History of the LOD
2025: 10th Anniversary Season; D.I.L.D.O; Return to Redraft; Failed Expansion; Soundcloud Joins the League; Erik’s Second LOD Title
After the conclusion of the 2024 fantasy season. The League was gearing up to celebrate a historic milestone of its 10th season. This coincided with the ending of the Keeper format voted on the offseason before, which provided a unique callback to the early years of the League during the ESPN Era. Because of the milestone, Commissioner Wings was set on making an in-person draft happen for the first time since the days of the Trap House when a majority of the League was in the Inland Empire. One of the Commissioner’s other ambitions was to get the rest of the League on board with expansion from 10 to 12 teams, seeing the redraft format as ideal for doing so with minimal disruption to established rosters and draft picks.
Commissioner’s Cup Trophy
With the establishment of the Commissioner’s Cup as a permanent fixture of the LOD, Wings would create a new trophy to become part of the tournament, which would be handed off to the winner every season. As the back-to-back winner, Chuck received the trophy in January of 2025.
Attempted Expansion and the Formation of D.I.L.D.O.
While Wings championed expansion, and had brought it up before, many members of the League were apprehensive or outright hostile towards the idea. One of the most vocal opponents was Gio, who spearheaded the group against it. Wings, wanting to try and convince a majority of the League to do so, wanted to introduce a concrete plan early in the offseason and thus wanted to line up the new members early on. Wings began discussions with Hurtado, who had retired from the LOD after the 2021 season, and his brother Soundcloud, who had begun to take a serious interest in the NFL and fantasy football, to be the 2 new expansion teams to potentially join for the 2025 season. With both on board with the plan, Wings’ next idea was to leverage his successful podcast from the year before to air a special offseason episode, where he pleaded the case for expansion to the League and featured 2 full-length interviews with both Hurtado and SoundCloud as to their interest in joining the League.
This podcast episode aired on January 29, 2025. Along with the podcast, Wings also used this podcast to formally announce a special vote to be held on February 3rd to decide on both expansion as well as to determine a date and location for an in-person draft in August.
The podcast was not received well by Leaguemates, and is well thought to have backfired on Wings’ expansion ambitions. While many found SoundCloud’s interview well-received, the League thought Hurtado’s interview showed a lack of enthusiasm for rejoining the League and frankly did not care either way. After the fallout of the podcast, Wings elected to pull the vote entirely, releasing an announcement on January 30 that while expansion would no longer be entertained, he would move forward with determining details for an in-person draft. The draft was set to happen in Las Vegas in August.
On February 10, 2025, the Commissioner announced the formation of a new independent League Advisory board, the Department of Independent League of Degenerates Observers (D.I.L.D.O.). This group would hold no power over the happenings of the League, but instead would serve as advisors to the Commissioner on League matters. Wings also announced that the inaugural members of D.I.L.D.O. would be Hurtado and SoundCloud. The announcement was met with confusion and condemnation from other League members, who saw this as a pointless power trip in reaction to the failure of expansion.
Offseason Activities of D.I.L.D.O.
One of D.I.L.D.O.’s first actions was to abolish the Vice Commissioner office, held by Bryan, as was seen as no longer needed given the new advisors. Bryan condemned this action, seeing it as further evidence of corruption and abuse of power.
Following this, Commissioner Wings also once again deputized his brother SoundCloud to retrieve the Trophy from the previous Champion Nauch.
While this was happening, Bryan also sought to complete his fantasy punishment during President’s Day weekend, which was to spend 24 hours in an IHOP until eating 24 pancakes. Bryan was unable to complete the punishment as he was kicked out of the IHOP after 3 hours. Seeing this as another opportunity to deploy D.I.L.D.O., Wings designated Hurtado to investigate this and decide whether Bryan was subject to more punishment for his failure to accomplish the initial challenge.
D.I.L.D.O.’s activities continued into March. Chuck attempted to once again do a bracket challenge for March Madness. Wings decided that he wanted to run this instead, and announced an officially sanctioned bracket challenge. Chuck took great offense to this, and subsequently threatened to retire from the League entirely in response to the Commissioner’s attempts to consolidate power. After this, Wings and D.I.L.D.O. announced they would Franchise Tag Chuck, effectively barring him from leaving the League.
After 2 months of this, D.I.L.D.O. quieted down and no further activity was conducted by them until the August Draft.
Joe Retires, Soundcloud Joins the League
On July 10, 2025, the League announced that Joe would retire from the LOD and not return for the upcoming season, with no additional explanation given. As an Original Six member, Joe left behind a legacy of multiple deep playoff runs, but never was able to become a Champion. This was the first time since Hurtado’s retirement after 2021 that a vacant spot opened up. After discussions between Wings and Chuck, they decided that Soundcloud, who was proposed as an expansion member, would leave D.I.L.D.O. and become the replacement member for the vacant spot. This move was accepted by the rest of the League given the overall positive reception of his initial case to join.
2025 Rules Changes
Ahead of the August Draft, the 2025 Rule Change cycle commenced. While not as extensive as the previous two seasons, there were some notable changes made:
- The 9AM Waiver rule from the previous season was abolished. With FAAB and the ability to put $0 bids in, the rule was seen as redundant and overall unpopular
- After 2 years of boosted QB scoring, reforms were changed to make minor reductions, but not completely reverting to the old scoring format
- After the removal of Keepers the season before, the idea of bringing them back for 2026 was introduced, the results of this vote was that Keepers would return, but only 2 slots instead of the 3 before and left the door open for additional reforms to how Keepers were slotted into draft boards
- After 7 seasons of no divisions, the League voted to reintroduce a 2-division format. Along with this, a specific scheduling format was introduced with it- giving 2 divisional matchups, 5 inter-divisional matchups, and one rivalry week, mostly based on historical storylines
Las Vegas Draft
The 10th Anniversary Season Draft was held the weekend of August 15 in Las Vegas. As a completely in-person draft held offline. 8 of the 10 League Members were in attendance. Roberto had an excused absence, but Nauch bailed last-minute and, as punishment, the Commissioner allowed Hurtado to stand in his place. For both members, the League would autodraft their teams. To determine draft order, Chuck held a Combine the morning of the event. Based on the results of multiple challenges, each member was able to choose their place in the order.
2025 Season Results
With the approval of the divisional format, the 10 League Members were split into two divisions of 5 teams- the Democrats (Chuck, Wings, Bryan, Ant, and Ryan) and the Republicans (Gio, Erik, Soundcloud, Rob and Nauch). As part of this new format, division members played each other twice, the other division once, and their designated rival once in what was called a rivalry week. Rivals were split as follows:
- Chuck / Gio
- Wings / Erik
- Bryan / Rob
- Ryan / Soundcloud
- Nauch / Ant
Under the new format, bye weeks were given to the division winners, seeds 3-5 were at-large based on the usual Win/Loss records/PF, and the 6 seed remained a wild card for the bottom 5 teams. This format resulted in one of the most competitive and closely-contested regular seasons in League history- with no team succeeding in reaching the 10-win mark and 2 8-win teams missing the playoffs.
The Commissioner’s Cup was similarly a close contest for the majority of the year- with it turning into a 3-horse race between Erik, Gio and Chuck. The regular season tourney would not be determined until the final week of the season, in which Gio would clinch it by one point over Erik. Gio’s win also marked the first time a new team would win the Cup, ending Chuck’s 2-season reign as the regular season Champion.
At the conclusion of the season, Chuck would find himself as the winner of the Democrat division, with a large PF lead giving him the tiebreaker over Wings. His one-game lead over the Republican Division winner Gio also gave him a third consecutive season as the top seed. Wings and Erik would lose the PF tiebreaker for the top of the division, which left them as the 3rd and 4th seeds, respectively. The 5th seed would go to Bryan, who was the highest PF scorer out of the remaining 3 teams that ended with 8 wins.
The Wild Card would once again go to Ant, who, despite only winning 6 games throughout the season, had a sizable PF lead over Soundcloud and Ryan, resulting in both of these teams missing the playoffs despite a winning record.
2025 Postseason
Round 1 of the playoffs pitted Wings versus Ant for the second year in a row. Wings, behind a stellar performance from Puka Nacua, would once again best Ant to move to the next round. On the other side of the bracket, Erik’s team would erupt against Bryan, winning by nearly 80 points.
For the semifinals, Wings would have a surprising eruption versus Gio, with Steelers Running Backs Jaylen Warren and Kenneth Gainwell combining for over 70 points in support of Puka’s 60 to blow Gio out and advance to his second consecutive LOD Championship. Erik, meanwhile, found himself in a very close contest versus Chuck. Chuck’s critical error was benching his season-long QB Matt Stafford, who scored well over 70 points, in favor of CJ Stroud who scored only 21. Erik would now advance to his first final since 2019 and also found himself in a rematch of the 2018 final versus Wings that first sparked their historic rivalry.
The 2025 championship was the most closely contested finals in League History, with the matchup coming down to Monday night. Puka Nacua, who was in top form throughout the postseason, could ultimately not make enough successful plays to take Wings over the top and the defending Champion would miss his opportunity to go back-to-back by 1.5 points- the closest margin in a final ever. Erik would become the fourth team to reach the 2-championship milestone.
Henry-gate
Soundcloud’s debut season in the LOD saw aggressive trades made by the rookie team, with many of his moves seen as highly questionable that would eventually give him the moniker “Radio,” based on the character from the Cuba Gooding Jr movie. The most notable of these trades by far was a deal done with Ant, where Soundcloud traded Derrick Henry in return for Rookie RB Cam Skattebo. Along with the League clowning this trade, it also caused the Commissioner to lose his patience with his brother given his streak of trades made to this point and, in a first, outright vetoed and reversed the trade. This caused an even bigger controversy that would become known as Henry-gate, in which both sides of the trade insisted they made this in good faith and demanded the trade be allowed. The Commissioner eventually capitulated and apologized for overstepping in this case.