Rob Masterson…the best team to never win a championship, and now, somehow, the only team to never win a championship.
The latter is actually a new development, because the 2020s have essentially become the fantasy football equivalent of a participation-trophy convention: everyone gets a mug.
Between 1999 and 2019, just seven people split the league’s 21 championships. Then came the Great Mug Giveaway. In 2020, Jeff won his first title. Eric followed in 2021. Colby earned his first in 2022, then immediately grabbed another in 2023. And in 2024, Michael, the league’s newest member, won it all.
This left just one man standing.
Robert Masterson.
As we’ve discussed before, Rob isn’t some baseball fan who wandered into a fantasy football league looking to fill up his time during the fall. He’s a football guy. He knows his shit. Sure, he’s a Jets fan, which suggests there may be some fundamental flaws in his judgment, but I know for a fact Rob has multiple fantasy football championships in other leagues.
So what’s the deal? What’s gone wrong? Who is to blame? And how does a man who remains the sexiest man I know not have a championship mug to go along with those delicious biceps?
Well, the obvious answer is bad luck.
We’re an eight-team playoff with no bye week, which means there have been plenty of great teams that never even escaped the quarterfinals, let alone won a championship. In this league, you can spend four months building a juggernaut only to have your season end because Neatock’s running back, the one he picked up just last week, decides he’s Walter Payton for one Sunday.
Still, with Rob, it feels more sinister than simple bad luck.
During the early years, he routinely suffered injuries to important players. Yet he still reached the semifinals three times in his first five seasons.
Then came 2011-2019, when Rob produced arguably the greatest regular-season run in league history: nine consecutive seasons with a winning record. And what did all that regular-season excellence produce?
Two postseason victories.
That’s it.
And then, since 2021, the wheels came off. Four consecutive losing seasons. A 20-36 record. Three straight seasons without even making the postseason.
So today, let’s look at three of Rob’s teams that either came should have won it all, came the closest to winning it all, or, in at least one case, had absolutely no business not coming closer.
MOST DISAPPOINTING: 2021
Not only has Rob never won a championship, he’s never even appeared in a championship game.
Part of the problem is that he’s rarely been a high seed. Before 2021, he had never earned the No. 1 seed and had produced only one No. 2 seed.
So when he finished 10-4, the most wins in a season of his career, and earned his first-ever top seed, surely this was the year things were finally going to change.
Naturally, the year began with Rob losing three of his first four games.
Despite scoring more than 1,700 points twice, he stumbled to 1-3. He won the next three, but then Christian McCaffrey suffered a season-ending injury, seemingly putting an end to any realistic championship hopes.
Instead, Rob somehow got better.
Led by Jonathan Taylor, the league’s top running back, who scored 4,388 points during the regular season, Masterson wouldn’t lose again. He ripped off nine straight victories, topping 1,500 points in five of them.
Now, he didn’t finish first in scoring (he was third) and his quarterback situation (Dak Prescott) was shaky. But Rob entered the playoffs looking like a legitimate championship contender.
Then he drew Eric, the No. 8 seed. He had lost three of his previous four games and had only made the playoffs because Michael forgot to set his lineup.
Surely, this was destiny.
It was not.
Dak Prescott failed Rob.
For the third consecutive game and fourth time in five contests, Prescott failed to reach 200 fantasy points. His inability to complete a throw also crushed Amari Cooper (Rob’s starting WR), who managed just two catches for eight yards.
Rob lost to Eric, 1,441-1,128.
And, because fantasy football is a cruel and poorly designed game, Eric proceeded to become the first No. 8 seed to win the championship. He followed his upset of Rob by beating Bob and Jeff, who scored just 955 and 1,226 points in their respective playoff games.
Of course, even if Masterson won, he wouldn’t have had Eric’s easy path. Had he survived, he would have faced Jeff in the semifinals; a Jeff team that scored 1,801 points that week.
So perhaps the fantasy gods weren’t completely screwing Rob.
They were just screwing him sooner.
BEST TEAM NOT TO WIN IT: 2011
Rob’s 2011 team, based on all the advanced metrics I’ve pulled completely out of my ass, remains his best team ever.
In the all-time career rankings, it sits at No. 42 (7th best by a team that didn’t reach the semifinals).
This was Rob’s first true “Wow” team.
Behind a pair of Falcons in Matt Ryan and Michael Turner, a pair of Jacksons in Fred and Vincent, and top-10 wide receiver Percy Harvin, Rob won nine games, captured his first career division title and averaged a stunning 1,530 points per game.
Averaging 1,530 may not sound impressive in our modern era, but prior to 2011, only one team in league history had averaged more than 1,500 points per game over an entire season.
And yet, Rob was still playing second fiddle to Molly.
She won 10 games, earned the No. 1 seed and averaged 1,536 points per game; just 69 points more than Masterson over the entire season. These were clearly the two best teams in the league. Surely, the fantasy gods would reward us with the championship game we deserved: Rob vs. Molly, two 1,500-point-per-game monsters battling for the title.
We were not rewarded.
Molly lost to Don by 55 points.
Rob, meanwhile, suffered one of the most ridiculous playoff losses in league history, falling to 6-7 Bob by two points in the infamous Steven Jackson game.
Here’s how it happened.
The Rams were trailing late in the fourth quarter, 23-6 and had sat Steven Jackson (Bob’s starting RB) for a second straight possession. Cadillac Williams was the man and it appeared the Rams were essentially cooked. But the Caddy was running well and he led the Rams down to the 1-yard line.
At this point, Rob led Bob by 87 points.
Any touchdown by any Rams player not named Steven Jackson and Rob would win.
The Rams failed to score on the first three downs.
Then, suddenly, Jackson re-entered the game. But on fourth down, they didn’t give him the ball.
Incomplete pass.
Except… defensive holding.
Fresh set of downs.
The Rams tried throwing on first and second down. Nothing.
Finally, on their seventh attempt, they handed the ball to Jackson.
Touchdown.
Rob still led by 20.
Now the Seahawks had the ball, with fewer than five minutes remaining and a 10-point lead, along with one of the league’s most dangerous running backs (Lynch). Naturally, the running back was too good at his job and the Seahawks scored a touchdown in six plays. With under three minutes left, Jackson was back on the field.
Surely the Rams would feed him the ball.
Nope.
They threw it around unsuccessfully until it was 4th-and-10.
So what did they do?
They threw a screen to Jackson.
He gained 13 yards.
Under the league’s then-existing scoring system, which deducted two points per carry or reception, Bob now had a four-point lead.
The next play: Jackson carry.
No gain.
Minus two.
Bob leads by two.
One more carry for no gain would tie the game, and Rob would win the tiebreaker.
Instead, the Rams pulled Jackson from the game.
And that was that.
You couldn’t script it better if your goal was specifically to break Rob’s soul.
Bob went on to win his third career championship, beating Colby in the semifinals after Colby scored just 1,180 points, then beating Burrier, who scored 1,283 points in the championship.
Rob had spent an entire season being one of the greatest teams in the league.
He lost by two points to a 6-7 team.
Fantasy football is beautiful.
CLOSEST TEAM TO WIN IT ALL: 2013
Rob’s quarterfinal failures are well documented.
He’s reached the semifinals just five times in 24 years, going 5-11 in the quarterfinals.
And once he gets there?
0-5.
His closest call in a semifinal wasn’t exactly close, but it’s still worth discussing.
Rob’s 2013 squad wasn’t an all-time great team. It featured just one All-Robio player: Drew Brees, who earned second-team honors.
After Doug Martin got hurt, Rob patched together his running game with Ryan Mathews and Chris Ivory. But he had two excellent receivers in Josh Gordon and Vincent Jackson.
He opened the season with four straight games over 1,500 points, going 3-1. Through 10 weeks, he was a solid 8-3, battling for the top-seed, before back-to-back losses to Robio and Calderon (who would finish first and second in the standings), costing him the top spot.
He finished 8-5 and earned the No. 3 seed, despite his opponents scoring the second-most points in the league that season.
Then came the quarterfinals.
For the second time in his career, Rob topped 2,000 points, crushing Molly 2,031-1,299 behind 509 points from Brees and 414 from Gordon. And just like that, Rob was one game away from the championship.
Waiting for him was No. 2 seed Calderon. The two teams had faced each other twice during the regular season, splitting the games. Unfortunately, Rob’s boys apparently decided that the semifinals were an excellent time to stop playing fantasy football.
His team scored 913 fewer points in the semifinals than it had the previous week.
He lost to Rich, 1,451-1,118.
The 333-point defeat remains the closest Rob has ever come to reaching a championship game.
Which, when you think about it, is an incredible sentence.
THE FINAL VERDICT
And that’s really the story of Rob Masterson’s fantasy career in this league: too good for too long, unlucky when it mattered, and recently not good enough at all.
He’s had dominant regular seasons, elite players, top seeds, 2,000-point playoff explosions and teams that look scary. He’s also had injuries, brutal matchups, quarterback implosions, bizarre coaching decisions by NFL teams and at least one playoff loss seemingly engineered by the universe itself.
But the cruelest part is that the drought has now become historic.
Everyone else has a mug.
The longtime champions have mugs. The newcomers have mugs. The guys who barely know what they’re doing have mugs. The guy who got into the playoffs because someone forgot to set a lineup has a mug.
Rob Masterson has biceps.
He has football knowledge.
He has fantasy championships in other leagues.
And yet, sitting on his shelf is no Robioland Football championship mug.