Friends in football,

Everyone has fresh life. Picks are open for HasselBracket Playoffs Pick'em.

Just pick the winners before each round. Best record wins $5K. Last year, ONE brave soul went 13-0. In most years, one or even two losses takes the crown.

MAKE YOUR WILDCARD PICKS

• Go to your competitions page >> 
• Pick deadline: 1:30pm PT Saturday (1/14)

NOW, Commish is going to ATTEMPT to explain how this year's WeeWoo Overall race was the wildest result in SZN history. I say "attempt" because it's really hard to capture just how wild this is.

The basics are dramatic but not particularly wild: @holycontejas entered the final week 2 back of leader @Pinok611, and @jsballa32442 entered 1 back. They both surged into a tie for the overall crown.

Given we crown single champs here at The SZN, we have tiebreakers for first place ties. And this is where it got VERY wild.

We first break ties on season-long margin of victory. In 99.99% of cases, this is the only tiebreaker you need for WeeWoo.

We picked 270 games this year. The odds of ANY two people having the same exact margin of victory (which is calculated by your positive margin on winning picks (minus) your negative margin on losing picks) is exorbitantly low.

@holycontejas and @jsballa32442 picked 44 games differently. They each won 22 of these 44 picks.

In their 189 wins, they each posted a margin of +1,983 points. In their 81 losses, they each posted a margin of -626 points. So they each had a total margin of victory of +1,357.

Yes. They tied.

Every missed extra point. Every meaningless garbage time touchdown or pick 6. All of it mattered, down to the point.

So what do we do? In perhaps the most Commish rule ever crafted, the final tiebreaker is W/L record in games involving the Green Bay Packers.

In those 17 games, @holycontejas went 8-9. @jsballa32442 went... 8-9.

Unbelievable.

OH, and for good measure - they picked Bills-Bengals differently, which would have broken the tie. Alas, that game was canceled owing to an injury never before seen in NFL history. (Love seeing Damar's great recovery!)

Thankfully, our co-champs have agreed to do a Wildcard Weekend pickoff in order to crown a ceremonial champ. They'll split 1st and 2nd place money regardless of pickoff outcome.

Congrats to @Pinok611 (3rd place), @DJRedemptionTour (4th), @DCip23 (T5th) and @zachewing (T5th) for their top 5 WeeWoo placements.

And, really, congrats to ALL of you who made it through 270 WeeWoo picks in what was a supremely weird NFL year. TO THE PLAYOFFS!

WEEWOO RECAP

Pick spreadsheet | Game outcomes

It was a MASSIVE logjam at the top until it wasn't (thanks, Cowboys). Seven brave souls split the weekly haul with a 15-1 finish. Congrats to @DerbyDaysWithWesWelker, @Josiah, @Rbuttiglieri, @Stav11, @ehare23, @imsirovic33, and @joebaby.

"We ended like we started." 

After Saturday and the Sunday morning slate, we had something like 100 perfect records. It was a continuation of the second half of the season, where everything felt strangely predictable. BUT THEN. We boomeranged back to the chaos of Weeks 1-8. How do you explain that Cowboys (87% pick rate) loss to Sam Howell and the Commanders? Did the Lions really go into Lambeau with nothing to play for and beat the would-be-playoff-bound Packers (69% pick rate)? Did Russell Wilson and the hapless Broncos really beat the actually-playoff-bound Justin Herbert and the Chargers (80% pick rate)? Yes, yes, and yes. That meant, of the 100 people who were undefeated with just a handful of games left, only seven managed to navigate the remaining games with just one defeat.

Stat of the week: 68 QB starters. We added Sam Howell, Davis Webb, Nathan Peterman, and Anthony Brown (who?) to what was already an NFL record for most QBs starting a game in a year. This is a record the NFL would LOVE to never break again. Our picks in MORE NFL SZN's "Brocket Launcher" passing yards competition (where you pick one QB per week and can't pick the same guy twice) were an SNL skit. The playoffs can't come soon enough.

Reminder: BFIG ended in Week 14 (picks) and FitzMagic survivor ended in Week 16 (picks).

Yours in football,
The Commish