Key takeaways
- By average finish, the best ITFFL manager is End Of Story at 4.50 over six seasons. Five top-four regular seasons, one bad year, zero championships.
- The trophy case says Any Given Sontag. Two titles, 2022 and 2025, which is twice what anyone else owns — on a 6.00 average finish that includes a last-place season.
- Fighting Armadillos is the only manager near the top of both columns. A 5.00 average finish plus the 2023 ring, won while scoring the most points in the league.
- Degree of difficulty is real. End Of Story has drafted from an average slot of 7.7 and ITFFLGOAT from 8.0, and both beat every manager who has averaged a top-four pick.
- One- and two-season managers are noise. jagmancctx owns a 1.00 career average finish and zero titles off exactly one year. That is a sample size, not a resume.
Every ITFFL offseason produces the same argument, and it always ends the same lazy way: point at the trophy case, conversation over. Two rings beats no rings. Next topic.
Except six seasons of league data — every final standing, every draft slot, every finish from 2020 through 2025 — makes the question of the best ITFFL manager a lot less tidy than the hardware suggests. The manager with the best average finish in league history has never won a thing. Not once. And the manager holding the most titles has a 12th-place season sitting on his ledger.
So let's do it properly. Four definitions of "best," four different answers, and one pick at the end I'm willing to defend in the group chat.
Six seasons of ITFFL in one list
Only managers with five or more seasons are in the argument. Everyone else gets dealt with further down. "Average finish" is regular-season standings position; titles are titles, and in this league those two things have almost nothing to do with each other.
- End Of Story — 6 seasons, 4.50 average finish, best 3rd, worst 11th, average draft slot 7.7, 0 titles
- Fighting Armadillos — 6 seasons, 5.00, best 2nd, worst 10th, slot 4.8, 1 title
- ITFFLGOAT — 6 seasons, 5.33, best 2nd, worst 9th, slot 8.0, 0 titles
- Any Given Sontag — 6 seasons, 6.00, best 1st, worst 12th, slot 5.0, 2 titles
- Hollywood Home Team — 6 seasons, 6.50, best 1st, worst 11th, slot 7.2, 0 titles
- purplepigs — 6 seasons, 7.00, best 3rd, worst 11th, slot 5.8, 0 titles
- aal3 — 5 seasons, 7.00, best 2nd, worst 12th, slot 3.8, 1 title
- DVO92A6 — 5 seasons, 7.20, best 4th, worst 10th, slot 8.0, 1 title
- Football Enthusiasts — 6 seasons, 7.67, best 1st, worst 12th, slot 5.3, 1 title
Two things jump straight off that list. The top three average finishes in the league — End Of Story, Fighting Armadillos, ITFFLGOAT — hold exactly one championship between them. The bottom four averages hold three. The most consistent teams in ITFFL are not the most decorated teams in ITFFL, and the gap is not small enough to wave off.
The case for End Of Story as the best ITFFL manager
End Of Story's six finishes, in order: 3rd, 3rd, 4th, 3rd, 11th, 3rd.
Read it twice. Four third-place regular seasons in six years, plus a fourth. The only blemish is 2024, when they went 6-8 for 1429.92 points and finished 11th. Remove that one year and you are looking at a manager who has finished third or fourth in every ITFFL season ever contested. That is not a hot streak. That is a process.
And it has been done from the back of the room. End Of Story has drafted from slots 10, 7, 9, 3, 9 and 8 — an average of 7.7, meaning exactly one top-five draft position in six years. They finished 3rd with it. Compare that with aal3, who has averaged the 3.8 slot, the friendliest draft position of anyone in this group, and carries a 7.00 average finish and one title.
Five top-four regular seasons in six years from an average draft slot of 7.7 is not luck. Zero titles out of five top-four regular seasons very probably is.
The best part is that End Of Story does it while committing the one draft crime this league will never stop mocking. They took the league's first kicker in 2020 (round 12), 2021 (round 8), 2022 (round 10) and 2024 (round 10). Four of six seasons, and in three of those they finished third. We wrote an entire post about the kicker paradox because the numbers flatly refused to cooperate with the joke.
The case for Any Given Sontag, and it is a real one
Any Given Sontag's six finishes: 1st, 7th, 7th, 8th, 12th, 1st. Average 6.00. Two championships, 2022 and 2025, double the next-best total in league history.
Here is the uncomfortable part for the End Of Story campaign. ITFFL does not hang a banner for average finish. There is one prize per year. Any Given Sontag has taken it twice and nobody else has taken it more than once. If your definition of "best" is "wins the thing everybody is actually playing for," the argument is over and it took one sentence to end it.
It gets stronger when you look at how those titles happened, because they could not have been less alike. The 2025 run was the front-runner version: 12-2, 1801.88 points, the most in the league, never in doubt. The 2022 run was the opposite — 7-7, the 7 seed, ninth of twelve in scoring at 1471.14 points — and it still ended with the trophy. Winning from both ends of the standings inside the same six-year window is genuinely hard to do by accident.
The counterweight is 2024: 4-10, 1347.68 points, last in the league in both. Any Given Sontag's career range is 1st to 12th, which is the signature of a manager who builds for a ceiling and occasionally gets a basement instead. Their early-round build is the most run-heavy in the six-season group — 47% RB across rounds 1 through 5, tied with Football Enthusiasts — with WR at 30% behind it.
The compromise candidate: Fighting Armadillos
If you flatly refuse to separate "best manager" from "most successful manager," one name survives both filters. Fighting Armadillos: a 5.00 average finish, second only to End Of Story among six-season managers, plus the 2023 championship won from the 2 seed at 10-4 while putting up 1751.64 points, the highest total in the league that year. Best roster, near-best record, trophy. No asterisks anywhere on it.
Their career average is dragged down by one season that deserves a footnote. In 2021 the Armadillos went 3-11 and finished 10th while scoring 1585.32 points — the fourth-most in a twelve-team league. That is not a bad team, that is a schedule. Take that single season of pure misfortune out and the resume is the cleanest anyone in ITFFL owns.
The floor argument nobody makes: ITFFLGOAT
Six seasons: 5th, 9th, 2nd, 7th, 5th, 4th. Average 5.33, third-best in the league, and a worst-ever finish of 9th. In a twelve-team league across six years, never once landing in the bottom three is a real accomplishment, and ITFFLGOAT has done it from an average draft slot of 8.0 — tied with DVO92A6 for the worst starting position of any established manager on this list.
The knock writes itself: zero titles and one top-three regular season. This is the profile of a manager who is very difficult to beat in October and never quite frightening in December. Which, if you have read the rest of this series, is starting to look less like a personality and more like the league's central problem.
Why one- and two-season managers are excluded
Taken literally, the all-time average-finish leaderboard is led by jagmancctx at 1.00 and Sherlock Mahomes at 2.00. Both numbers come from a single season, and neither manager owns a title. jagmancctx finished first in the 2022 regular season and then watched Any Given Sontag win the championship from the 7 seed, which is either the funniest fact in this dataset or the bleakest, depending on which side of it you were standing.
Same rule applies at the other end. Korean Kamikazes and Blue both carry a 12.00 career average off one year apiece. Brancho Country's 9.50 comes from two. Nobody's reputation should be built or torched on n=1, so they stay out of the argument and live in the all-time record book where they belong. The one genuinely borderline case is Athletic Supporters: four seasons, 5.50 average, best 4th and worst 8th. That is a strong run, and if they had played the other two years this might be a different post.
A caveat worth repeating out loud: six seasons of twelve teams is a small dataset. Every average finish above rests on five or six data points, and one fluky year moves a career average by half a place. These are the real numbers and they describe what happened. They do not promise what happens next.
The verdict
End Of Story is the best manager in ITFFL. Any Given Sontag is the best champion in ITFFL. Those are two different questions and the league has spent six years pretending they are one.
Here is why I take End Of Story. The part of this game a manager genuinely controls is roster construction across a full regular season, and by that measure it is not close: a 4.50 average finish from the least favorable draft position in the top half of this list, with five top-four seasons out of six. The part they do not control is a short bracket, and the bracket is the only part they have lost. If you want the counterargument in a single line — the bracket is the game and they have not won it — I cannot beat that. All I can do is point out that the ITFFL bracket has ignored the standings five times in six years, which makes it a strange instrument to grade a manager with.
The pick'em angle
This exact split shows up every single week in a pick'em pool, and most people end up on the wrong side of it without ever choosing. A season-long leaderboard rewards the End Of Story profile: take the chalk, never post a 4-for-12 week, let everybody else's variance do the work for you. A one-week pool with a payout on it rewards the Any Given Sontag profile, because you need a ceiling and a ceiling means being loudly, publicly wrong some of the time.
The mistake is playing one style while being scored by the other. If you are chasing the season leaderboard, floor wins and boring is a strategy. If you are trying to take down a single week, floor gets you eighth place and a handshake. Set your weekly picks according to the thing you are actually trying to win.
The draft is close enough now that this stops being trivia. Go through the six-year draft dataset, work out which of these profiles you are actually built to be, and then go be it deliberately instead of by accident. The trophy case only has room for one answer a season. The table above is where the argument lives the other eleven months.