2022 in review
Standings & superlatives →The lowest-scoring final ever, decided by two points
Drew Cakouros won his second title as the seven seed at 7-7, one year after Matt Stockbridge won as the seven seed at 7-7. The league had a format and the format had a hole in it.
Cakouros got there on Patrick Mahomes, who he started nine times for 231.0 points — including 32.7, 23.6 and 24.4 in the three playoff games. In 2022 Mahomes led the NFL in passing yards and touchdowns. Cakouros had him for the part that mattered.
He beat Cam Ford 122.3 to 101.5 in the quarterfinal, which was its own small tragedy. Ford had scored 1,493.8 points, more than anyone in the league, went 9-5, and got 35.7 from Josh Allen in that game. He finished sixth. Then Cakouros beat Joe Hegarty 105.5 to 100.2 on the back of 21 from the Rams defense.
The final was 71.5 to 69.5 — the lowest-scoring championship game the league has played, and the closest. Mahomes scored 24.4 of Cakouros's 71.5 and Nick Chubb 11.6; Ja'Marr Chase scored zero. Ari Lloyd-Farber got 21.7 from Jamaal Williams and then watched Justin Jefferson score 1.5, Tee Higgins score nothing, and Evan McPherson score nothing. Three starters, 1.5 points, a two-point loss in a final.
Lloyd-Farber had earned it the hard way. He put 122.5 on KJ Beckett in the quarterfinal on 32.4 from Kirk Cousins, then knocked out the one seed — JJ Sellon, 10-3-1 — 116.5 to 82.0, with George Kittle scoring 24 and Justin Jefferson 19.3. Two weeks later Jefferson gave him 1.5.
Harrison Dolgoff spent the year starting Justin Fields and Lamar Jackson and collecting four of the season's twelve best individual weeks, and finished fifth. Joe Mixon scored 51.1 for Cam Ford in week nine — five touchdowns against Carolina — the best single week of the season. Matt Stockbridge went from champion to eleventh. Brady Vrettas scored 31.7 in week fourteen and finished twelfth.