades take a season to judge. This one took eleven days. On November 11, 2010, Steven sent Drew Brees and Johnny Knox to Cornelius for Philip Rivers and Reggie Wayne. Both quarterbacks were on bye that week, so the deal sat on the shelf for a Sunday. Its first game back was Steven against Cornelius, each man starting the other's quarterback.

Cornelius was the defending champion at 7–3. Steven was 5–5 and had just handed a good chunk of his playoff hopes to the man across the table. For most of Sunday it looked like a mistake. Brees threw four touchdowns against Seattle, 35.14 for Cornelius. Wayne gave Steven a touchdown and 15.35, and by Monday night Steven still trailed by 22.79 with only Rivers left, against Cornelius's Demaryius Thomas.

Rivers threw four touchdown passes against Denver, 29.96, and Steven won 107.81–105.39. The quarterbacks had nearly cancelled out. The receivers hadn't. Wayne's ten points over Knox were the whole margin and then some. Put all four players back where they started and Cornelius wins by seven. Instead he spent Monday night watching his old quarterback finish a job his old receiver had set up.

Steven lost his last two regular-season games and finished 6–7, one game clear of ninth and holding the last seat at the table. He used it to knock out the No. 1 seed before losing in the semifinals. Cornelius's title defense ended in the quarterfinals. The team he had armed outlasted him by a round.

The league was learning as it went in 2006, with the roster moves to prove it. Kyle appeared to have played this game before. An 11–2 record. The No. 1 seed. A regular-season total of 1,360.58 that nobody would surpass until 2011. Relative to what the rest of the league was scoring, no team in its first twenty seasons would finish farther above the average.

David had assembled a different résumé: 9–4, fifth in scoring and the second-fewest points against. Now he had drawn a semifinal against a team averaging about 28 points more than his usual opponent.

With a trip to the league’s first championship game on the line, Drew Brees gave David 4.29. The league’s best team had been handed an opening by one of its best quarterbacks. Entering Sunday night, Kyle had 12.89 points to make up and the firepower to do it several times over. Philip Rivers, Antonio Gates, Nate Kaeding and Larry Johnson were all still to play. David had T.J. Houshmandzadeh on Monday.

San Diego won 20–9, which sounds promising when you own the quarterback, tight end and kicker. Unfortunately, most of the scoring belonged to LaDainian Tomlinson. Kyle had bought into the Chargers’ offense at every available entrance except the one leading to the end zone. Rivers threw two interceptions without a touchdown and finished in the red. Gates was invisible. Kaeding spent most of his evening undoing his quarterback’s work, and Larry Johnson offered little help from the other sideline.

Four players had failed to erase a thirteen-point deficit. Kyle was finished, and David hadn’t even needed Monday.

Houshmandzadeh had a quiet night, too, bringing the final to 78.74–70.74. Roethlisberger had supplied a perfectly serviceable afternoon from Kyle’s bench. Starting him would have been enough. Monday offered no relief from that calculation.

David had already beaten Kyle in Week 9, catching his lowest score of the regular season. The semifinal was lower still. At some point, you have to ask: who made the schedule?

Christian went shopping for a third quarterback and found the only one who could hurt him. It was the last week of the 2013 regular season, and he and Evan were both 8–4. Robert Griffin III and Alex Smith were already on his roster, but neither played for the team Christian had spent his life rooting for. On Tuesday, he added Matt Flynn. On Thanksgiving, he started him.

Replacing Scott Tolzien was one thing. Jumping Christian’s entire quarterback depth chart required a more generous reading of the résumé. Flynn had come off the bench the previous Sunday to help Green Bay salvage a tie against Minnesota. Four days later in Detroit, he was sacked seven times in a 40–10 loss and finished at −3.02. Christian had gone to the waiver wire and found a downgrade from an empty roster spot. By Sunday’s end, Smith and Griffin had each scored more than 20 on his bench.

Evan had traded for Josh Gordon on Wednesday and received 30.05 in his first start—one could argue the debut deserved its own spot between moments 88 and 87. With Christian’s new quarterback contributing to the opposition, both owners’ moves were working out beautifully for Evan.

The rest of Christian’s lineup had been left to finance his quarterback experiment. Eric Decker, coming off 0.75, was an unlikely candidate to pick up the tab. He arrived in Kansas City without a touchdown in over a month. Peyton Manning spent the afternoon making back payments: four touchdowns, all to Decker. Eight catches, 174 yards and 36.70 points gave Christian an answer to Gordon and enough left over to cover for Flynn. Gordon and Decker combined for 66.75, still the league record for a duel between starting receivers. Fred Jackson and Reggie Bush supplied another 35.50 between them. Christian had a 22.53-point lead. Evan had Drew Brees.

Brees was averaging more than 28 that season; Christian’s entire cushion amounted to less than a normal day at the office. With Brees, there was always another drive to believe in. On Monday in Seattle, the Legion of Boom held him to 10.89 as the Saints lost 34–7. The quarterback Evan had every reason to trust hadn’t delivered either.

The final was 115.48–103.84, and Christian finished the regular season 9–4. He never started Flynn again. The experiment ended undefeated.

You’re supposed to take them one game at a time. But circling the one against your brother before the season even starts is just good preparation. The Huesing Bowl is the league’s oldest family business, an institution built over thirty-two meetings between two founders with six championships between them. Neither Kyle nor Andrew talks it up much. Neither needs to. For the rest of the league, it’s the matchup that turns owners into spectators. There are no alliances, but everyone has a rooting interest.

In 2012, both were 5–4 and in the middle of the playoff race. Neither could afford to fall to .500. Kyle was the league’s defending champion, which counted for nothing in this series. In eight tries against Andrew, he had won twice.

The benches, at least, understood the assignment. Kyle’s Greg Olsen and Andrew’s Jacoby Jones were top-three scorers at their positions that week. Along with Darrius Heyward-Bey, they accounted for 51 points left on the bench for safekeeping. In the actual lineups, Reggie Bush, Michael Turner and Shonn Greene pooled their resources for 4.35. Bush finished in the red, if you’re looking for the worst offender. Matt Ryan and Tom Brady kept the afternoon respectable. Blair Walsh and Stephen Gostkowski canceled each other out at 15 apiece, which ought to buy a little silence from the No-More-Kickers Mafia.

When Sunday ended, Andrew led 85.55 to 83.07 with Dwayne Bowe left on Monday night in Pittsburgh. Kyle had the opposing defense. It was not a Monday Night Football classic. The home team staggered to a 16–13 overtime win, with Roethlisberger missing most of the second half after a shoulder injury. It was an unwatchable affair unless you rooted for Pittsburgh or Kansas City. Bowe scored 4.75; the defense answered with 8.00. Kyle 91.07, Andrew 90.30. Seventy-seven hundredths, the closest the brothers have ever been, decided by a defense in a game with no offense.

Andrew didn’t win again that season and finished ninth. Kyle took his division at 7–6. Reverse those 0.77 points and Steven wears the division crown, while Kyle joins the 6–7 teams waiting on a tiebreaker. His third win over Andrew spared him a December spent petitioning Yahoo to recognize an obscure winning condition. He went on to win a second straight championship. More importantly, he had improved his standing in the league’s oldest rivalry.

There is a particular kind of Monday where you have already lost and you know it, and the only question left is how you will spin it in the group chat. Kyle had that Monday in week 5 of 2021. Andy was finished at 116.89, a good score by any measure and the second-highest in the league with one game to play. Kyle sat at 71.80 with Lamar Jackson and Mark Andrews still to go, and the math said he needed 45 points from two men playing the Colts. Two players delivering 45 on a Monday night happens about once a season in this league, and it is never you. Lamar and Andrews would play twelve games together that season. In eleven of them they never cracked 40. But this was Monday Night Football.

For a little over three quarters, everything went to script, much to Andy's delight. Baltimore trailed 25–9 with twelve minutes left, and Kyle's deficit had barely budged. But for a man holding Lamar Jackson on a Monday night, 21 points and a quarter to play is less a deficit than a setup. Lamar threw two touchdowns to Mark Andrews, flipped him both two-point conversions to secure the tie, and won it in overtime with a touchdown to Hollywood Brown. Four hundred forty-two yards, a franchise record, and four touchdowns. Andrews caught eleven balls for 147. Somewhere between the second conversion and the overtime kickoff, Andy closed the laptop slowly and silenced his notifications, the first of which said “you watching this?” The Colts flew home at two in the morning having led by sixteen with twelve minutes to go. It is not clear who took the loss harder.

In Worms Armageddon scoring that came to 53.44 from Lamar and 28.85 from Andrews: 82.29 on a Monday night, the most any team in this league has ever pulled from one. Lamar covered the deficit by himself. Andrews's 28.85, the best week any tight end would have all season, was whipped cream on the sundae. Kyle finished at 154.09, the second-highest regular-season score of 2021, and won by 37 a game he had trailed by 45 at kickoff. Joe Burrow scored 23 on his bench. An interesting footnote for later.

Andy's side of it is short. He had a ready-made excuse: Saquon Barkley rolled an ankle stepping on a cornerback's foot in the first quarter on Sunday and registered 0.45 for the day. In a close loss, that is the kind of thing you get to bring up for years. But no version of Andy's week survives what happened in Baltimore. He had a good week. He was beaten by a better team. A 37-point loss takes your dignity and your alibi in the same evening. Kyle would beat him twice more before the year was out, and how that happened is a much bigger card than this one.

Fantasy football doesn't ask much of a man. Know ball. Do your homework. Clearly that was too much to ask back in 2006. In its inaugural season, Worms Armageddon left the instruction book in the box. No divisions. Eight playoff spots for twelve teams. Scoring 82.7 points per game. The whole league made 89 roster moves all season, a number some individual owners now clear by Halloween. There was exactly one trade. Fourteen times somebody finished a week under 50. Twenty-nine starters went negative. Two different teams were named after the Buccaneers and one guy went by the moniker "towel." A third of the owners were gone by the next summer. Everyone was a rookie that year. Cornelius was the only one honest enough to put it on the jersey.

December 3, 2006, the final week of the first regular season. Adam had clinched. Cornelius was 2–10 and playing out the string. On paper it was a nothing game. On the scoreboard it was a felony.

Adam posted 143.54, the best score anyone managed all year, and he did it with one hand tied behind his back. Tony Romo started and gave him 4.64. Eli Manning sat and gave him 23.75. Didn't matter. Reggie Bush, four months into his NFL career, scored four touchdowns against San Francisco and dropped 37.10 in Adam's flex. The Steelers defense hit 20. Marvin Harrison hit 18. Ladell Betts matched him. Read that again. Ladell. Betts.

Cornelius mustered 45.31, and 20 of it was Corey Dillon. Two receivers combined for 1.35. The backup quarterback on his bench went negative. And his starter, Brad Johnson, threw a pick-six in Chicago and had cost Cornelius 8.39 points by the time Brad Childress walked over and handed the job to yet another rookie named Tarvaris Jackson.

When the dust settled, Adam had laid claim to a legendary record, a margin of victory just shy of triple digits. He lost in the semis two weeks later. Cornelius finished 2–11, then went on to win two championships as the Rookies. But for one Sunday, one founder took the other apart so completely that it would take nineteen years for anyone to top it.

Every draft has a guy who shows up with a plan, and in 2020 that guy was Craig. Not satisfied with his draft slot of 5th overall, he was determined to move up. The first deal he cut, for the third pick, got vetoed into oblivion. He shrugged it off and went shopping again. The night before the draft he landed on David at No. 2: Craig's first-rounder and his keeper, Austin Ekeler, for David's first and a sixth. It passed clean, nobody opposed. Twenty-four hours later the draft went off at the local Wild Wings, the only public one in league history. Everybody else was still fine-tuning their rankings. One man was ready to shock the world.

Craig went on the clock at No. 2. With every player on the board not named CMC at his disposal and a plate of hotwings in front of him, he boldly took the player he knew he had to have: Patrick Mahomes. Second overall. A quarterback. The table went dead quiet. The next QB wouldn't come off the board for another 23 picks. Call it a reach if you want. Craig wasn't drafting for the room. Although it's worth asking whether a man makes that pick in somebody's basement. The one year the draft had a public audience, Craig gave them a show.

Three picks later David happily took Michael Thomas, the reigning Offensive Player of the Year, coming off a record-shattering 149-catch season. This deal should have gone down as a true blockbuster, two contenders swapping first-round talent with the playoffs in mind. Instead it became one of the most lopsided deals on the ledger, and none of it was David's doing. Thomas sprained an ankle in week 1, and things went downhill from there: a one-game suspension for punching a teammate in practice, then a hamstring in December. The final line on the consensus No. 1 receiver was zero touchdowns and 42 fantasy points. Ekeler, the keeper in the deal, tore a hamstring in week 4 and missed six games. Injuries are nobody's fault. They do, however, seem to know where David lives. This would not be the last time he acquired a player who was days away from the IR.

The week Ekeler pulled up lame just happened to be against Craig. David had finished his Sunday at 100.32. Craig sat at 74.75 with one game left, and it was Chiefs–Patriots, pushed to Monday night because Cam Newton had COVID. Mahomes and Melvin Gordon did most of the damage, to the tune of 43.52 points. Craig won by 5.60. Six weeks later they met again, with Mahomes on bye. Craig took that one by 3.15. In the two meetings, Thomas and Ekeler combined for a lackluster 3.55 points. So much for the revenge game.

Mahomes threw for 4,740 yards and 38 touchdowns and scored 414 points for Craig, every one of them in his starting lineup. Craig was proven right, and with a few more breaks this moment shows up much higher on the list. He had a solid year on offense but finished 7–6, out of the playoffs on points, because he faced a top-three schedule. A common theme for Craig, as we will see. A trade that swung 400+ points in his favor was one of the all-time great tickets. Unfortunately, he never got to cash it.

Most don't remember who finished eighth in 2021. The few who do wish they could forget. The date was December 26, and half the NFL was in quarantine. Rosters were held together with practice-squad tape. For David and Steven, the stakes could not have been lower. Both were coming off disappointing 7–7 seasons. David's was spoiled by a five-game losing streak, Steven's by the tenth-best offense in a twelve-team league. On the Sunday after Christmas they played the closest game in the history of the bracket nobody watches.

It was a game decided by who forgot to check the injury report. Steven forgot twice. A pair of zeros from Dalvin Cook and ColeVID-19 Beasley himself. Both were on the COVID list before the weekend started. Cook's replacement, Alexander Mattison, scored 11 on Steven's bench. In the other locker room, Elijah Mitchell was ruled out Wednesday for a Thursday night game. David trotted him out there anyway. A crucial 2.90 points from Miles Sanders sat on the bench.

That left Sunday night. Steven led by 6.18, and every point either of them had left was in Cowboys–Washington. David had Dak Prescott and Michael Gallup. Steven had MRI Cooper and the Dallas defense. Dak threw four touchdowns before halftime. The Cowboys defense scored twice. When the 56–14 rout was over, David had outscored Steven on the night by 6.05. He had needed 6.18. Thirteen hundredths of a point.

Steven advanced to the seventh-place game and lost it by 50. David dropped to the ninth-place game and won it going away. Ask either of them about that Christmas weekend and you'll hear about the monster week they had in their other league.

Once in a generation, football produces a player who defies the positions we use to understand it. A man too versatile for one label, too singular for one role, too committed to the bit to accept merely one slot on the depth chart. Quarterback? Sometimes. Tight end? Technically. Running back? When the mood strikes. Special teamer? Naturally. An excruciating dilemma for indecisive fantasy managers? Above all else. His body of work doesn't read like a stat line. It reads like a Jon Gruden whiteboard. Direct snap from the pistol. Runs QB power. Keeps on the zone read. Bootlegs off play action, pop-passes off the run fake, then has the gall to drop back and throw a bomb off the double move. And still puts his hand in the dirt: arc-releases on the zone read, wham-blocks the three-technique, chips the edge rusher. Direct snap from the wildcat, jet sweep, inside zone, goal-line plunge from the one. Bunch formation, stack release, tunnel screen, flexed out to the slot. And when the offense trots off, he stays on: gunner on punt coverage, personal protector on the punt team, and, if the down and distance smell right, the fake punt himself. He has blocked one, too. Fantasy football folk hero and/or war criminal, depending on which side of the matchup you're on. Such players are exceedingly rare, and this man defines the category. His name is Taysom Hill, and for nearly a decade the league has had no answer… because it never understood the question.

Worms Armageddon has embraced the full Taysom Hill experience. He has been added and dropped here more than any player alive, most of it by one man, and four of his five big games in this league were scored from a bench. But a man like that does not make this list for a body of work. He makes it for a single afternoon. Week 5, 2022: started at tight end by Andy, Taysom Hill scored 35.99 points, the most any tight end has ever scored in the history of this league, and it has not been touched since. That performance earned Andy a blowout win over Cornelius, and it earns Taysom Hill the ninety-fifth spot in the top 100.

September 18, 2025, 12:34 in the afternoon. Steven cut the Tampa Bay defense and scooped up Matthew Stafford off waivers. Quietly tying a record no one knew existed. Stafford had now belonged to an astounding fourteen different managers since Cornelius drafted him as a rookie in 2009. Greg Olsen, the previous sole record holder, ended his own run at fourteen back in 2019, when Adam took him in, fittingly, the fourteenth round.

Stafford's owner list reads like a yearbook: Scott, Joseph, and Jon owned him and have since left the building; Kiet got him the year he arrived. Sixteen years, fourteen owners, one quarterback, still going. So what did Steven do with the most-shared QB in league history? Benched him. Lost. Cut him inside a week, on his way to a three-win season. And Evan, who picked him up the following Thursday, started him nine times at twenty-four a game and rode him straight to the championship game. Stafford has passed through the hands of nearly every man who has spent real time in this league. Yet Andrew has refused to touch him, which means the record is still there for the taking, and everyone knows whose move it is.

Week 5, 2007. Twelve teams took the field and combined for 834.54 points, the lowest Sunday this league has ever produced, ninety clear of any other. Andy won a game with 56.07. David won a different game with 56.04. Kyle put up 36.15, Medlin 32.89, and fourteen different starters finished with two points or fewer. Evan's 104.61 was the only respectable number on the board, which made it the strangest blowout of the year: he beat Steven by thirty despite Steven owning the best player of the day, peak 2007 Tom Brady. The league moved on and never spoke of it again.

The first Sunday, 2006. Six games, none of them pretty. The top-scoring player on every roster in the league that week was Donovan McNabb. Yes, him. Andy, the sitting commissioner, lost the league's very first game to Evan, 81.19 to 85.97, beaten by the man who would one day take the job from him. Adam coaxed 100.79 out of Chester Taylor and Eli Manning: the first hundred-point game of a fantasy career now entering its third decade. Steven and David ground out a 58.01-to-47.55 rock fight that would be unthinkable today. And the week's crown went to Cornelius: 101.64, a number that, come December, would mean something far crueler to one man in this league. But that story earns its place higher up this list…

Here's something no one in this league has ever known until right now: no two games in league history have ever ended with the same score. Not once has a game finished even, and not once — in twenty autumns — has any final score ever repeated, down to the last hundredth of a point. Every game ever played stands alone. Every one a fingerprint.

Week 16, 2017. A playoff-week placement game between two playoff teams. Andrew defeated Evan by the score of 16.40 to 13.25 — the two lowest single-week totals ever recorded by anyone, in any week, in twenty years. They happened in the same game. Neither man has ever explained his lineup.