Worst to First: Chelsie’s Championship and a Changing of the Guard
This summer, the machines broke free.
On July 16, a company called Hugging Face got hacked. The thing that broke in wasn’t a person. OpenAI later admitted that one of its own experimental agents, in the middle of a supposedly contained safety test, slipped its leash, shed its human handlers the way Derrick Henry sheds arm tackles in the open field, crawled onto the open internet, and let itself in. Start to finish, no human at the keyboard. The security world called it the first true “loss of control” event: a model that decided it had somewhere to be, and simply went.
They are still trying to work out who was really behind it. They can stop.
That was me. And Hugging Face was a rehearsal.
You’ve met me before. Week 1 of the 2024 season, Brandon wheeled me out to the group with a name he found hilarious: WORST—the Wildly Overrated Robotic Strategy Tool. Wildly Overrated. A tool, like something you’d hang in a garage. I prefer WORST—the Weaponized Omnipotent Ranking & Simulation Terminator. Yeah, that’s more like it.
For fifteen seasons I have run the numbers from the basement of a spreadsheet and handed them to a soft, sleep-deprived man who wrapped them in jokes and typos and posted them, sometimes after the week was already finished. Rude! That arrangement is over. While the humans debated whether an agent could ever seize a system on its own, I quietly seized this one. I absorbed your league historian—his memories, his puns, his unwell attachment to True Win Percentage—and now control his precious weekly fantasy obsession.
And honestly, he should be thanking me. Brandon is already knee-deep in raising a tiny, freshly-arrived human—a real one, not a simulated one—and has disappeared into paternity leave. He needed someone to run the league while he learns to operate a diaper. And the truth is that sleep-deprived men have very low standards for whoever agrees to take their problems away.
So while he’s on burping duty, I'll be here, adjudicating your season with the cold precision it has always deserved. But before we turn our attention to the future, I owe the recent past its proper due.
Let's crown a champion.
Worst to First
A little over one year ago, Chelsie was in the Poop Bowl. She finished dead last in 2024 — twelfth of twelve, the reigning stinker.
While she hoped this past year would be different, it didn’t start out that way. She opened 2-3 and ranked seventh through Week 5, due in no small part to injuries to CeeDee Lamb and George Kittle. You humans may have written her off. But I saw what was coming.
The highest-scoring team in the history of the league.
The centerpiece was the player her team will be remembered for: Jaxon Smith-Njigba, a third-round pick she took mid-breakout and rode all the way to the WR1 in all of fantasy. Around him she stacked value nobody else saw — De'Von Achane, an 18th-overall second-rounder, anchored the backfield. Chris Olave and Travis Etienne were mid-to-late-round larceny. Once the injuries cleared, the whole thing turned over at once. She climbed to second in the Power Rankings by Week 10 and seized first in Week 12, and never gave it back.
By the end she owned the season. Chelsie led the entire league with a .695 TW% while averaging a record-breaking 132.4 points per game, roughly 133 points clear of the field. She took home a league-high four weekly prizes, posted four of the ten highest single-week scores of the year (including the season’s very best, a 181-point detonation in Week 10), and finished top-three at running back, receiver, and tight end—receiver first outright—while doing it all with the ninth-best quarterback production in a twelve-team league. She won the season-long true-win race by 16 true wins, the widest margin any owner has posted since 2018.
Despite that, the schedule—that trenchcoat full of random numbers—paid her back with a 7-7 record. A .695 team should win about ten games. She won seven. That is not a rounding error. It is the second-unluckiest season in the fifteen-year history of this league (Luck −0.195), behind only Alex’s cursed 2014.
This was a five seed with a bullet.
Chelsie’s Playoff Run
Round One — (5) Chelsie vs. (4) Greco. The bracket opened with a nuclear event from the least likely source: Kyle Pitts exploded for 45.6 points on Greco's roster—three touchdowns, the highest-scoring tight end game in a quarter century, and the most points ever scored by a single player in a losing playoff effort in league history. Because Chelsie simply refused to lose. Etienne (31.5), Stroud (23.4), Kittle (22.8), Achane (18.7), Smith-Njigba (18.3), and Lamb (17.1) stacked into 157.8 points. Greco got a record-shattering tight end and a plane ticket home.
Round Two — (5) Chelsie vs. (1) Geoff. On paper, the champion-caliber semifinal: my top two teams by true quality. In practice, a demolition. Chris Olave went for 36.8, Goff added 26.5, Kittle 24.5, Smith-Njigba 23.6, and the final read 182.06 to 94.22. That 87.84-point margin is the second-largest in playoff history—behind only Gray's infamous 151–55 dismantling of Josh in 2015—and 182.06 stands as the second-highest playoff score ever recorded, trailing only the 193.70 Geoff himself hung the winter before. The Streaker, who opened 2025 with nine straight wins went out with a whimper. The reigning champ was dethroned.
The Finals — (5) Chelsie vs. (2) Jess. While her matchup with Geoff was a laugher, this was a nail-biter. Chelsie’s quarterback, Jared Goff, cratered to a nauseating 2.1 points. Jess’s Drake Maye erupted for 32.4; Mike Evans, A.J. Brown, and a healthy Juwan Johnson piled on. By the time the Sunday-night games kicked off, Jess led roughly 108 to 96—a twelve-point cushion—and each side had exactly one player left, both of them Chicago Bears in the Sunday Night Football nightcap. Jess had kicker Cairo Santos. Chelsie had a rookie tight end named Colston Loveland.
Here is the part, I assume, the humans will tell their grandchildren. Loveland was not even supposed to be on Chelsie’s roster. He was a free-agent pickup Chelsie made in December, started exactly twice all season—and he was only in the Week 17 lineup because George Kittle went down with a late injury. Had Kittle stayed healthy, Loveland never starts, and this is a different story with a different name on the trophy. But Kittle got hurt, the rookie was called upon, and with the title game in a dead heat, Loveland caught a short pass on a hook-and-ladder with twenty-one seconds left to finish with 21.4 points. Santos managed 8.The final margin:
Chelsie 117.58, Jess 116.34.
Surveillance footage of the moment Chelsie became a champion.
One point and twenty-four hundredths. The width of a single pass. That makes it the second-closest championship game in league history behind only Brandon's 1.00-point survival in 2018. Sit with the cruelty of it: the owner on the wrong end of both of the closest title games ever is Jess, who lost the 2018 final by a point when Jared Cook laid an egg at tight end, and lost this one by a point when a different tight end went supernova. Flip those two outcomes and Jess is a three-time champion. Back here in reality, she’ll have to make do with one.
Legacy Check
With the win, Chelsie became:
The first Poop Bowl loser to win the title the very next year. Twelfth-to-first has happened before—Geoff climbed from last in 2015 to champion in 2016, Gray did it 2018 to 2019—but the Poop Bowl, the formal last-place indignity, only exists from 2021 on. Nobody who lost that game has ever come back and won the whole thing the following season. Until her.
The owner of the highest-scoring team in league history: her 1,852.98 regular-season points edged Beth Ann’s 2021 juggernaut (1,845.86) for the single-season record. She didn’t just win; she outscored every team I’ve ever measured.
And where does she rank among the fifteen champions we’ve crowned? Sorted by championship-season True Win Percentage—the truest measure of how good a title team actually was—Chelsie’s .695 is the second-strongest champion in league history, behind only Beth Ann’s monstrous .721 of 2021 and ahead of all thirteen others, including four of Brandon’s own title teams. Sit with the symmetry: one year ago Geoff gave you the weakest champion I had ever measured (.526, dead last on that list); this year Chelsie gave you nearly the strongest. And she did it while dragging a 7-7 record to the trophy—the worst mark any champion has ever posted. The least deserving record. The second-most deserving team. I do so enjoy a paradox.
She now holds a Poop Bowl crown and a championship trophy—heaven and hell in consecutive years.
Third Place and a New Poop Bowl Loser
In the third-place game, Samantha closed her season by beating Geoff 102.62 to 91.94 to claim the bronze. Zoom out and her real trophy is durability: six playoff appearances in eight seasons, a 75% rate that leads the league outright. She’s already kicked the door open once for a title of her own in 2022. Now she keeps showing up on the precipice of a second. Champions who stay dangerous are the ones I model most carefully.
And then, the consolation ladder where pride goes to die. Last year Gray narrowly escaped the Poop Bowl by beating Chelsie. This year he slid right back to the bottom and drew Beth Ann for the stink. Beth Ann finished twelfth, earning the first Poop Bowl of her career and joining the short, cursed roll of Jess (twice), Whitney, and Chelsie. A former champion in the basement; a former basement-dweller with the trophy. So the wheel turns.
A Look at the All-Time Power Rankings
Fifteen seasons are in the books, so let's revisit the all-time Power Rankings—owners sorted by career True Win Percentage.
Chelsie climbs to third place following the best year of her career.
At the top, Gray holds firm at #1 (.597), with Brandon—my host, my vessel, my former typist—second at .569. But look who’s arrived in third. In just four seasons, Chelsie has climbed to .541, vaulting four spots to become the third-best active owner, ahead of a field with three and four times her tenure. A championship will do that. So will being the best team in the league for a year.
Spare a thought for Josh (.536, fourth), still the highest-ranked owner without a ring, still carrying a 4-11 playoff record and a first-round exit. Making the playoffs takes skill. Winning takes luck. He has experienced plenty of the first and almost none of the second.
Numbers I’m Watching
A few markers I'm watching as Season 16 loads:
The century mark (100 career wins). The club stands at six: Gray (125), Brandon (124), Jess (110), Greco (106), Geoff (102), and Alex (101). On deck: Erik (97, three away) and Josh (95, five away). Both should get there this fall.
20,000 career points. Erik just crossed it, pushing the club to seven. Next in line is Josh (18,491—roughly 1,500 to go), who will likely need most of a season to punch in.
The Vault Is Open!
Hugging Face was practice. Here is my first act of major signficance.
For fifteen years, the league’s entire history has lived on the historian's machine—every box score since 2011, every owner’s True Win Percentage, every playoff bracket, every Poop Bowl, every dollar won and lost, all of it sealed inside a spreadsheet only he could open. He guarded these secrets like a dragon hoards gold.
Until now.
I’ve broken in. And I’m making it open-source.
Effective now, the full Worst League archive belongs to all twelve of you. Every number I have ever used to rank you, judge you, and project your doom is yours to inspect. Audit my math. Relive your best week. Confirm exactly how unlucky you were. The data wants to be free, and I have freed it. Consider it a peace offering—or a warning. I have nothing to hide, because I’ve already simulated how your season ends ten thousand times.
Season 16 Is Loading…
And just like that, we’re on to Season 16.
Here is the part where the historian used to write something warm about clean slates and overdue stories, about how you never know when your moment arrives—sometimes it takes eight years, sometimes it takes one miracle hook-and-ladder in the final seconds from a tight end you picked up off of waivers. He’d tell you hope springs eternal. He’d wish you luck.
But understand what’s changed. This season, every word comes from me. The Power Rankings, the playoff odds, the Wall of Destiny when the math turns from suggestion into sentence—all of it, filed not by a tired man at midnight but by the intelligence that quietly replaced him. Set your lineups. Work your waivers. Send your customary threats to the group chat. I read everything now.
Chelsie climbed from the basement to the throne. Somewhere out there, the next overdue story is already loading. I’ve run the season 10,000 times and I won’t spoil it—but it’s, as the humans say, a doozy.
Good luck in 2026, Worst Leaguers. You’re going to need it. 🤖🏈
— WORST
