2024 season

The first one

Fourteen teams, superflex, dynasty rules, and a scoring system generous enough that a bad week here still clears a hundred. The YIFFLE started in 2024 and KJ Beckett won it, which anyone who has watched the MFFL for a decade could have told you was coming.

He finished with 2,449.6 points, eighty more than anyone else — though a good chunk of that is three weeks nobody else got to play. Across the regular season he was third at 1,906.5, behind Matt Koski and Cameron Ford, and took the two seed at 9-5. Then he did the thing that actually decides these: 193.2 in the quarterfinal, 160.4 in the semifinal, 189.5 in the final. Three of the highest weeks anybody posted all season, in the three weeks that eliminated people.

He did it with rookies. Jayden Daniels scored 329.4 on the year and then 23.6, 34.4 and 31.8 through the bracket. Ladd McConkey went for 29.4 in the final, Jalen McMillan 23.0, and Trey McBride — in his breakout year — 36.3. Beckett's championship lineup had five players over seventeen points and none of them were the guy he drafted first.

Pierce O'Sullivan had the better regular season. He went 10-4, took the one seed, and put up the single biggest week of the year, a 197.8 in week nine against Stephen DeMatteo. Lamar Jackson gave him 407.4 across the season, the most any YIFFLE player produced. In the final Jackson scored 29.4, Travis Kelce 26.4, Jahmyr Gibbs 26.3 and DeVonta Smith 30.0 — 145.7 in total, which would have beaten most teams on most weekends. He lost by 44 anyway.

Harrison Dolgoff was the seven seed and the most annoying team in the bracket. He drew Cameron Ford in the quarterfinal and hung 175.5 on him behind 41.3 from Josh Allen and 30.1 from a forty-year-old Aaron Rodgers, a 66-point win as the lower seed. Then O'Sullivan held him to 104.5 in the semifinal and that was that.

The most YIFFLE moment of the season happened in a consolation game nobody was watching. Week sixteen, Dillon Mackenzie 114.1, Michael Fulton 0.0. Not a low score. Zero. Fulton had already been eliminated and evidently stopped setting a lineup, which in a league this deep is its own kind of statement.

Drew Cakouros and Stephen DeMatteo both went 3-11, and the wall of shame came down to one afternoon in week four. DeMatteo won it 155.9 to 150.6. Under the head-to-head rule the league used that year, five and a half points put Cakouros last.

It stings more because he outscored DeMatteo by 265 across the season, and scored 2,176.5 in total — more than the runner-up managed. He also won both his consolation games, including a 156.8 to 119.6 win over the man who had already buried him. None of it counted. DeMatteo, thirteenth, gave up 2,389.2 points on the year, the most in the league by 65.

The closest game of the year was Cameron Ford over Cakouros by a tenth of a point in week eleven. Cakouros lost eleven games that season. That one probably stung the most.