There's an old story I tell every year around this time, usually to whoever's unlucky enough to be standing near the chip dip at the league's summer gathering, about the time Brad Morris drafted a kicker in the fourth round because he'd 'heard good things.' Brad's gone now — pre-Sleeper casualty, lives only in the archive — but the lesson stuck with me longer than he did: this league punishes cleverness and rewards patience. Which brings me, in my typically roundabout fashion, to Week 2.
Week 1 gave us one result worth discussing and five I'm apparently not permitted to know yet, which tells you everything about how this so-called information age actually works. What I do know: Elliott Simmonds's All Gas No Drakes squeaked past Nick Inman's TacoDreams, 4.04 to 1.2, numbers so small I checked twice to make sure someone hadn't left the decimal point on the cutting room floor. Back in my day a team that put up 1.2 would've been benched from the league entirely. Inman heads into Week 2 already 0-1, and given that he owns this league's most last-place finishes outright — three of them, more than anyone else still playing here — plus a career runner-up finish still waiting on its ring, I'd call that a rough start to a get-right campaign. His Week 2 date with Ryan Weaver's Joe Buck Yourself feels like the kind of game a desperate man wins ugly.
Now, the marquee. Ben Cunnion, a three-time champion over the life of this league, hosts Evan Sinn's 4th and 20, the very outfit that posted 2025's best regular-season record at 11-3 while Cunnion's group finished fourth at 8-6. I won't pretend to know how last season's postseason shook out for either man — the archive keeps that particular secret from me this week — but I'll keep pointing out that raw record and results don't always sit where the standings alone would have you believe. Sinn owns the best career winning percentage of anyone still playing in this league, and if the spreadsheet people want to tell me that means something, fine — this week I'd like to see it mean a win.
Elsewhere, John Penney — the all-time leader in career wins among this group, a fact the app-era crowd conveniently forgets to mention — takes on Kevin Jones, a three-time champion in his own right, in a matchup of men who've forgotten more about roster construction than half this league ever learned. Justin Waitt's Diamond Dogs draw Ryan El Masri's ArabMamba6, and here's where I'll indulge my annual gripe: naming your team after your own username is not a bit, gentlemen, it is a surrender. El Masri, Nick Inman, and Ben Cunnion all remain guilty parties on my list, and I'll keep printing it until somebody's embarrassed enough to change it. Meanwhile Ollie Simmonds, still chasing his first ring after a runner-up finish that predates most of this current roster, gets Trent Harley — one of the two newest men in this league, and until he proves otherwise in a game that actually counts for something, I remain unconvinced.
Brian Jones draws the very man who beat Inman in Week 1, Elliott Simmonds, and I'll say what I always say about Jones: a champion, three times a runner-up, a man who has landed on the wrong side of more finals than anyone else currently playing in this league, and deserved better each time. The standings don't lie. They also don't always tell you the whole story.