Championship

Well. I don't know how I expected this week to feel. I guess I would've been disappointed by either team winning, to tell you the truth. But something about seeing the teams with the best records in the league facing off for the championship is even worse than when we had the #6 seed facing off against (and beating) the #4 seed in 2015. That stunk for the teams that played well all season - but at least it was surprising, and therefore a little bit exciting. Anyway.

The only person more depressed over this game is probably Bill. His team, as we all sort of hoped/expected, sort of fell apart in the end. Tom Brady (12pts) closed out the season with four straight lackluster performances after put up pretty spectacular stat lines as recently as weeks 10, 11 & 12. RB Ezekiel Elliott (11pts) returned from his six week exile and, sure, put up a double digit score - but only barely. And that against the same Seattle Defense that Todd Gurley absolutely decimated on the ground just last week. Sterling Shepard, who put up 24 points on Bill's bench last week, could only manage 4 points this week before leaving the game with a neck injury. WR Michael Thomas (6pts) ended his three game TD/double digit fantasy scored streak and WR Keenan Allen (6pts) continued his downward trend after breaking his streak last week. Not even 16 points from Kareem "The Invisible Man" Hunt could pull Bill out of this tailspin as he finished the biggest week of his season with just 84 points. (His second lowest point total of the season, for those keeping track at home.)

Jared, on the other hand, played up as he posted his highest score of the championship weeks - and third highest point total of the season. Of course, that's not a super difficult feat when your RB1 scores MORE THAN FORTY POINTS FOR THE SECOND CONSECUTIVE FRIGGING WEEK!!!!!! Yes, Nick's (very early) Christmas gift to Jared continued to pay off at just the right time as RB Todd Gurley (45pts) ran all over the Tennessee Titans (supposedly good) defense and basically put the Auto Bots on his back and carried them to their first (and last) Sports Champion Winner Trophy. But what about the other impressive scores on Jared's team, you ask? Well, those would be RB Bilal Powells' 25 points and QB Alex Smith's 18 points.... on the bench. Because only four other players in Jared's starting lineup (or whole team, really) posted double digit scores. And of those, QB Cam Newton's 13 points was the highest.

If Jared didn't have Gurley - would he have put Powell in the starting lineup and won anyway? Probably. But if he didn't have Gurley: he probably wouldn't have been in the championship in the first place and we'd likely be talking about how Andrew won another championship... this time with a score of 87 points. Ugh. I don't guess that would be much better. I mean, really, the only thing that probably would've made me happy here is if I won. Or maybe Earl.  That would've been a fine closing note. Oh - or Jeremy too, I forgot about his great season.

Ah well, to the winner go the spoils - no matter how he got there. Congratulations Jared!!

And last/least of all: Matt is the DLL because he lost to James even though James started one player who was on the IR and another who was a game day scratch. If that's not a fitting closing note for this, then I'll just leave this here....