2014 season

Twelve teams and a very quiet final

The league went from ten teams to twelve, which is where it has stayed ever since. Harrison Dolgoff won it, one year after finishing sixth.

He went 11-2, took the one seed, and never had to work very hard. His two losses came in weeks four and eight and he won everything else. Nothing about the run was dramatic, which is unusual for this league and probably why nobody talks about it much.

He won the title with Andrew Luck, Eddie Lacy and Tre Mason at running back, Dez Bryant and Josh Gordon at receiver, Larry Donnell at tight end, the Giants defense, Connor Barth, and a rookie in the flex named Odell Beckham Jr., four weeks after the catch against Dallas.

The final was 92.7 to 77.1 over Drew Cakouros. Between them they scored 169.8 points, the second-lowest-scoring final in league history. Cakouros deserved better: he led the league with 1,330.2 points and a differential of plus 288, the best mark in the field, and then scored 77.1 on the day it mattered. That is the whole Cakouros experience in miniature, roughly a decade before he started actually winning these.

Ben Waterman had the two biggest weeks of the season, a 138.0 and a 135.0, went 7-6, and lost his quarterfinal 109.5 to 103.2. Finn Suppelsa took the three seed and then scored 55.2 in his quarterfinal, losing to Brady Vrettas, who himself only managed 83.7. Somebody had to advance.

This was also the year ties showed up. Adam Deal finished 4-8-1 and Roddy Tobin 5-7-1, and the tie rule here is that a tie is a tie. Nobody has ever been happy about it.

Tobin is the story at the other end. He won the championship in 2013 and finished eleventh in 2014, a drop of ten places in one year. Beckett went from runner-up to eighth in the same stretch. The two teams that played the 2013 final finished eighth and eleventh a year later, which tells you something about how little carries over.

Sean Keohane finished last for the second straight season, 3-10 with 901.5 points, the fewest anyone scored that year. His one highlight was beating Joe Hegarty by two tenths of a point in week fourteen, the closest game of the season.