2023 in review
Standings & superlatives →Cakouros goes back-to-back, this time from the front
Drew Cakouros won the 2022 title as a 7-7 seven seed who scraped through three games in the seventies and low hundreds. He won the 2023 title by scoring 119.8, 124.3 and 121.9 in the three playoff rounds and never being seriously threatened in any of them. Same manager, opposite method, consecutive years.
He was the two seed at 9-5. Christian McCaffrey carried the regular season — 264.0 points in thirteen starts, including 41.7 in week four — and then Justin Fields carried the playoffs, scoring 24.5 in the semifinal and 25.1 in the final. Puka Nacua, a rookie fifth-rounder that year, gave him 24.0 and 13.7 in those same two games. In the quarterfinal McCaffrey went for 36.7 and the Raiders defense for 25 and Roddy Tobin lost by 48.5.
The final was 121.9 to 83.1 over Cam Ford. Ford had scored 1,438.3 points, most in the league, and got 20.3 from Dak Prescott in the title game and not much after it.
The story of the bracket was Pierce O'Sullivan, playing his first MFFL season. He got the six seed at 8-6 and then scored 143.5 in the quarterfinal — Brock Purdy 25.6, Sam LaPorta 23.6, Jahmyr Gibbs 22.8, Jaylen Waddle 20.2 — against Ari Lloyd-Farber's 56.2. An 87.3-point margin, the biggest of the season, in a playoff game. The following week the same lineup produced 75.8 and he lost by 48.5 to Cakouros. He finished fourth in his first year.
Lloyd-Farber's season deserves a note. He went 8-6, took the three seed, and then posted two of the five lowest scores of the entire year — 56.2 in the quarterfinal and 50.4 in week seventeen — and finished eighth. Roddy Tobin beat him 137.0 to 50.4 in that last one, the second-biggest margin of the season, in a game for nothing.
Harrison Dolgoff, the eight seed at 7-7, beat the one seed KJ Beckett 101.2 to 74.0 in the first round on 21.8 from Jalen Hurts and 21.7 from Ty Chandler, then lost to Ford and finished third. Beckett had gone 9-5 and led his division and was out in a week.
Josh Allen scored 367.9 for Joe Hegarty. Hurts scored 354.9 for Dolgoff. Neither made a final. JJ Sellon went 3-11 a year after finishing third.