Key takeaways
- Six ITFFL champions have come from seeds 8, 4, 7, 2, 4 and 1. The average championship seed is 4.33, and the top seed has won it exactly once.
- The best regular-season record has converted once in six tries. Any Given Sontag in 2025. That is the entire list.
- Scoring the most points does not do it either. The league's leading scorer has won the title twice in six seasons.
- Two of six champions did not have a winning record. The 2020 champion went 5-8. The 2022 champion went 7-7 and finished ninth of twelve in scoring.
- Build for the bracket. In ITFFL the standings function as a qualifying round, and six years of results say a roster with a huge week in it beats a roster with a tidy seed.
Six ITFFL seasons are in the books. Here are the regular-season seeds of the six champions, in order: 8, 4, 7, 2, 4, 1.
That is the whole post, really. But since you are here, the ITFFL regular season is a lie in a much more specific and considerably more insulting way than the usual "anything can happen in the playoffs" shrug, and the six-year dataset spells out exactly how insulting.
One time in six years has the team with the best record in ITFFL finished the season holding the trophy. One. And it did not happen at all until last year.
Six champions, six seeds, one match
Every season, the champion and the team that actually won the regular season:
- 2020 — champion Football Enthusiasts, 8 seed, 5-8. Best record: Any Given Sontag at 13-0. Unbeaten. No trophy.
- 2021 — champion DVO92A6, 4 seed, 8-6. Best record: Hollywood Home Team at 12-2 with 1828.76 points, still the highest single-season total in league history.
- 2022 — champion Any Given Sontag, 7 seed, 7-7. Best record: jagmancctx at 11-3.
- 2023 — champion Fighting Armadillos, 2 seed, 10-4. Best record: Football Enthusiasts at 11-3. This is the closest the standings have ever come to being right.
- 2024 — champion aal3, 4 seed, 8-6. Best record: Howell's Pals at 10-4.
- 2025 — champion Any Given Sontag, 1 seed, 12-2. The one time the best team also won.
Add the champions' regular seasons together and you get a combined 50-33. A .602 winning percentage. That is the profile of a team you would describe as "solid, could go either way" right up until somebody hands it the trophy.
The ITFFL regular season is a lie, in one number
4.33. That is the average seed of an ITFFL champion.
In a twelve-team league the midpoint is 6.5, so seeding is not literally worthless — champions do skew toward the top half, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But 4.33 is a long, long way from 1. Two of the six winners came out of the bottom half of the standings entirely, and one of those, the 2020 Football Enthusiasts, did it at 5-8.
In 2020, a 13-0 regular season and a 5-8 regular season produced exactly the same number of ITFFL championships. Only one of them belonged to the team that went 13-0, and it was not that one.
Say it the blunt way: the 1 seed in ITFFL is 1-for-6. Five times a manager has spent three months building the best record in the league and gotten a nice line in a spreadsheet for it.
The teams that won the regular season and nothing else
Line up the best regular seasons in ITFFL history and what you get is a museum of near-misses.
- Any Given Sontag, 2020. 13-0, 1713.94 points. The only unbeaten regular season anyone has ever put together in this league. No title.
- Hollywood Home Team, 2021. 12-2 and 1828.76 points, the most anybody has scored in a single ITFFL season across all six years. No title. Hollywood Home Team has now played six seasons, has finished as high as first, and owns zero championships.
- jagmancctx, 2022. 11-3 and the 1 seed, then watched Any Given Sontag win the whole thing from 7-7.
- Football Enthusiasts, 2023. 11-3, best record in the league, and Fighting Armadillos took it from the 2 seed.
- Howell's Pals, 2024. 10-4 and the top seed while scoring 1388.80 points, the eleventh-most in a twelve-team league. The standings called them the best team. The scoreboard called them the second-worst offense. Both were correct and neither one mattered in the end.
Points do not buy trophies either
If records are a lie, surely raw scoring tells the truth. It does not.
League scoring leaders by season: Any Given Sontag in 2020 (1713.94, no title), Hollywood Home Team in 2021 (1828.76, no title), ITFFLGOAT in 2022 (1637.92, no title), Fighting Armadillos in 2023 (1751.64, title), The Sixth Dimension in 2024 (1720.28, no title), Any Given Sontag in 2025 (1801.88, title). Two for six.
Now the champions' scoring ranks, in order: 4th, 2nd, 9th, 1st, 2nd, 1st. The 2022 champion, Any Given Sontag, scored 1471.14 points — ninth out of twelve teams — and won the league anyway. The 2020 champion scored the fourth-most points in the league and still finished 5-8, which is its own kind of unfair before you even get to the part where they won.
And the cruelest data point in the whole file: in 2021, Fighting Armadillos scored 1585.32 points, the fourth-highest total in the league, went 3-11 and finished 10th. Two years later the same manager led the league in scoring and won the title. Same manager, same approach, opposite luck. If you want an argument that a fourteen-game schedule is mostly a coin-flipping exercise with a spreadsheet attached, there it is.
The honest caveat: this is six seasons and six brackets. Six. Every claim above is a description of what happened in ITFFL, not a law of nature, and a league that runs another six years could easily produce six top-seed champions and make this post look silly. What the data cannot do is show causation. What it can do is show that the thing everyone treats as the goal has paid off once.
How to build a roster for the bracket
Here is the part that is opinion rather than arithmetic, clearly labeled as such.
If seeding has been worth this little, then the job of the regular season is qualifying, and everything after qualifying is a short-series game where one enormous week beats four merely good ones. That changes what you are drafting for. Stop paying a premium for weekly consistency and start paying for the weeks that break a bracket.
Three practical consequences:
- Seeds 2 through 4 have produced as many titles as the 1 seed and the entire bottom half combined. Three champions came from that band. Grinding from the 4 seed to the 1 seed is, on six years of evidence, close to free of reward.
- Do not trade ceiling for floor in October to protect a seed. The seed has not paid. The ceiling has, twice, for the same manager, from opposite ends of the standings.
- A boom-or-bust roster's bad weeks cost you seeding, and seeding is the cheapest currency in this league. Its good weeks cost somebody else a season.
None of this means punting the regular season. Two of six champions had losing or .500 records, which also means four did not, and you cannot win a bracket you are not in. It means the difference between a very good regular season and a great one has been worth almost nothing here, while the difference between a 130-point week and a 90-point week in the bracket has been worth everything. Draft accordingly, and if you want the raw material on how the league actually drafts, the six-year draft dataset is all there — including what each draft slot has actually returned, which is another number people trust far more than six seasons can support.
The pick'em angle: seeds versus brackets
Pick'em players walk into this same trap every year, just with a different scoreboard. There is a strategy that maximizes your expected win total across a whole season, and there is a strategy that maximizes your odds of winning one specific week with money on it. They are not the same strategy, and the second one requires being wrong in public sometimes.
ITFFL has spent six years demonstrating which of those the prize is actually attached to. A short window decides everything, and the team that looked best for three months usually is not the one standing there at the end. If you play weekly pools the same way you build a fantasy roster — protecting a record you do not get paid for — you are optimizing the wrong number. Go check what the season-long numbers actually say about your own picks, then make this week's selections for the outcome you are trying to buy.
The draft is coming, and somebody in this league is about to spend twelve rounds building a team that goes 11-3 and wins nothing. It has happened almost every year. The only real question left is who volunteers this time — and whether the manager with the best average finish in league history and zero rings finally gets the three weeks he has been owed since 2020.