Season recaps

Where it starts

Ten teams, thirteen weeks, and a league that hadn't decided what it was yet. It was still called the Glover Fantasy Football League. It would be four more years before anyone called it the MFFL.

Roddy Tobin won the first one, and he won it the boring way. He opened 6-0, finished 11-2, and gave up 950.3 points all season, eighty fewer than anyone else that year and still the second-stingiest season in league history. He was never the most exciting team on the board and it never mattered.

ESPN gives up the lineups this far back but not the scoring, so we know who he started and not what they did. Tobin won the first MFFL championship with Matthew Stafford at quarterback, DeMarco Murray and Stevan Ridley at running back, Brandon Marshall and Torrey Smith outside, Jason Witten at tight end, Dez Bryant in the flex, the Bengals defense and Adam Vinatieri. It reads like a 2013 team because it is one.

KJ Beckett was the more interesting one. He scored 1,413.1 points, 139 more than Tobin and the most in the league by a distance, including a 147.0 in week nine that stood as the season high. He went 10-3 and took the two seed. Then he met Tobin in the final and the whole thing collapsed into a 100.3 to 89.1 slog.

That final is worth sitting with. Two teams that had spent thirteen weeks putting up triple digits both came in under 101 on the one week it counted.

The quarterfinals produced the closest game of the year that mattered: Brady Vrettas over Finn Suppelsa, 116.5 to 115.8. Seven tenths of a point. Vrettas got as far as the semifinal and ran into Tobin, who held him to 86.2.

Joe Hegarty took the three seed at 8-5 and scored 74.6 in his semifinal against Beckett, who put up 128.4. That is a 54-point loss in an elimination game, and it is the kind of thing this league has kept doing ever since.

At the bottom, Shaymus Colman went 1-12 in his only season here. He scored 957.8 points, the fewest in the league, and lost by 71 to Tobin in week six on a 46.3. He finished eighth anyway, because the consolation bracket does not care how you got there. Sean Keohane went 4-9 and finished last, which he would do again the following year.

Half the field from that season is gone. Tobin, Beckett, Hegarty, Vrettas and Dolgoff are all still here twelve years later. Colman lasted one year, Adam Deal and Finn Suppelsa three, Ricky Robinson nine, Keohane four.