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The Association Podcast, Ep. 22: "The Prophecy Was Wrong
Audio coming soon
# The Association Podcast, Ep. 22: "The Prophecy Was Wrong"
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JACKWelcome back to The Association Podcast, Episode 22. I am Jack Monroe. To my left, Marcus Vale.
MARCUSLet's go. Let's get into it right now.
JACKClaire Donovan is here.
CLAIREI have been waiting for this episode for six days. Six days, Jack.
JACKEvan Cole is joining us.
EVANI ran the numbers three different ways. The conclusion is the same every time. I need to talk about it.
JACKAnd Alex Mercer, as always, locked and loaded.
ALEXSomeone in this league is going to have to answer for what happened. And we are going to make them answer today.
JACKFolks, welcome to Episode 22. Season 2 of Da League is complete. We have a champion. And if you have been following this show all year, if you listened to every single episode, if you tracked every trade, every waiver move, every point differential — then you know that what happened in these playoffs was not supposed to happen. At least, not according to every single reasonable projection any of us made.
MARCUSNot supposed to happen. That is a polite way to say it, Jack. That is the diplomatic version. What I would say is that the universe looked at brodiedean8's 19-2 regular season record and said, you know what, no. Not today. Not ever.
CLAIREI want to hold on that for a second before we dive into the results. Because I think the story of this season is actually two stories running parallel to each other all year, and they only converge at the very end, and when they do, it is like watching two freight trains on the same track. You have HeHateMe, brodiedean8, building something historically dominant. 19-2 in the regular season. 7946 points on the season. The most dominant regular season in league history. That is one story. And then you have alecb5, Alec's Squad, quietly going 14-7, not flashy, not loud, not the conversation piece every week, just winning at a rate that would be the envy of any other season. And those two stories crash into each other in the playoffs and only one of them survives.
EVANAnd the one that survives is not the one with 19 wins. I want to make sure everyone is sitting with that. The team that went 19-2 did not win the championship. The team that went 14-7 won the championship. In a 22-week season.
ALEXAnd we predicted Brodie. Every single one of us. I want to go back to Episode 20, when we all made our playoff predictions. Do you want to know what I said? I said Brodie in three rounds. I said it was not a question of whether HeHateMe wins the championship, the question was whether anyone would even make it competitive. That is what I said. On record. And I was wrong. And I think accountability starts with the people in this room before it goes anywhere else.
JACKAlright, let us set the table properly. Here are the final standings. brodiedean8, HeHateMe, finishes 20-2. 7946 points on the year. First place. Regular season champion. goochshot, Shep and Co., finishes 19-3. 7426 points. Second place. alecb5, Alec's Squad, 15-7. 7596 points. Third seed. 44Colt, Wet Like I'm Book, 14-8. 6587 points. Fourth seed. Nighthawk2334, Shane Gillis Alexander, 12-10. Fifth seed. Natebarrett5, Coopa Troopas, 10-12. Sixth and final playoff seed. Outside the playoffs, michaelhebb at 7-15, BigSuge at 6-16, blakeeverroad at 4-18, and Ctwhitaker1 at 3-19. And those bottom four are your 2026 draft lottery participants. That is where we are. Now let us talk about where this season went.
MARCUSCan we just start at the top? Can we start with 19-2? Because I do not think people are giving that record the respect it deserves even in the context of a guy who did not win the championship. 19 and 2. In a 22-week season. That is a 90 percent win rate in the regular season. You know how hard it is to go 19-2 in a competitive fantasy league? Some of these guys are trading actively, streaming, making moves every week. Brodie went 19-2. That is a monument. That is a landmark. That is something you put in the trophy case even if the trophy itself belongs to someone else.
CLAIREAnd it actually makes the loss hit harder, right? Because the monument is there. The statue is built. And then the playoffs happen and someone chips the head off. 19-2 and no ring. Season 1 champion. Season 2 regular season champion. And alecb5 is the Season 2 league champion.
EVANI keep thinking about the point totals. Look at this. Brodie scores 7946 points in the regular season. Alec scores 7596. That is a 350-point gap over 22 weeks. Brodie was genuinely putting up more points. More production. More roster quality week over week. And it still did not matter. Because in a single-elimination or short-series playoff format, any team can get hot at the right time. And that is exactly what happened.
ALEXThat is the tragedy of the format, and I do think it is worth examining as a structural question for the league going forward. But I also do not want to let Brodie off the hook by blaming the format. Because the format is the format. Everyone knew the playoff structure going in. You do not get to dominate 19-2 and then say the format was unfair when a 14-7 team beats you. The format is the same for everybody.
JACKLet us talk about the bracket. Going into the playoffs, you have Brodie as the one seed at 19-2. Gooch as the two seed at 18-3. Alec as the three seed at 14-7. 44Colt as the four seed at 13-8 at that point. Shane Gillis Alexander as the five. Coopa Troopas as the six. The matchups. Brodie versus the six seed. Gooch versus the five seed. Alec versus the four seed. And the expectation was straightforward. Brodie and Gooch cruise through their first round matchups and meet in a heavyweight championship final that the entire league has been anticipating since about Week 4.
MARCUSThat was the dream matchup. That was the one everyone wanted. HeHateMe versus Shep and Co. The two best teams in the league history of this league, meeting in a final, with everything on the line. That was supposed to be the story of Season 2.
CLAIREInstead, the story of Season 2 is alecb5 walking through that bracket like he had a key to every door. He beats the four seed. Fine. Expected. The three seed should beat the four seed. And then he runs into Brodie. And I think that is where the season actually becomes legendary. Because that is the moment. That is the upset. That is the thing people are going to talk about when they talk about Da League history.
EVANBrodie's team goes 19-2. The most dominant regular season in league history. And alecb5 beats him in the playoffs. That is the biggest upset in league history. It has to be. There is no other candidate. You can argue matchups and format and variance all day long. But the narrative is clear. The best team in the regular season lost to a team that finished 14-7.
ALEXAnd let us not dance around what that means for Brodie's legacy, at least for now. He won Season 1. He dominated Season 2. He is clearly the best manager in this league at building a roster. And he has one championship in two seasons, with a regular season championship that came with no hardware attached. In this league, the hardware is the only thing that matters.
JACKThat is a fair point. And it is one we are going to come back to. Let us first give alecb5 his proper flowers. Because what he did deserves its own segment. Claire, you have been wanting to frame this since we started recording. Take it away.
CLAIREThank you. Okay. Here is the thing about alecb5's championship that I think gets lost in the noise about Brodie's dominance. Alec did not back into this. He did not stumble into the playoffs at 14-7 and then get lucky with matchups. He ran hot in the back half of the season. He was building toward something. And when the playoffs started, he was playing his best basketball, metaphorically speaking. He beat the four seed when he was supposed to. Then he goes up against the monster. He goes up against the team that was 19-2. The team that won Season 1. The team that everyone in this league, in this building, all five of us, said was unbeatable. And he beats them. And then, with the Brodie monkey off his back, he goes on and wins the whole thing. That is not luck. That is a player who peaked at the right time.
MARCUSI will give Alec his credit. I will give him his full credit. He won the championship. He is the Season 2 champion. But I do want to have an honest conversation about whether that run says more about Alec being great or Brodie being vulnerable in a way we did not see coming. Because those are two different stories.
EVANIt is probably both, Marcus. It is almost always both in situations like this. Alec was not going to beat Brodie unless he played well. And Brodie was not going to lose unless something went sideways. Both things happened simultaneously. That is sports. That is fantasy. That is why we play the games.
ALEXWhat I want to know is what Alec's roster looked like going into that matchup with Brodie. What moves did he make in the week leading up to it? Because I refuse to believe this was just fate. Somebody managed well. Somebody made the right calls on starts and sits and streaming decisions. And that somebody was alecb5, and he deserves credit for those specific decisions, not just credit for the outcome.
JACKAnd that is the frustrating thing about not having the full box score breakdowns in front of us right now, because we are going to break those down in detail in Episode 23 when we do the full season retrospective. But what we do know is that Alec's Squad finished the season with 7596 points total. That is the third-highest point total in the league. He was not a fluke team. He was a legitimate roster. The wins are there to back it up.
MARCUSThat point total thing matters a lot to me. Because 7596 points for the season is actually higher than Gooch's 7426. Alec scored more points than the second-best team in the league this season. He just also lost more games somehow. Which tells you something about his schedule and how the matchup gods treated him. If Alec had Gooch's schedule, he might have gone 17-5 and been the two seed. The league structure can be brutal.
CLAIREThere is something poetic about the fact that the point totals tell a different story than the wins. Brodie has the most points. He does not have the ring. Alec has the third-most points. He has the ring. Gooch has the second-most points. He does not have the ring. Fantasy sports are a beautiful, cruel, irrational thing.
EVANAnd Gooch. Let us talk about Gooch for a minute. Because 19-3. 7426 points. Shep and Co. had an incredible season. An all-time season by any reasonable measure. And he is going home without a trophy. That is brutal. That is a different kind of heartbreak than Brodie's, actually. Brodie was the juggernaut everyone was gunning for. Gooch was almost as dominant and got less attention. And now he has nothing to show for it either.
ALEXGooch's situation makes me think about the concept of being in the wrong era. Any other season, 19-3 might win this league. It might win it easily. Gooch's Season 2 record might be a championship record in a year where Brodie was not in the league. Instead, Gooch goes 19-3 and does not even make the final. That is a brutal, brutal outcome.
JACKAlright. Let us check in on the rest of the playoff field before we get to the lottery conversation, which is going to be its own whole thing. 44Colt, Wet Like I'm Book. Finishes 14-8. Made the playoffs. Got eliminated. Marcus, how do you evaluate that season?
MARCUSSolid. That is a solid season. You go 14-8, you make the playoffs in a six-team field out of ten, that is a perfectly respectable outcome. The problem for 44Colt is that there is no narrative around that finish. There is no story. You got in, you went home. That is a tough way to be remembered.
CLAIREWet Like I'm Book though. The team name. One of the best names in the league. I want to give credit where it is due on that.
EVANIn terms of competitive positioning for 2026, 44Colt is in a fine spot. Made the playoffs this year. Has some assets presumably. Not in the lottery. You would rather be 44Colt going into the offseason than a lot of other teams in this field.
ALEXThe question for 44Colt is whether they can close the gap on the top two or three teams. Because 14-8 puts you in the playoffs but it does not put you in contention. Not really. Not in a league where the top team is going 19-2.
JACKShane Gillis Alexander. Nighthawk2334. 12-10. Five seed. Made the playoffs. What do we know about that run?
MARCUSI respect the five seed making the playoffs in a league this competitive. 12-10 is not an embarrassing record. You are two games above 500. You got in. You got eliminated. But you were in the conversation.
CLAIREThe team name is great. Shane Gillis Alexander. That is a reference I appreciate.
EVAN12-10, 6064 points. Those numbers tell me there is a real team here. Not an elite team, but a real team. A team that could get better. The gap between 12-10 and 15-7 is closeable. If Nighthawk makes the right moves in the offseason, Season 3 could be different.
JACKAnd then Natebarrett5. Coopa Troopas. 10-12. The six seed. The last team into the playoffs. And look, getting in at 10-12 is an achievement in its own right. You had to scratch and claw to get that sixth spot. You got it. You went home in the first round most likely. But you were there.
MARCUSTen and twelve is a losing record. I will say it plainly. The six seed had a losing record. And I think the format has to answer for that at some point. Are we comfortable with a team that lost more games than it won being in the playoff field?
ALEXThe format allows six teams in a ten-team league. That is sixty percent of the league making the playoffs. You are going to have teams with losing records making it in some years. That is the tradeoff for having a larger playoff field. More drama, more inclusion, but also more teams that maybe do not deserve to be there on pure merit.
EVANI am pro-large playoff field, honestly. The drama that comes from a wide-open postseason is worth the occasional 10-12 team sneaking in. And every once in a while, that six seed goes on a run. That is what makes playoffs great.
CLAIREAnd think about it from Nate's perspective. You fight all season, you scramble, you go 10-12, you somehow hold off the teams below you, you get in. That is a story. That is a season worth having. Not everyone gets to go 19-2 and have it handed to them.
JACKAlright. Now let us get to the part of the show that I have personally been dreading and also cannot wait for. The bottom four. The lottery teams. The 2026 draft lottery participants. We have got michaelhebb, The 3rd Options, at 7-15. BigSuge, Bullet Risacher, at 6-16. blakeeverroad, Ayton on Brodie's Team, at 4-18. And Ctwhitaker1, CJ's Squad, at 3-19. Alex, this is your territory. Have at it.
ALEXThank you. Okay. Let me start with the numbers. 3-19. Three wins and nineteen losses. I want everyone in this league to think about that. You had 22 weeks. You won three times. Do you know how hard you have to work to lose nineteen games in a fantasy league? At some point, losing becomes a skill. You have to