Key takeaways
- Any Given Sontag went 12-2 with 1801.88 points and won the title. First seed, most points, trophy. In six years of ITFFL that combination had never happened.
- The five champions before this one came from seeds 8, 4, 7, 2 and 4. The best regular-season team had gone 0-for-5. The 2025 ITFFL season is the year the pattern finally broke.
- This is a worst-to-first story. The same manager finished 12th at 4-10 the year before, on the fewest points in the league that season.
- The top five in the standings were the top five in scoring, exactly in order. That is not how most seasons here go, and it is a big part of why the bracket behaved.
- End Of Story finished third for the fourth time in six years. Best average finish of any long-tenured manager at 4.50. Titles: still zero.
Six seasons in, the ITFFL had produced a specific kind of history: the best team in the regular season did not win. Not once. Champions came out of the 8 seed, the 4, the 7, the 2 and the 4 again. The team that spent September through November beating everybody kept finding a way to lose one game in December to somebody who had no business being there.
The 2025 ITFFL season ended that. Any Given Sontag went 12-2, scored 1801.88 points, took the No. 1 seed and then actually closed it out. It is the first time in the league's recorded history that the top regular-season team has also been the champion, and it happened to the manager who had the single most painful near-miss on the books.
Here is the full accounting, and then the argument about what it means.
The 2025 ITFFL final standings
- 1. Any Given Sontag — 12-2, 1801.88 pts (champion)
- 2. aal3 — 9-5, 1691.06 pts
- 3. End Of Story — 9-5, 1626.52 pts
- 4. ITFFLGOAT — 7-7, 1555.98 pts
- 5. Fighting Armadillos — 7-7, 1547.42 pts
- 6. purplepigs — 7-7, 1429.60 pts
- 7. DVO92A6 — 6-8, 1498.70 pts
- 8. Howell's Pals — 6-8, 1469.80 pts
- 9. Hollywood Home Team — 6-8, 1462.14 pts
- 10. The Sixth Dimension — 6-8, 1408.08 pts
- 11. Brancho Country — 5-9, 1471.98 pts
- 12. Football Enthusiasts — 4-10, 1307.14 pts
Seven teams landed within one game of .500. Three at 7-7, four at 6-8. That is a middle class of seven managers separated by point totals rather than wins, which is either a sign of a healthy competitive league or a sign that nobody in the middle could beat anybody else in the middle. Both readings are available.
At the top it was not close. 1801.88 points is 110.82 more than second place and 494.74 more than last. Any Given Sontag lost twice all year.
What the 2025 ITFFL season did that the five before it could not
The champion list now reads: Football Enthusiasts, DVO92A6, Any Given Sontag, Fighting Armadillos, aal3, Any Given Sontag. Six seasons, five different winners, one repeat, and only one of those six titles belongs to a team that also finished first in the regular season.
The cruelest version of that history belongs to the 2021 season. Hollywood Home Team went 12-2 and put up 1828.76 points, which remains the highest single-season total in league history. They took the 1 seed. DVO92A6 won the title from the 4 seed with 1643.74. Nearly 200 fewer points across the year, and the ring.
A fourteen-game regular season is a decent measurement of who is good. A short playoff bracket is a coin flip with a narrative attached. For five years this league proved that repeatedly, and then in one season it proved the opposite. Neither result tells you the bracket is fair.
So it is worth being careful about the lesson. One No. 1 seed converting does not mean seeding suddenly matters. It means the sample got one entry bigger. Six seasons of a twelve-team league is a small pile of data, and "the top seed is now 1-for-6" is a sentence about arithmetic, not about anybody's roster.
What is defensible: a team that outscored the runner-up by 110.82 points across fourteen weeks walks into any given matchup with a real edge, and eventually an edge that size cashes. This year it cashed.
Worst to first, and the ghost of 13-0
Any Given Sontag's six-year finishing line reads 1st, 7th, 7th, 8th, 12th, 1st. Two titles, in 2022 and 2025. Those two titles could not have come from more different places.
Start with 2020. Any Given Sontag went 13-0 in a thirteen-game regular season, scored 1713.94, took the top seed, and did not win the championship. Football Enthusiasts did, at 5-8, from the 8 seed. Undefeated in the regular season and nothing to show for it is the kind of thing a person carries around.
Then 2022: they finished seventh at 7-7 with 1471.14 points, the ninth-most in the league that year, and won the whole thing. Proof, from the other direction, that the bracket does not care what your record says.
And then 2024, which was rock bottom. 4-10, 1347.68 points, dead last in a twelve-team league, both in record and in scoring. One year later, 12-2 and 1801.88.
There is a draft-night footnote here that I enjoy more than I should. Any Given Sontag drafted from slot 1 in 2025, and slot 1 had been the worst seat in this league by a wide margin: in the five previous drafts its holders finished 7th, 10th, 11th, 9th and 12th, never once in the top half. We wrote about that in the 2025 draft analysis back in September, complete with the caveat that five data points is not a curse. Turns out it was not a curse. Ja'Marr Chase at 1.01 in a full-PPR league with three flex spots was just a good pick.
Points versus record: who actually got robbed
One of the quieter things about 2025 is how orderly it was at the top. The five best scoring teams finished as the top five in the standings, in exactly that order: Any Given Sontag, aal3, End Of Story, ITFFLGOAT, Fighting Armadillos. In a twelve-team league where the schedule decides a lot, that is unusual, and it is a large part of why the postseason produced the "correct" winner.
The disorder was below that line:
- Brancho Country finished 11th at 5-9 while scoring 1471.98 — the seventh-most points in the league. They outscored the teams that finished 8th, 9th and 10th and finished behind all of them.
- purplepigs did the reverse, going 7-7 for sixth place on 1429.60 points, which was only the tenth-most in the league. A winning-adjacent record on the third-fewest points is a schedule doing you a favor.
- Football Enthusiasts finished 12th at 4-10 with 1307.14, the fewest points in the league. No argument to be made there. Worth remembering they won this league's first recorded title in 2020 from the 8 seed at 5-8.
Compare that to 2024, when Howell's Pals took the No. 1 seed at 10-4 on 1388.80 points — the eleventh-most in a twelve-team league — and aal3 won the title from the 4 seed. That is a season where the standings and the scoreboard disagreed violently. 2025 is a season where they mostly agreed. Same league, same format, different luck.
Six years, best average finish, zero rings
End Of Story finished third. Again. Their six-year finishing line is 3rd, 3rd, 4th, 3rd, 11th, 3rd — an average regular-season finish of 4.50, the best of any manager who has played more than two seasons here. Championships: zero.
That is the most consistently good six-year run anybody has put together here, and it has produced nothing but a very tidy row in a spreadsheet. It is also the strongest evidence in the dataset that regular-season quality and titles are only loosely related in a twelve-team league with a short bracket.
ITFFLGOAT has a similar problem: six seasons, fourth place this year at 7-7, an average regular-season finish of 5.33, never worse than ninth, still no title. Meanwhile DVO92A6 has a worse average finish than either of them, at 7.20 across five seasons, and owns a championship.
The kicker bit, updated. ITFFLGOAT took the first kicker off the board this year at pick 111 in round 10 and finished fourth. End Of Story, who took the first kicker in four of the five previous drafts, finished third. The two managers in this league most associated with reaching for a kicker went three-four. The data does not support the joke. I am keeping the joke.
The pick'em angle: what a 12-2 season is really made of
This is a pick'em site, so the transferable part. A 12-2 fantasy season and a good pick'em season fail for the same reason: variance you did not account for, applied to a sample too small to correct itself.
Fourteen fantasy weeks is not many. Fourteen picks against the spread is not many either. Both are short enough that a genuinely better process can lose and a coin flip can look like genius. The difference is that a pick'em pool gives you a much bigger sample, much faster, and a written record of every decision you made.
That record is the whole point. Nobody in this league can tell you why they finished 6-8 instead of 8-6, because fantasy hides your reasoning inside a lineup. A pick'em card does not. You get a timestamped list of what you believed and what happened, week after week, which is the only honest way anybody has ever gotten better at this.
Go look at your own numbers on the statistics page, then check where that actually put you on the leaderboard.
Six seasons. Five different champions. Two of them belong to Any Given Sontag, who is now the only repeat winner in the league, and who got there by way of an undefeated regular season that ended in nothing and, one year before this one, a last-place finish.
The highest-scoring regular season in ITFFL history still belongs to the 2021 Hollywood Home Team, who put up 1828.76, went 12-2, and lost. The best average finish belongs to a manager with no titles. The champion this year was, for once, simply the best team.
File that one away. It has only happened once.