Five Podiums. Zero Trophies.

Now — here's a guy who has finished top three in this league five times in five years.

Forty-three and twenty-seven. That is the best winning percentage of anybody who has ever played in this thing, and I mean anybody. Hand me that résumé with the name taken off and I'll tell you I'm looking at a dynasty. I'd say it on the air and I wouldn't blink.

Here's the problem, though. It's not a dynasty. It's zero championships.

Twice he had it set up perfectly

Twenty twenty-two and twenty twenty-four, he walks into the playoffs as the number one overall seed. He's got the bye. He's got the rest. He's got the whole thing arranged exactly the way you draw it up in August when you're lying to yourself about your roster.

Both years, he's out in the semifinal.

In twenty twenty-two it's Dambro, coming out of the six seed, a hundred and thirty-five to ninety-four. In twenty twenty-four it's David — who wasn't supposed to be anywhere near that game — hanging a hundred and sixty-eight on him. A hundred and sixty-eight in a semifinal. You can play that one perfectly and still lose it.

Two-point-five-eight points. That's one running back falling forward for an extra yard.

And then there's twenty twenty-one

That's the final. That's the whole thing, right there in front of him.

He loses it by two-point-five-eight points.

That's a kicker's leg. That's one guy falling forward. It happened five years ago and I promise you he can still tell you the number without looking it up, and I'll be honest with you — I'd be the same way. You don't forget two-point-five-eight.

So what is this?

You can call it bad luck, and a lot of it genuinely is. You can call it a curse, which is what everybody in that group chat calls it, mostly because it's funnier.

But it's so easy to look at somebody's numbers and decide you've explained him. And yet this has always been a game where the schedule and the matchup and one Sunday in December decide things that talent had nothing to do with. Ask anybody who has ever gone thirteen and one and gone home.

Year six. He's the commissioner. He runs the league, he wrote the by-laws, he keeps the records — and he's the best manager in it who has never won it.

At some point that stops being funny and starts being a tragedy, doesn't it? Although knowing this group, I suspect it'll stay funny.