2020 Season Recaps - GWBL CHAMPION

1st Place: The TC Williams Titans (8-5) - Commish

Coming in 1st place with 1,633 points scored (3rd) is YOUR 2020 GEORGE W. BUSH LEAGUE CHAMPION – The TC Williams Titans (8-5) owned by your favorite Commissioner.

What Went Right:

I’m going to keep this short because I know no one cares about my title as much as I do (duh). And I don’t want to seem bragadocious or appear to be rubbing it in. But as with all former champs I do have to tie together the season. So here we go.

A couple of quick player notes: Josh Jacobs (1st round) had some big games and is RB7 in the NFL. Russel Wilson is QB6 and outperformed his 8th round draft slot. AJ Brown (5th round) officially broke out and scored 10 TDs for me. Last but not least, Darren Waller established himself as a top 3 TE in fantasy – finishing with 98-1,079 and 8 TDs. I also got solid production from Chris Carson, Miles Sanders and Kenny Golladay when healthy.

Now on to the championship. As we’ve seen in fantasy and in the NFL, winning a title is all about getting hot at the right time. During the regular season my team averaged 125 points per week. During my 3 week playoff run, my team averaged 143 points per week. That’s 18 points above my weekly average, or nearly a 15% premium in the playoffs. Talk about good timing. Even better timing – the 158.15 points I put up in Round 1 of the playoffs was my 2nd highest point total all year. To add on to my good fortune, I scored 133 and 138 in my Round 2/Finals appearances. If you take out the 158 I put up in Round 1 of the playoffs, you would have had to go back to Week 5 to find the last time my team scored more than 130 points.

Most of my team performed well in the finals, but it was Stefon Diggs who earned the MVP honors. Going into Monday Night Football, I was down 111-99. I had Stefon Diggs and Kev was done. I needed about 12 points to take the title, but it was no sure thing. The Bills were playing the Pats, who have one of the best secondaries in the league (arguable) and held Diggs to 12.2 points in their Week 8 matchup. In our half-PPR scoring, 12 points is actually a good figure for a WR. Five catches for 90 yards would have been a very respectable game from Diggs and it still wouldn’t have gotten me the win. So while it looked relatively favorable, there was no guarantee I’d be able to pull it out. I was SWEATING all day Monday and couldn’t focus whatsoever. Anyways Monday night came and we all know what happened - Diggs scored 39 points for my team took home the title. A live look…..

“The puck is still loose… 11 seconds…..we’ve got 10 seconds…the countdown is going on right now! Morrow up to Silk, 5 seconds left in the game! DO YOU BELIEVE IN MIRACLES?!?!?! YESSSS!!!!”

What Went Wrong:

Just about all of my top players missed some time with injury. Josh Jacobs missed 1 game, Miles Sanders missed 3 games and Chris Carson missed 4 of his own. This was after Marlon Mack tore his achilles in Week 1. AJ Brown missed 2 games of his own while Kenny Golladay was only able to play in 5 games all season. Fortunately I had enough depth to cover the missed weeks, but it got pretty sketchy there towards the middle of the season.

I guess the only other thing I can really point to is the Tieg/Taysom Hill nonsense. Of course the year I win the league has to be tarnished in some (small) way. Of course it does.

Speaking of “of course it did”. Go figure I win the league when we cut the dues in half due to coronavirus. In a normal year 1st place pays out $775, this year it’s $425. It’s not about the money, but go figure.

Preseason Prediction:

“I predict this team goes 5-8 and misses the playoffs.”

Bleh, bad year for the Commish on these predictions. Only 40% success rate on making playoffs vs. not.

Final Thoughts:

Holy shit, this feels good. It’s been 10 years of struggling, clawing, grinding, and scraping my way through this league. 10 years of offseason research, 10 years of NFL draft coverage, countless NFL/CBS/ESPN articles, hundreds of hours of podcast listens and God knows how much time doing the weekly writeups. After all of that time and effort I’ve finally earned my first title. After coming up short on the ultimate stage each of the past two seasons, I was finally able to close out the season on top of the GWBL. And damn, it feels good.