Thirteen and one, and fourth
LTF put together the most dominant regular season anyone has managed. Then they played two games in December and went home with nothing.
The 2023 regular season belonged to 💨 LTF, and it was not close. It finished 13–1 — a season that has to be read twice — at 134.9 points a week, and it did so in a league where 💨 LTF had never before finished better than second.
Then the bracket opened, and it finished 4th.
What a one-loss season is worth
Nothing, is the short answer, and that is not a complaint about the format so much as a fact about it. The regular season seeds the bracket and then stops mattering. LTF entered December having lost once since September and left it having lost twice in eight days: the semifinal in week 16, and the third-place game in week 17.
The second of those is the crueler one. A team that has already had its title taken away is asked to come back the following week and play for the difference between third and fourth, and LTF lost that too.
The long view
It is worth putting beside its all-time line, which is 64–71 with 1 championship. 2023 is not the year it won that. That was 2022, when it went 7–7 in the regular season — a full six games worse — and won the whole thing.
Its record against 🎣 DTTW, incidentally, is 12–3, which is the most lopsided rivalry either of them has.
Every figure in this article is read from the league database when the page is built. Nothing above is typed in by hand, so nothing above can drift away from the record.