Last Place Column 2025

(all references to "Dirty Mike" are referencing a team name)

The Anatomy Of A Collapse

What does panic look like? Is it screaming, flailing, hyperventilating? I’d argue panic is when someone identifies a problem, then acts impulsively without considering the consequences. Usually, the consequences are longer tailed than the person can realize. Not every act of panic happens quickly either. Sometimes it takes days, weeks, months, or in this case: one entire fantasy season.

Dirty Mike identified the problem with this season right away, when he was the only person to raise concern on draft night that we had two members missing. Smart and reasonable, but the LOWR train waited for no one and he drafted a team in line with his rosters of years past. Emphasize grown ass men who have huge ceilings. And after week one, it looked like he was right! He was the top scorer behind huge games from Bijan Robinson and Josh Allen, and a banged up Brock Bowers still had a good game. Hell, even Jayden Reed, who was questionable because he didn't want to get foot surgery, scored a touchdown.

Week two, he’s handling injuries the best he can. Bowers looked hurt and performed poorly, but at least Mike got Harold Fannin on waivers for $6 and Michael Mayer on Sunday morning to cover any long term absences. Fannin had a great week one, so Dirty Mike tried to capture that window while it was still open. What he didn’t realize was the domino of chasing points he’d just started.

Over the next three weeks, Dirty Mike systematically drained nearly every last dollar in his waiver budget chasing high scorers from the week prior, and bailing on them before he could see the experiment through. After the $6 for Harold Fannin, it’s $11 on Hunter Renfrow after he caught two touchdowns. Dropped a week later. 

The player Renfrow got cut for? $17 Sterling Shepherd. In week three, he dropped another $13 on Dylan Sampson, chasing a touchdown, despite the previous manager smartly cutting bait. He’d be gone by week four. The slurry of moves ended with Dallas Goedert for $24 and Matthew Stafford for $23 in week five. Fannin, Sampson, and Goedert were the only players that had other waiver offers in for them. Dirty Mike identified a problem, and was now acting impulsively. It ended up in half of his waiver budget never playing a game or scoring a point.

But the two most impulsive moves came after James Conner went down for the season in week three. Accepting defeat not even a month into the season, Dirty Mike considered the solution to his two-game losing streak to be playing for eleventh place rather than see his roster to the end of the season. Over the next two weeks, Dirty Mike would trade Brock Bowers, Jerry Jeudy, Josh Allen, Bijan Robinson, and Jayden Reed. In return, he received Chase Brown, Sam LaPorta, Travis Etienne, Bo Nix, Keenan Allen, and Marvin Harrison Jr. Even writing it out is appalling two months later.

The numbers on the trade are as staggering as you’d expect. If we consider each time a player was in the starting lineup a “started week”, Dirty Mike received thirty-nine started weeks that totaled 460.88 points (11.82 points per started player). He traded away twenty-eight started weeks totaling 489.46 points (17.48 per). Dirty Mike flooded his roster with average players by trading away all of his great ones. This plus a complete incineration of his free agent budget set the stage for turning his two game losing streak into a ten game free fall.

The streak itself was nightmarish by any measure, but the details of it are even more horrifying than you remember. It started with Wan’Dale Robinson’s 8/142/1 eruption against Dallas on the bench. Then the David Montgomery thirty point game. Justice Hill scored two touchdowns on the bench in week four. Eight opponent touchdowns, then a seventeen spot from a defense the next two weeks. 

Bo Nix’s thirty nine point chaos? Left on the bench the same week Jahmyr Gibbs cracks thirty for the first time all season. Tucker Kraft had his highest score of the year against Dirty Mike, and he couldn’t get the Bears right if his life depended on it. In a two week span he added Kyle Monangai, then dropped him before he scored twenty-one points. That same week, DJ Moore scored twenty on his bench, so Mike started him the following week. Goosegg.

In week eleven, the final week of the losing streak, it was time to realize the consequences of his actions and face off against Hank, to whom he traded Josh Allen and Bijan Robinson six weeks prior. In what can only be described as a spiritual reckoning, Josh and Bijan combined for 72.98 points, only 4.22 less than Dirty Mike’s entire roster. Moral victory in week twelve aside, that thorough beatdown was the end of Dirty Mike’s season that only he couldn’t see coming.

What happened to Dirty Mike this year is a textbook example of the power of upside, the ability to think longer term than one week, and the pitfalls of bailing on a strategy early. Impulse caused him to lose his entire waiver budget for next to nothing. Trading away his best players cost him the upside he needed to win on a weekly basis. When your team is built on a specific strategy like Dirty Mike’s was, seeing the strategy through gives you a chance for it to work. Bailing on it early ensures it won’t.

Dirty Mike identified a problem, and acted impulsively. His actions were consequential far past week five and his own roster. Each team he traded with is a playoff team, and even Brock Bowers, who was traded again, made it into the playoffs. Dirty Mike panicked. And now he’ll get to spend an entire basketball game by himself, in a knock-off Travis Etienne jersey, thinking about it.