Twenty-four champions, each measured against the other thirteen teams in its own league that year. Same season, same scoring, same rulebook.
You do not draft a champion. You build one. Of the eight players who start a championship game, 3.7 of them were not on the roster on draft day — more than were drafted (2.6) and more than were kept (1.6). The median champion's title-game eight were not all on the roster together until week 16. These teams were not finished until the week they won.
And that is where the skill is. Three things predict a season about equally well — your picks beating what those picks are worth, the players you add after the draft, and starting the right eight. Only two of them repeat from one year to the next within the same coach, and both are in-season. Draft night's contribution is real, large, and a coin flip.
Points above the field median at each position, split into starting MORE of them and getting MORE from the ones you started.
Champions beat the field median by 72 points at running back and by
essentially nothing anywhere else — and 60 of those 72 points are
QUALITY, not usage. They did not start more backs than anyone. The backs they started scored more
(z=+0.88, p=0.006).
And the backs came off the draft board. Split by where the player came from, a champion's DRAFTED
running backs scored 12.48 per start against the field's 9.58.
Its ADDED running backs scored 8.38 against the field's 8.51 —
nothing. Champions were no better than anyone at picking running backs off waivers. They were much better at
the ones they drafted, having spent no more capital there than their field
(capital share z=-0.09). They did not target
running back. They hit on it.
Which is why nobody does it twice. Hitting on draft picks is the one thing on this page that predicts a
season strongly and does not repeat at all. The single position that decides titles here is decided by the one
skill that turns out not to be one.
Six positions were tested, so running back's p=0.006 does not survive correction across them.
It is much the largest effect on the page, it agrees with the draft-execution finding and with the origin split,
and it is still a lean rather than a proof.
A thing a coach does carries into next season. A thing that happened to him does not. The line falls in exactly one place.
| what | predicts scoring | champions vs field | repeats next year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| who you add after the draft | r=+0.36 | +0.51 sd, p=0.02 | r=+0.15, p=0.03 | SKILL |
| who you start | r=+0.38 | +0.27 sd, p=0.07 | r=+0.23, p=0.00 | SKILL |
| your picks beating their slot | r=+0.34 | +0.56 sd, p=0.04 | r=−0.05, p=0.37 | UNMEASURABLE |
| your keepers beating their cost | r=+0.25 | +0.39 sd, p=0.09 | r=−0.04, p=0.75 | luck |
| staying healthy | r=−0.15 | -0.71 sd, p=0.00 | r=+0.07, p=0.23 | luck |
The two highlighted rows are the ones a coach carries with him. Persistence is the same coach's
within-season z in consecutive seasons — 266 to 285
pairs — with a gap year breaking the pair.
One row says UNMEASURABLE, and the reason this page used to give for it was wrong.
It reported that odd and even halves of the same draft anti-correlate
(r=-0.29, 330 team-seasons) and concluded that ten
to fourteen picks cannot measure a drafter. The number is real. The diagnosis was not, and it mattered: it let
"we cannot measure this" stand in for a question that is in fact measurable.
The cause is positional composition, not sample size. A team's picks are not exchangeable - every roster
drafts about one quarterback, and with six-point passing touchdowns a quarterback is an outlier in RAW points, so
whichever half of a split holds him runs high and the other runs low by construction. A random split
reproduces the same negative number, which is the tell: if the scheme were at fault, randomising it would have
repaired it. Price each pick against players at its OWN position instead, in position-season SD units, and the
anti-correlation disappears - split-half goes from -0.816 to
-0.13 on the SAME split scheme. Zero, not negative.
(Quoting the random split's -0.028 against the old ALTERNATE
figure would compare two different cuts and overstate the repair; the like-for-like pair is the one above.) The two in-season measures split cleanly in half
(r=+0.512 and +0.556, full-season
reliability 0.677 and 0.715), so
their persistence means what it appears to — corrected for that reliability their true year-over-year figures are
about 0.28 and 0.25 rather than 0.19 and 0.17.
So: is drafting a skill here? Measurable, consequential, and not demonstrably repeatable. Those are three
separate findings and collapsing them is what went wrong the first time.
It is measurable - every live pick is priced against its own position, exactly. It matters more than
anything else on this page: execution in rounds 1-4 correlates r=+0.41
with where a team finishes, above lineup efficiency and above in-season acquisition. And the band where
sleeper-hunting is supposed to live is the weakest one, not the strongest:
| picks | vs where the team finished | same coach, next season |
|---|---|---|
| rounds 1-4 | r=+0.41, p=0.000, of 162 team-seasons | r=+0.01, p=0.89 (86 pairs) |
| rounds 5-9 | r=+0.18, p=0.008, of 330 team-seasons | r=−0.01, p=0.86 (286 pairs) |
| rounds 10+ | r=+0.09, p=0.122, of 324 team-seasons | r=−0.01, p=0.81 (277 pairs) |
| every round | r=+0.30, p=0.000, of 330 team-seasons | r=−0.04, p=0.44 (286 pairs) |
Nothing repeats, in any band. And the strongest test is the career one, because pooling a
coach's whole record averages out the single-season noise: across the
22 coaches with five or more drafts, the spread in career execution is what
reshuffling the same team-seasons produces 20% of the time.
The ranking's own shape says the same thing - the extremes are short careers (Janeen Kopale on 5 seasons at the top), while everyone
with twenty-plus converges on zero.
THREE caveats this owes, all of which cut against the number above. The r=+0.41
is partly mechanical - points scored by a team's drafted players are most of that team's points, so the
two can hardly fail to correlate. And most of it is not about the SLOT. Zeroing the slope in the
per-position fit - so a pick is scored purely against its position's mean, with no information about where it
was taken - still returns r=+0.37 of that r=+0.41. So the
honest reading of this row is "your drafted players scored well for their position", which is a weaker and
different claim than "you beat your slot"; the slot term contributes about a tenth. And the persistence nulls carry a power bound: 286
coach-season pairs resolve r≈0.16, not r≈0.08. The defensible claim is that any repeatable drafting edge in this
league is too small for 24 seasons to see - not that it is zero.
And one caveat this page owes on its own number: draft execution's r=+0.34 with team scoring is
substantially mechanical. Points scored by a team's drafted players are most of that team's points, so
the two can hardly fail to correlate. Read it as a description, not as evidence that drafting well causes winning.
The split is not subtle and it is not where anyone expects it. The two decisions taken before a down is
played — which picks to spend and which players to keep — predict a season as strongly as anything else here, and
neither repeats. The two taken during it repeat. Preparation matters and does not compound; management matters
and does.
Keeping is a good deal, and everyone knows it. Across 151 team-seasons the median
keeper beat the pick it cost by 0.27 of an average drafted player, and
65% of keeper decisions came out ahead of the round they
consumed. Champions were no better at it than their field (). Asking "how many keepers did
champions have" could never have found this: the count is capped at four and most teams sit at the cap, so there
is no variance in it to spend.
Notice what is missing from that table: the draft board. Twenty-two separate measures of how a team
drafted — how many of each position, what share of its capital went where, when it took its first and its average
at each spot — and not one separates a champion from its field. How you draft does not matter. How WELL you
draft matters a great deal and is not something anyone does repeatably.
The two in-season skills are not the same skill. Adding well and starting well correlate with each other
only weakly, and each survives controlling for the other. Nor is either the same as health: absences and lineup
quality correlate at r=0.131, and controlling each for the other makes both links to scoring
stronger (n=324).
Why nobody has run away with it. 13 coaches have won the 24 titles of
37 who ever held a roster, the most being 5. Against a
league where each season's champion is drawn at random, that is unremarkable — a random league produces a
5-title coach 15% of
the time. The skills are real and they are small: r ≈ 0.17 and 0.19 year over year. Real enough to
matter in a season, too small to compound into a dynasty over twenty-four.
Every champion whose championship lineup reconstructs, by where its eight starters came from.
Kept, drafted, or added after the board closed — for the eight who actually started the title
game, not the roster around them. 23 of 24 champions; 2004 have no
reconstructable championship lineup.
Convergence is the sharper number. The median champion's title-game eight were first all on the roster
together in week 16, and restricting to the
14 champions whose season reconstructs completely gives
week 16 — so it is not an artifact of missing early weeks.
The extreme case is the one that started 0-4. 2023 Gamblin Gars started the title game with 0 drafted players and 6 it had
picked up in-season — Kyren Williams in week 6, Isiah Pacheco in week 7, Isaiah Likely in week 16.
Two different questions, two different samples, and 49 tests between them.
A champion is a bad sample and it is worth saying why. A title is a good team multiplied by
a six- or seven-team single-elimination bracket — given a berth, five in six contenders lose. With 24 champions a
paired test only finds an effect when the average champion sits near the 75th percentile of his own field,
which almost no coaching behaviour is. So most of this page tests against all 324
team-seasons and a continuous outcome (where a team's scoring ranked within its own season), which sees an
effect roughly four times smaller for no extra data. The 24 champions are then laid over that axis as a
description, not used as the sample it comes from.
Two families, corrected separately. 30 champion-vs-field comparisons (sign test
on paired differences) and 19 team-season correlations (Spearman, within-season z-scores so no
era can carry a result). Each family gets Benjamini-Hochberg at 5% false discovery, which is the lenient
correction. Champion-vs-field survivors: regPf, ceiling, missedWeeks, aboveMedian, keyPlayerMissed
— and one of those is that champions outscored their field, which is nearly a definition.
Team-season survivor: lineupEfficiency, acquisitionQuality, draftExecution.
Anything else on this page that looks like a finding is labelled suggestive or flat, and the
facts — a bracket, a record, a seed — need no test at all.
Starting the right players. Lineup efficiency — the share of your roster's best available points that
you actually put in the eight — is the strongest measure on this page and the only one of
19 team-season tests to survive correction. It predicts a team's scoring rank
(r=+0.384, p<0.001, n=324) and it predicts making the playoffs
(r=+0.295, p=0).
This measure was reported as a null earlier in this project, because over 24 champions it is
13 of 24 and invisible. The champions are better
at it than their field — mean z of 0.27 — just not by enough for 24 rows
to see.
The obvious objection, tested: a team with one dominant player has an easy lineup decision, so is
this just roster shape? Efficiency correlates with top-three concentration at only r=0.16, while its link to
scoring is r=0.40. Concentration explains a little of it and not most of it.
The one comparison that survives correction. A champion lost 10.5 player-weeks to absence against 15.6 for its own season's field — about a third fewer — and was above its field in only 4 of 24 seasons. Among the players a team committed to in the first three rounds it is 2.1 against 3.5. Labelled INFERRED: the measure is a floor on disruption, not an injury count.
Yes — 2025 Rashaud Express (Malik Nabers, 9 weeks), 2017 I AM GROOT (Odell Beckham Jr., 8 weeks), 2023 Gamblin Gars (Jeff Wilson, 6 weeks). Good availability is the tendency, not the requirement.
Neither. Top-three concentration is 46.3% against a field 45.0%, and distinct starters differ by -0.6. Swept across every cut from top-1 to top-6, the verdict never leaves coin-flip territory — so this is the measure saying nothing, not a threshold hiding something.
Both, and the scope decides which. Over the regular season a champion's points from its own draft board are 71% against a field 71% — identical. In the playoffs it is 57% against 61%, measured against the other playoff teams, and champions shed own-draft share nearly twice as fast getting there (-14 points against -11). But it does not survive the correction — p=0.152 on its own, before accounting for the 30 comparisons this page makes. The direction is consistent and the mechanism is plausible; the evidence is 21 seasons and that is not enough. Treat it as the most interesting thing here to go and test properly, not as something established.
No signal — 1.7 recorded trades against 1.3, and waiver activity is the same coin flip (14 of 24). Read as a floor. The CBS transaction log is incomplete — the roster replay it drives cannot hold rosters at fourteen — so these counts are what was recorded, not what was done.
Not one. Every season has a best split; the question is whether it beats the season's own variance, tested here by shuffling each team's weeks two thousand times. No champion's season splits more sharply than chance. Across all 324 team-seasons in the archive the same test fires on 13 — 4.0% at α=0.05, which is what a calibrated test does. Champions were not teams that turned a corner. They were mostly good all year, or good enough and lucky in January.
No. It is the flattest measure in the whole study. Draft slot against a team's scoring rank across
316 team-seasons: r=-0.006, p=0.916, n=316. There is no lucky chair.
It would be a misleading number even if it were not flat: this league assigns the order inverse to
finish and the champion picks last the following year, so a champion's slot is a statement about the
season before it. What matters in a keeper league is your first LIVE pick, which is your slot and everyone
else's keeper count together.
No, and this is the most comprehensively negative result here. Each of these is a decision made on
draft night, before a down is played, tested across 324 team-seasons against how
that team then scored:
· when they took a quarterback — r=-0.013, p=0.819, n=288
· when they took a running back — r=+0.023, p=0.671, n=311, a receiver — r=+0.058, p=0.304, n=310
· keepers held — r=+0.112, p=0.074, n=292
· NFL experience of the players they drafted — r=-0.120, p=0.051, n=316
· rookies drafted — r=-0.063, p=0.258, n=316
· NFL draft pedigree of the players they took — r=-0.047, p=0.386, n=316
Not one survives correction. The two that come closest point the same way and both are weak: taking a tight
end later (r=+0.179, p=0.042, n=159) and buying fewer late-round lottery tickets
(r=-0.122, p=0.048, n=316) — and the second is more likely a symptom of already having a good roster than a
cause of getting one.
A departure, and it is the strongest result on this page. Comparing a champion to its league says
whether the team was good; it cannot say whether the COACH was doing anything unusual, because a coach who
is always good beats the field every year. Holding the coach fixed and comparing the title season against
his own other seasons, 22 of 24 scored at a higher
weekly rank than their norm, by 8.97 percentile points. Measured in percentile
rather than points on purpose: on raw points it is only 16 of 24, because the scoring rules changed four
times and a coach whose title came late looks improved when the rulebook did.
But only 3 of 24 were that coach's best season ever. The title
year was above their line and short of their peak — which is the most practical thing here: you do not need
a career year to win this league.
No, and of all the nulls this is the one worth sitting with, because it is the one that would have been skill. Points actually started as a share of the best eight the roster held that week: 78.5% for champions against 77.0% for their field. They did not start the right players more often than the teams they beat. Nor were they steadier — weekly consistency is 12 of 24, p=1.000 — and their bad weeks were no better than anyone's (floor, 15 of 24). What was different is the top end: their best week beat their field's in 21 of 24.
No — and this page said the opposite first time round, which is worth recording. Running back looks like a lean: 29% of a champion's starter points against a field 24%. But it is 16 of 24 seasons at p=0.152. The first version quoted the well-covered subset instead (13 of 15) and called it the one signal that holds — choosing the slice where the number looks best, out of an already non-significant result. No position separates them.
6 champions started 0-2 and 2 started 0-4. The strongest case is 2023 Gamblin Gars, who started 0-4 head-to-head and 0-4 against the league median — 0-8 by the standings this league actually keeps — and won the title. Three champions also came in as the last team in the field: 2012 at the 7 seed, 2014 at the 7 seed, 2024 at the 6 seed.
Every input and output measured here, against how a team scored, over 324 team-seasons.
Read the bottom of that chart, not the top. Everything from keepers held downward
is a decision made on draft night, and none of it predicts anything. The draft is where this league spends its
attention and it is not where the league is decided.
Lineup efficiency contains outcome and is labelled as decision quality, not pure behaviour — it is
computed from what the players actually scored, so a coach cannot be graded on it in advance. It is also an
upper bound: the best eight here is the best eight by points, ignoring slot eligibility, so every team's
figure is inflated by the same rule and it is the ordering that is being compared, not the level. The legal
version is solved on the near misses page.
Four dimensions per position, because no one of them is the answer on its own.
"Took a receiver late" is not a measurement. A team that drafted one receiver in round 2 and a team that drafted one in round 2 and five more in rounds 9-14 have the same "first WR" pick and nothing else in common; a team that waited until round 5 and then took four straight looks late at the position it committed to hardest. So each position carries how many they took, what share of their draft capital went there, where the first one went and where the average one went — and capital is the one that weighs round against quantity, because it prices every pick off this league's own curve.
| pos | champion | field | z | p |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| QB | 1.7 | 1.5 | 0.22 | 0.40 |
| RB | 2.8 | 2.9 | -0.07 | 0.78 |
| WR | 3.5 | 3.5 | 0.06 | 0.72 |
| TE | 0.7 | 0.8 | -0.20 | 0.36 |
| K | 1.0 | 0.9 | 0.35 | 0.20 |
| DEF | 1.3 | 1.3 | -0.03 | 0.90 |
| pos | champion | field | z | p |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| QB | 14% | 12% | 0.29 | 0.22 |
| RB | 25% | 26% | -0.09 | 0.73 |
| WR | 32% | 30% | 0.20 | 0.35 |
| TE | 5% | 7% | -0.28 | 0.19 |
| K | 7% | 6% | 0.14 | 0.55 |
| DEF | 11% | 11% | -0.03 | 0.88 |
| pos | champion | field | z | p |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| QB | 32% | 40% | -0.29 | 0.16 |
| RB | 24% | 19% | 0.22 | 0.37 |
| WR | 21% | 20% | 0.07 | 0.72 |
| TE | 39% | 42% | — | — |
| K | 86% | 78% | 0.38 | 0.06 |
| DEF | 56% | 55% | 0.14 | 0.55 |
| pos | champion | field | z | p |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| QB | 46% | 52% | -0.33 | 0.22 |
| RB | 45% | 41% | 0.21 | 0.31 |
| WR | 48% | 44% | 0.26 | 0.21 |
| TE | 56% | 51% | — | — |
| K | 86% | 78% | 0.42 | 0.05 |
| DEF | 61% | 61% | 0.04 | 0.86 |
22 cells, and not one survives correction. Timing is a percentile of
that season's live board — 0% is the first live pick, 100% the last — so keeper-consumed rounds do not distort it
and a 12-round 2005 draft compares with a 14-round 2019 one. Capital is priced from a curve fitted on
2861 skill-position picks across every season: the top 5% of a board returns
1.276× the average drafted player and the bottom 5% returns
0.507×.
The one coherent pattern, and it still does not clear the bar: champions drafted their kicker
later and took fewer of them — later first pick (z=+0.38),
later on average (z=+0.42, p=0.046),
fewer taken (z=+0.35). Three dimensions pointing the same
way is not what one lucky cell looks like. A kicker is the only asset on the board whose value next August is
guaranteed to be zero, so spending early there is a pure vote for this November — and champions voted less.
And running back, specifically: champions spent no more capital there than their field
(z=-0.09, p=0.73)
and drafted no more of them. An earlier version of this page reported that champions took more of their POINTS
from running backs. That is an output. There is no decision behind it.
Of everything measured here, this is the one that is not close.
A missed week is a player on the roster whose NFL team played and who has no stat line.
It is a floor on disruption, not an injury count — it catches suspensions and healthy scratches too, and
every figure from it is INFERRED. The status verbs that would not have that problem do not cover the era:
the CBS log carries 13 Moved to IR events in 11,134.
Over a regular season a champion's roster origin is indistinguishable from anyone else's. The playoffs are a different team.
Origin is split three ways: players the team drafted or kept itself, players another team drafted that season and it acquired later, and players nobody drafted. The playoff comparison runs against the other playoff teams only — comparing a champion's postseason against teams that had none would be comparing it against zero. The most forged title teams on record: 2002 Blackbeards, 100% of its playoff points from players nobody drafted; 2022 Darkwa Express, 40% of its playoff points from players nobody drafted.
The one comparison that holds the coach fixed — and the one that separates hardest.
Each row is a champion. The dot is that season's mean weekly scoring percentile; the line runs
back to the average of every other season that coach has ever played, across team renames and both
platforms. 22 of 24 moved up, by 8.97 points on
average. Percentile, not points, because points are not comparable across a career here — the scoring
changed four times, and on raw points the same test is only 16 of 24.
Titles are concentrated. 13 coaches have won the 24, out of
37 who have ever held a roster — 35% of
the league's history has a ring. Terry Herndon has 5 (2002, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2021); Mike Pugh has 3 (2006, 2011, 2018); Kevin Herndon has 3 (2012, 2017, 2019).
Weekly scoring percentile within the league, 24 champions. Green dots are wins, red losses. The flat line is the league median for that week.
Not one of these is a pivot. Every series has a best split into a worse half and a better half — that is arithmetic. Whether it means anything is tested by shuffling each champion's own weeks two thousand times and asking how often chance produces a split that sharp. It produces one at least that sharp for every single champion. The same test fires on 13 of the archive's 324 team-seasons, so it is calibrated and it is not broken; champions simply did not turn corners.
As of 2026 week 2, Rashaud Express is 0-2 and 1-3 including the median game, Calabash Shrimp is 0-2 and 0-4 including the median game, Octomore 15.3 is 0-2 and 0-4 including the median game. The precedent is real and it is specific: 2023 Gamblin Gars started 0-4 and 0-4 against the median — 0-8 by the standings this league keeps, over its first four weeks — and won the title from the 5 seed. Over the full four weeks 2 champions were 0-4 head-to-head and 5 were below .500. What that team then did is the part worth copying: 38% of its playoff points and 11 of its 24 playoff starts came from players nobody in the room drafted.
Sortable. own draft is the share of starter points from players the team drafted or kept itself; weeks lost counts roster players whose NFL team played and who posted no stat line.
| season | team | coach | seed | record | pct | kept | allowed | top-3 | own draft reg | own draft po | weeks lost | trades | margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2002 | Blackbeards | Terry Herndon | 1 | 11-3 | 0.786 | — | — | 41% | 0% | 0% | 4 | 1 | 10 |
| 2003 | Panthers | Jimmy OBrien | 1 | 10-4 | 0.714 | 0 | 0 | 44% | 92% | 61% | 3 | 0 | 4 |
| 2004 | Bulldogs | Ben Byler | 4 | 9-5 | 0.643 | 0 | 0 | 41% | 57% | 69% | 9 | 0 | 26 |
| 2005 | Blackbeards | Terry Herndon | 3 | 8-5 | 0.615 | 2 | 2 | 46% | 75% | 56% | 5 | 4 | 37 |
| 2006 | Bickering Wrens | Mike Pugh | 1 | 9-4 | 0.692 | 1 | 2 | 36% | 51% | 40% | 8 | 4 | 5 |
| 2007 | Gamblin' Garz | Scott Garlisch | 1 | 11-2 | 0.846 | 2 | 2 | 53% | 79% | 64% | 12 | 2 | 33 |
| 2008 | Send in the Clowns | Steve Baird | 5 | 6-7 | 0.462 | 3 | 4 | 38% | 52% | 19% | 14 | 2 | 24 |
| 2009 | Blackbeards | Terry Herndon | 2 | 8-5 | 0.615 | 4 | 4 | 43% | 62% | 55% | 6 | 2 | 1 |
| 2010 | Blackbeards | Terry Herndon | 4 | 8-5 | 0.615 | 4 | 4 | 38% | 75% | 48% | 6 | 1 | 46 |
| 2011 | Bickering Wrens | Mike Pugh | 3 | 8-5 | 0.615 | 3 | 4 | 53% | 86% | 75% | 13 | 0 | 71 |
| 2012 | One Man Wolfpack | Kevin Herndon | 7 | 6-7 | 0.462 | 4 | 4 | 56% | 88% | 74% | 6 | 0 | 37 |
| 2013 | South Park Cows | Brian Pugh | 1 | 11-2 | 0.846 | 4 | 4 | 55% | 85% | 79% | 3 | 3 | 32 |
| 2014 | South Park Cows | Brian Pugh | 7 | 5-8 | 0.385 | 4 | 4 | 51% | 74% | 78% | 10 | 2 | 19 |
| 2015 | Murray Creek Station | Ryan Ayers | 2 | 8-5 | 0.615 | 4 | 4 | 43% | 71% | 54% | 7 | 3 | 14 |
| 2016 | California Shrimp | Dan Weissburg | 4 | 9-4 | 0.692 | 0 | 4 | 49% | 87% | 55% | 10 | 1 | 1 |
| 2017 | I AM GROOT | Kevin Herndon | 4 | 7-6 | 0.538 | 4 | 4 | 41% | 73% | 54% | 17 | 3 | 48 |
| 2018 | Bickering War Wrens | Mike Pugh | 2 | 9-4 | 0.692 | 2 | 4 | 55% | 51% | 33% | 11 | 3 | 61 |
| 2019 | Mr. Big Chest | Kevin Herndon | 6 | 7-6 | 0.538 | 4 | 4 | 43% | 71% | 75% | 10 | 0 | 27 |
| 2020 | Man Without Fear | Matt Pugh | 5 | 6-7 | 0.462 | 3 | 4 | 51% | 84% | 72% | 20 | 2 | 37.4 |
| 2021 | Shut up Lige | Terry Herndon | 1 | 9-5 | 0.643 | 3 | 4 | 47% | 68% | 53% | 8 | 2 | 40.9 |
| 2022 | Darkwa Express | Todd Mercer | 2 | 10-4 | 0.714 | 1 | 4 | 47% | 95% | 57% | 8 | 0 | 39 |
| 2023 | Gamblin Gars | Scott Garlisch | 5 | 7-7 | 0.500 | 4 | 4 | 45% | 62% | 48% | 26 | 3 | 76 |
| 2024 | Octomore 15.3 | John Silvers | 6 | 4-10 | 0.286 | 0 | 4 | 43% | 83% | 73% | 15 | 2 | 29.15 |
| 2025 | Rashaud Express | Todd Mercer | 3 | 10-4 | 0.714 | 3 | 4 | 51% | 81% | 83% | 22 | 1 | 78.35 |
The population is two numbers. 24 champions for anything computed from games;
24 for anything computed from players.
Playoff figures cover 24: 2004 and 2007's bracket lineups do not reconstruct.
Lineup coverage is uneven and the weak seasons are named. A CBS team-week contributes player rows only if
its eight starters reconstruct to the recorded score. Field coverage is 100% in every Sleeper season and falls to
55% in 2020 and 63% in 2010. 9 seasons sit below 90% (2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2010, 2020), and every
aggregate above is computed twice — over all seasons, and over only the well-covered ones. A finding that moved
between the two is not reported as a finding.
Trade and waiver counts are floors. The CBS transaction log under-records departures; the roster replay it
drives leaves 1,621 of 4,182 roster-weeks with too many players.
Thresholds are swept, not asserted. Top-N concentration is reported across N=1..6 and never separates;
the key-player cut is reported across rounds 1..6 and the champion advantage deepens monotonically, so the
headline understates it.