2023 Kickoff: History Lessons

 

We're back! Today is draft day and with just 2 days until the season kicks off I thought it would be really fun to take a look back through the record books at our first decade of fantasy football.

Generation Workday '13 has now experienced 10 total seasons of play and being a huge nerd I have painstakingly recorded stats on all of them.

The OGs

This league started as a 10 team league, and 6 of the original 10 are still here keeping things going. Shoutout to these guys for getting things started!

• Austin Kidd
• Tyler Williams
• Cody Schwartz
• Chris Schott
• Nathan Brandon
• Steve McDonald

2 more managers (Munsch, and myself) joined a year later bringing us up to 12. We saw a bit of fluctuation with Ryan and Cole joining 2 years later, and a couple seasons where we dropped down to 10 teams (more on that later). Our newest members in Cameron and Kevin have been here 2 and 1 year(s) respectively, but if you guys stick around you'll have more interesting stats in future writeups!

Win Percentage

We're going to start with the most basic way to measure team success : wins. Below you can find managers ordered by their regular season win percentage.

1. Greg Wadley 56.3% (67-52)
2. Austin Kidd 54.5% (72-60)
3. Cole Payan 53.8% (50-43)
4. Tyler Williams 53.8% (71-61)
5. Ryan Mosby 51.9% (55-51)
6. Nathan Brandon 50.8% (67-65)
7. Cameron Hasty 50% (14-14)
8. Kevin Yueh 50% (7-7)
9. Austin Munsch 49.6% (59-60)
10. Steve McDonald 47.7% (63-69)
11. Cody Schwartz 47.0% (62-70)
12. Chris Schott 43.9% (58-74)

Ok, I promise I did not put in all this research just to prove that I'm the highest win percentage manager in our league, and until the last 2 years that absolutely was not the case. 

The thing that jumps out to me here is that the randomness of the game and this group's skill level has lead to a pretty balanced list. There are 0 teams here that fall more than 7% away from 50% in either direction.

The fact that our two newest members sit at exactly 50% does imply that randomness plays a large role but over the long haul differences in manager choices can add up.

Playoff Percentage

Regular seasons wins are great and all, but ultimately the goal is to make the playoffs and win them! Below you can see the percentage of the time each player has made the playoffs, with championships in parenthesis.

1. Austin Kidd 70% (1)
2. Tyler Williams 70% (2)
3. Nathan Brandon 60% (1)
4. Chris Schott 60% (1)
5. Cole Payan 57.1% (1)
6. Ryan Mosby 57.1% (1)
7. Greg Wadley 55.6% (2)
8. Cameron Hasty 50%
9. Cody Schwartz 50%
10. Austin Munsch 44.4%
11. Steve McDonald 40%
12. Kevin Yueh 0%

The standout in this list has to be Chris. To have the lowest win percentage in the league and be the 4th most successful at making the playoffs takes a special kind of magic that no one else seems to be able to replicate. How did it happen?

Chris has made the playoffs 6 times, but only once has it been with more than 7 wins. Championship year aside, he has squeaked in with 6-7, 7-7 or 7-6 records in his other 5 playoff runs.

Our most successful teams in Kidd and Tyler are more consistently solid teams sporting the 2nd and 4th best win percentages. They also had the honor of winning the first 2 championships in league history.

My team is also a bit of a mystery here. I'm not sure if I should be disappointed to be 7th in playoff % and 1st in win %, or extremely grateful to have 2 championships on that low of a playoff berth number. I will choose the latter.

Rivalries

Now for my absolute favorite part of sports as a whole: rivalries. I added up every game played between managers still in the league, and awarded bonus rivalry points to playoff matches to determine the biggest rivalries in Generation Workday.

I'm going to write up our top 3 rivalries, but everyone's top rival will be listed below. Total rivalry points are listed in parenthesis.

Austin Kidd vs Tyler Williams (18)

In a hard fought battle between two of our most successful managers, Tyler leads the series 9 wins to 6 all time, with multiple crushing victories in the postseason. The pinnacle of this rivalry was the 2014 championship game in which Kidd was incredibly close to capturing back to back titles, a feat that wouldn't be accomplished for another 8 years.

Kidd came in projected to win 120-105, but was upset by a shocking Cowboys/Colts game on December 21st. The Cowboys destroyed the Colts so thoroughly (28-0 at half) that the Colts would throw in the towel, benching Andrew Luck to avoid any potential injuries. Luck ended his outing with 109 yards and two INTs, scoring just 3 of his projected 28 points and giving Tyler a 10 point title victory.

Two years later, Tyler would come into the playoffs with a juggernaut of a team, outpacing the rest of the league by ~200 points on the season and easily securing the #1 seed. Kidd cruised through the quarterfinals with a 150 point week setting up a very tight rematch of their 2014 game.

Projected within 1 point of each other, Tyler would take home the win by 13, due mostly to the 21 point scoring difference between Drew Brees and Joe Flacco. 1 week later Tyler would crush Chris by 50 to win his second title.

Austin Munsch vs Ryan Mosby (17)

In a matchup with slightly less postseason mayhem but a crazy number of regular season games, Munsch leads this series 9 wins to 7 all time. That this is the most played matchup in our league despite Ryan having 3 less years than some teams says they have been matched twice a season quite frequently.

The high point in this rivalry was the 2020 semifinals. Due to some scheduling luck, Munsch took the #1 seed and first round bye despite being just 5th in points scored on the season. He was carried to this position largely by the insane 2020 campaigns of Russel Wilson and Davante Adams, but both would let him down in this matchup scoring ~12 points under projections each in a matchup lost by 19.

Ryan would go on to beat Nathan in the championship a week later and capture his title thanks to the brilliant playoff run of 2020 Stefon Diggs, but Munsch would put up by far the highest score of the week, taking 3rd place with bounce-back games from both Russ and Davante. Had he survived the semis he would have taken the title in a landslide no matter who won the other matchup.

Chris Schott vs Nathan Brandon (16)

Another storied pairing, Chris has really had Nathan's number in this series, winning 9 of their 14 games despite an overall losing record in the league. This includes two cases in which Chris has been the only thing standing between Nathan and championship week, knocking him out in the semis both times.

In 2016 Chris barely managed a playoff spot, edging out Austin Munsch for 6th, while Nathan came in with a 2 seed and a bye week. They met in the semis where an absurd 36 point game from Brandon Cooks would give Chris a 7 point win. Much like the Mosby/Munsch semis described above, Nathan would put up a large enough score to have beaten any of the other 3 teams the following week but be forced to settle for 3rd.

Two years later in 2018 these two managers would meet in one of the weirdest matchups in league record. Chris came in with the highest scoring team in league history (a scoring total no one has surpassed to date) and would absolutely crater, scoring just 81 points against his projected 134. Luckily for him Nathan's team fell apart to an even greater degree, managing 68 points against his projected 114.

In a very weird week, the other semis would be decided 82-80, as if there was simply no offense being played in the NFL. Chris' team would reload the following week, torching Steve by 30 points to claim a title while Nathan would earn bronze again.

Other Rivals

Teams not listed above and their biggest rivals. Just like in real sports, sometimes your main rival has another rivalry that's even more storied.

• Greg Wadley : Tyler Williams (16)
• Steve McDonald : Chris Schott (15)
• Cody Schwartz: Tyler Williams (15)
• Cole Payan : Nathan Brandon (15)
• Cameron Hasty : Cole Payan (5)
• Kevin Yueh: Austin Kidd (2)

What we can learn from this is that if you make the playoffs a lot (Tyler) you get more chances to make people hate you.

Here is the part where I make an argument for divisions: I think we could inject a lot of fun rivalry into the league by creating divisions, and I think it would be awesome to use this historical data to set them. If Kidd and Tyler have the most "history" in the league lets put them into the same division and make them play twice a season.

Best Teams Ever

Of course, what league history would be complete without a list of the best teams to grace its record books? There are two important things to point out with these scores before we get to them though:

• At some point (year 3 or 4?) we voted to move to 0.5PPR scoring, which greatly inflates scores in all future years
• From 2018-2020 the league had just 10 teams, which concentrated talent and created better teams. 

That said, here are the best:

1. Chris Schott (2018) : 1867
2. Cody Schwartz (2021) : 1794
3. Austin Kidd (2021) : 1754
4. Cole Payan (2021) : 1738
5. Greg Wadley (2021) : 1693
6. Nathan Brandon (2020) : 1689
7. Cameron Hasty (2021) : 1687
8. Ryan Mosby (2022) : 1670
9. Tyler Williams (2020) : 1649
10. Steve McDonald (2022) : 1649
11. Austin Munsch (2021) : 1624
12. Kevin Yueh (2022) : 1541

As discussed in the rivalries section, Chris holds the record for best team ever and will be very difficult to unseat as we are unlikely to move back to 10 teams and his score is so far ahead of all our other record teams.

The fact that Cody's 2021 team, our second best squad ever, missed playoffs with a 6-8 record has got the be the single unluckiest thing that has happened in our 10 years.

2021 was an explosion of fantasy points, with 6/12 managers hitting their personal best despite transitioning from 10 teams back to 12.

Championship Drought

Finally, when it comes to teams that are missing out on the gold, there are only 2 managers who have stuck with us all 10 years and failed to reach the top. Cody and Steve, here's wishing you better luck in 2023.

That's a wrap! I'm looking forward to how these numbers and stories progress over the next 5 or even 10 seasons