With Wild Card weekend behind us, the football season approaches its end with a host of questions: Deshaun Watson has expressed frustrations with the Texans and the Eagles are in the market for a new head coach. Cam Newton will likely be looking for a new home, and the Big Ben Era might be ending in Pittsburgh, without one final ring to show for it.

However, one thing is clear, and it’s that The Queen’s Journal’s fantasy football competition with The Western Gazette was a roller coaster.

After some early stumbles, The Journal found itself in a hole down 3-1 to Western. After the losses began to pile up, our three-member committee came up with a more robust weekly plan, where we identified overvalued players having lacklustre seasons and used them to eat up the bench’s salary quota. Similarly, our starters were geared toward choosing one all-star at running back or receiver and filling the rest of the positions with undervalued players having unexpectedly strong seasons. Essentially, we ‘Moneyball-ed’ it.

This change in philosophy led to a string of wins, and your friends at The Journal went into the winter break tied up at four wins apiece with The Gazette. We were able to extend our streak to three and take hold of the lead after Week 15 in the NFL.

Unfortunately for us, Western got first pick and elected to start Alvin Kamara for our Week 16 matchup, where he put up a historic performance by scoring six touchdowns, an NFL record, finishing with a score of 56.20 points. That effort ultimately led to a loss for The Journal in Week 16, again leaving the season series tied up, in what is normally the last week of fantasy competition due to teams resting players in Week 17.

However, after consulting with Western, we decided ending in a tie would be an unjust conclusion for such an exciting season and opted to settle the series with one more matchup.

In cliché underdog sports-movie fashion, The Journal didn’t disappoint and completed the upset, blowing out Western 67.66-7.88 in Week 17 of the season to take home the recently invented title of ‘Fantasy Newspaper Champion’. What a thrilling comeback it was.

However, in the spirit of sportsmanship, we would like to extend our congratulations to Western. Their lineups were well-crafted and thoroughly researched, helping them take a significant lead at the beginning of the season. It has been fun playing week after week against our rivals in London, and it looks like Queen’s finally found a way to win in something football-related.

Thanks for following along throughout the year. We will hopefully have some more competitions coming up with The Gazette this semester, so stay tuned.