Season recaps

The worst team in the league won it

KJ Beckett finished last in 2024. Twelfth of twelve at 6-8, nothing to argue about. A year later he was holding the trophy, and the league still hasn't fully processed it.

The numbers make the case better than the story does. Beckett scored 1,316 points and gave up 1,336. He was outscored across the season and won the championship anyway. Five teams had a worse point differential than he did, and four of them finished ninth or lower.

The start was ugly. He sat at 2-5 through seven weeks, and week seven was the bottom of it: Cam Ford dropped 165.4 on him, the highest single week anybody posted all year. Ford finished 3-11 with the fewest points in the league. He just found the one Sunday where everything hit, and spent it on the team that would go on to win the whole thing.

Then Beckett won six straight, lost week fourteen, and stopped losing. He put up 141.7 in the quarterfinal, 112.0 in the semi, and 146.7 in the final. The final and the quarterfinal were the two highest-scoring weeks he had all year. There is no version of this where that isn't lucky, but there also isn't a version where it doesn't count.

What he had was a rookie running back and a second-year quarterback. TreVeyon Henderson scored 34.1 in the quarterfinal; Drake Maye gave him 20.5, 23.7 and 32.4 across the three playoff games on his way to 334.1 for the season. In the final Bijan Robinson went for 37.9, Maye for 32.4, Chase Brown for 26.1 and the Giants defense for 19 — 115.4 from four players, more than Matt Stockbridge's whole roster managed.

Joe Hegarty is the one who should be annoyed. He led the league in scoring by nearly seventy points behind Josh Allen's 364.1, went 10-4, took the one seed, and then scored 69.6 in the semifinal against Beckett and went home. Allen picked that afternoon to score 6.9 and Jahmyr Gibbs 12.8. Only once all season had Hegarty scored less. He picked a bad week to do it twice.

Brady Vrettas went 10-4 as well and lost his semifinal by eight. Drew Cakouros scored the second-most points in the league and finished eighth, which took some doing: he lost his last three and never really looked settled after week ten.

Matt Stockbridge made the final on Christian McCaffrey and Jalen Hurts — 308.9 and 298.3 on the season — and then lost it 146.7 to 90.0 with McCaffrey scoring 24.1 and nobody else reaching fourteen. That is two years running now. He won back-to-back titles in 2020 and 2021, disappeared for two seasons, and has now been the runner-up twice in a row. Someone should check whether he wants this more or less than everyone else.

At the other end, Roddy Tobin took the wall of shame at 4-10, which is a little unfair given that Ford and Pierce O'Sullivan both went 3-11 and finished ahead of him. Record got him to eleventh; the consolation bracket finished the job.

Week seven deserves its own note. Ford's 165.4 and Roddy Tobin's 27.8 happened on the same afternoon, a spread of 137.6 points between the best and worst teams of the day. Harrison Dolgoff scored 52.7 and lost by 67. Ben Catudal scored 52.6 and lost by 69. Five of the six games were decided by more than 40. Nobody has explained what happened that Sunday.

The closest game of the year came a week later, Dolgoff over JJ Sellon by three tenths of a point, 131.7 to 131.4. Sellon finished 5-9 while outscoring five of the eight playoff teams. He also gave up 1,481.6 points, the most in the league by 124, which is its own kind of achievement.

So: a champion who was outscored, a one seed who scored 69 in an elimination game, and a last-place team that hung the season's high score on the eventual winner. It was not a well-behaved year.