2023 in review
Standings & superlatives →The year a playoff game ended in a tie
Elijah Gomes won the title and the strangest thing that happened all season happened on his way to it.
In the quarterfinal he played Colby Fender and they finished level. Not close — level. Gomes 112.17, Fender 112.17, to the hundredth of a point. There is no overtime in fantasy football, so the higher seed went through, and Gomes was the three to Fender's six. Fender got 28.2 from Jaylen Waddle and 21.9 from Jalen Hurts and went home on a tiebreaker.
Gomes then beat the two seed and the five seed to finish it. In the semifinal Amon-Ra St. Brown gave him 23.9, James Conner 19.7 and George Kittle 17.1, enough for 117.7 against Jayden Bernhardt's 98.2. In the final he started Jake Browning, Cincinnati's backup, and Browning gave him 21.1 while Isiah Pacheco ran for 28.0. Final score 117.5 to 91.5.
The two teams that spent the season looking like the best in the league both lost in week sixteen. Nick Carnevali went 11-3, took the one seed and a bye, and then scored 89.2 and lost to a 7-7 team. Bernhardt scored 1,749.3 points across the year, more than anyone, and finished third.
That 7-7 team was Cooper Young, who beat the one seed and reached the final on the back of a lineup that kept finding one big afternoon at a time — James Cook 37.1, Sam LaPorta 26.1 and Jahmyr Gibbs 25.8 in the quarterfinal, then Joe Flacco of all people for 26.7 in the final.
Christian McCaffrey scored 376.3 for Carnevali, the most any player produced for one manager that season. Amari Cooper's 51.0 in week sixteen was the best single week by a starter, and it belonged to RJ Stone, who finished seventh.
This is also the league that starts a defensive player, which is why Fred Warner and T.J. Watt show up in title-game lineups next to the running backs. Ten starters, one of them a linebacker.
At the bottom, Marcus Cardoza went 4-10. Colby Fender's season ended with a 0.0 in week sixteen — he didn't set a lineup for a consolation game, and Harrison Dolgoff beat him 90.1 to nothing.