2020 in review
Standings & superlatives →The bracket goes to eight and the five seed wins it
Two changes arrived in 2020: the playoff field went from six teams to eight, and Matt Stockbridge won the first of two straight titles. The first change made the second one possible.
Stockbridge went 8-5 and got the five seed. In the old six-team format he would have been in anyway, but the wider bracket meant the quarterfinal round happened at all, and week fourteen was the best round of football the league has staged. Cam Ford beat Joe Hegarty 109.1 to 108.2. Brady Vrettas beat Ari Lloyd-Farber 81.3 to 81.1. Two of the four games were decided by less than a point on the same afternoon.
Stockbridge's own quarterfinal was the boring one, 98.6 over Roddy Tobin. Then he beat the one seed. Cam Ford had gone 9-4 with the second-most points in the league; Stockbridge got 28.2 from David Montgomery and 23.3 from Deshaun Watson and won 119.6 to 105.7.
The final was over early. Stefon Diggs — in the season he led the NFL in receptions and yards — scored 32.5, Watson added 26.6, and Stockbridge won 128.8 to 59.1. Vrettas got 25.9 from David Johnson and then almost nothing: T.Y. Hilton 6.0, Jakobi Meyers 4.5, DJ Moore 3.7, and the Texans defense for minus nine. It is the largest margin in an MFFL final.
Ford's response was to score 155.0 the following week in the third-place game, the second-highest week of the season, in a game that decided nothing. Alvin Kamara chose the same afternoon to score 54.2 for JJ Sellon — that was Christmas Day, six rushing touchdowns against Minnesota, and the most any player has scored in a week in MFFL history.
Josh Allen (374.6, Ari Lloyd-Farber) and Kyler Murray (374.0, Vrettas) finished six tenths of a point apart across the whole season. Drew Cakouros went from champion to eleventh and opened the year with a 32.1.