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Hello and welcome back to the TSL Quarterback Power Rankings!  

 

We've done something a little different this week.  As promised, we have a list of things we plan to rank this season other than quarterbacks, and we've been publishing a schedule at the end of our articles for the last few weeks showing what's coming.  Our first non-QB Ranking of the year is ready this week as we've compiled the Greatest Teams in TSL History.  We'll get into the details of how we defined "the greatest teams" below, but needless to say it was fairly exhausting!  Read on below and see if your team made the list to end all lists.

 

For our actual Quarterback Rankings this week, we've expanded our coverage to the Top 25 passers in the League.  Inspired by the genius of our Breakfast Club captains (or perhaps just exhausted from the effort it took to do the "Greatest Teams" rankings), we've done each QB write-up below as a Haiku.  Not much change at the top of the Rankings, but lots of action in the #10 - #25 spots so take a look and see how your team's quarterback is doing. 

 

Enjoy!

 

 

#1 Joey Batts - Legends / Cunning Stunts

Last Week:  Lost to Eyes Downtown 38-24 (Legends), lost to Vaspian 20-17 (Cunning Stunts)

Two losses for Joe

Why is this guy number one?

Must be his good looks

 

#2 Mike Thomas - Sticky Bandits

Last Week:  Beat Tight Ends in Motion 20-19

After two seasons

Mike finally beats Tight Ends,

Sticky is for real

 

#3 Bobby McConnell - Eyes Downtown

Last Week:  Beat Legends 38-24

Bobby McConnell,

Admit it, you wrote him off

But he keeps winning

 

#4 Dylan Day - Scared Hitless

Last Week:  Beat Passed Our Prime 38-32

Dylan is ready,

D2 runs through Scared Hitless

Helps to have those chicks!

 

#5 Alex Buchlis - The Notorious BNB

Last Week:  Did Not Play

D2's best offense:

Notorious BNB

This Greek can ball out!

 

#6 Jeremy "Hogan" Olson - Passed Our Prime

Last Week:  Lost to Scared Hitless 38-32, beat Grey Hair - Don't Care 30-29

Won one and lost one,

They have a winning record

thanks to Hogan's arm

 

#7 Seth Molisani - Tight Ends in Motion / Buffalo Vice

Last Week:  Lost to Sticky Bandits 20-19 (TEIM), beat Sleezin Szn 31-14 (Buffalo Vice)

Seth has his first win

as Vice beats Sleezin Szn,

Tight Ends will win soon

 

#8 Brandt Dubey - DILFS

Last Week:  Beat Bullet Club 36-18

Dubey beats the Club,

seems to win games every year,

is he immortal?

 

#9 Jeremy Burr - Untouchaballs

Last Week:  Beat 4th & Something 37-12

Name the following:

All unbeaten D3 teams.

Easy.  Just the 'Balls!

 

#10 Dylan Jaloza - Bullet Club / Freeballers

Last Week:  Lost to DILFS 36-18 (Bullet Club); beat Itches and Ohs 27-15 (Freeballers)

Bullet Club winless,

Freeballers are two and one

That feels about right

 

#11 Garrett Beesing - Frodo Swaggins

Last Week:  Beat Show Me Dem TD's 31-27

Hey Frodo Swaggins,

Why must all your games be tight?

This is exhausting

 

#12 Dave Eickhoff - Grey Hair - Don't Care

Last Week:  Beat When Dove Cries 36-25, lost to Passed Our Prime 30-29

Grey Hair Don't Care wins!

They're one and three but look fine,

Beware playoff Dave.

 

#13 Scott Drosendahl - 4th & Something

Last Week:  Lost to Untouchaballs 37-12

Finally a loss,

can't be perfect forever,

not even Scotty

 

#14 Nick Hawes - Spinelli's Plumbing

Last Week:  Beat TOX 44-16, lost to Interdimensional Lightning Falcons 34-32

Spinelli's Plumbing,

we thought you could never lose,

Falcons disagreed

 

#15 Steve Moser - Itches and Ohs

Last Week:  Lost to Freeballers 27-15

High scoring Itches,

what happened to your offense?

Scoring fifteen sucks!

 

#16 Brandon "B" Ford - Practice Squad

Last Week:  Beat Puckett All-Stars 35-31

Practice Squad can't lose,

Puckett's a quality win,

Good to see you're BACK

 

#17 Jeff Jenkins - XMD

Last Week:  Beat Varsity Has-Beens 56-32

Wow fifty six points

XMD spanked the Has Beens

D4, fear Jenkins

 

#18 Matt Newman - Sleezin Szn

Last Week:  Lost to Buffalo Vice 31-14

Sleezin Oh-and-three,

Newman you're better than this,

at least we think so

 

#19 TJ Ferguson - Puckett All-Stars

Last Week:  Lost to Practice Squad 35-31

Puckett you're RIGHT there

on the verge of winning games,

why can't you finish?

 

#20 Joe Miano - Interdimensional Lightning Falcons

Last Week:  Beat Spinelli's Plumbing 34-32

Huge, huge, huge, huge win

are ILF contenders?

It sure seems like it

 

 

#21 Blake Fisher - Red Zone Mafia

Last Week:  Beat TMA 22-16

Is Blake winning games

Or does Sam do all the work?

Who cares, they're winning

 

#22 Darryl Carr - Cobblestone

Last Week:  Did Not Play

The hair of a God,

The arm of a dinosaur,

Darryl is legend

 

#23 Brian Orzechowski - Vaspian

Last Week:  Beat Cunning Stunts 20-17

Vaspian and Zack,

Winning games with great defense,

Need more QB help!

 

#24 Zack Elphick - Zack Attack

Last Week:  Lost to Can't Touch This 21-8

Zack and Vaspian,

Winning games with great defense,

Need more QB help!

 

#25 John Langley - Travis Henry's Kids

Last Week:  Beat Blitzkrieg 34-6, beat Woodpeckers 20-12

Leader of D6,

THK is killing teams

John is MVP

 

***

The Greatest TSL Teams of All-Time

 

When we started talking in the offseason about fun things we could rank this session, one of our Committee members suggested "the best teams of all-time".  We immediately wrote this down and said yes, absolutely, that would be a great debate!  Then when we started actually trying to do it, we realized everyone had different ideas about what "greatness" meant.  Is a great team just one with the best win percentage?  Is a great team one that wins a lot of championships?  Is a great team one that hangs out at the bar every week and has contributed to the culture of the league over the years?  Sure, a great team can be all of those things, but how you define greatness will give you a COMPLETELY different list.  Marketing Mayors was a better team than Cobblestone on the field.  Cobblestone was (and is) a more impactful team in the history of the bar scene.  Comparing the two would be pointless.  So we decided this list will be the best teams on the field in the history of the TSL.  Bar contributions will not factor into the rankings whatsoever (maybe they become a separate ranking some day).

 

So if we decide we're only going to evaluate on-field performance, how do we even begin to do that?  For starters, some of these teams haven't played in a decade.  How does Dwyer's compare to Scared Hitless?  How does Top Line Solutions compare to Tight Ends in Motion?  The only way to subjectively assess older teams is to ask old-timers who have been around for the entirety of the TSL, and you know how that goes: everyone was ALWAYS better "back in the day"... or at least that's how people tend to remember their athletic primes.  Objective comparison by memory is impossible because people are hopelessly biased to whatever narrative better supports their own legacies.  We can't ask around about who was "the best" because we don't trust the answers we'd get back.

 

Okay, so if we're trying to remove the biased memories of old-timers from the equation, how do we compare teams based PURELY on the facts?  Ideally we would look at win percentages and point differentials of each team in TSL history and see who is the best in each category.  That would be nice... IF we still had all those old records.  Sadly it's a little challenging to dig up old standings as our website doesn't back up that information on a regular basis.  So what do we do in the absence of team win/loss records?

 

We look at championships.

 

If you're REALLY one of the best on-field teams in the history of the League, you've won a championship at some point in time.  It's that simple.  Yes, we are VERY aware that it's not a 100% perfect system for evaluating performance: a team that finished in second five times could potentially have been better than a team that won one title.  Think of it like Philip Rivers vs Trent Dilfer: one of them is clearly better, yet the other has more championships.  However if you're going to stake a claim to being one of the all-time greats, you cannot do it without winning the big ones, plain and simple (sorry Philip Rivers!).  So the focus of our rankings will be on the irrefutable evidence of which teams have won championships over the years in the TSL.  We're sorry if you never won one, because you're not going to be on our list.

 

As it turns out, even information on previous champions is incredibly difficult to find!  Rumors are that there are lost plaques floating around the Rose Garden somewhere with past winners engraved, but no one has seen those in years.  But we had to have ALL the facts to make sure this was done correctly, so our Committee dug up all the old research we could find: a decade of old banquet emails from Topper, Godfather articles still saved on the website, archived podcasts from the end of seasons long long ago (which are still super entertaining if you ever have the time and want to hear Sheri quiz Lenny on who he'd "Fuck Marry Kill").  It was incredibly difficult but we eventually tracked down every championship victory in TSL history... all 112 of them.  We're sure you've never seen a complete list of these before (we're sure NO one has ever seen a complete list before, even Topper) so let's start with that, and then we'll try to make sense of how we rank these teams against each other:

 

 

We really encourage you to stop reading and take a minute to absorb that list.  Ten years, twenty seasons, one hundred and twelve divisions, summarized in a single chart.  Crazy to see how much the League has changed over the years, for those who have been around long enough to appreciate it.  You'll notice this list doesn't include Breakfast Club, Winter Session or any special tournament teams by the way, which have different formats and wouldn't make sense to compare against our normal outdoor seasons.

 

So now that we have the data, how do we compare our various champions?  All divisions are obviously not created equal, and if we're trying to determine who's the best of the best, it has to be significantly biased towards the top division. Winning D5 is not the same as winning D1... and yet we can't just ignore lower divisions either.  Somehow we had to figure out a way to weight each division to compare all of these teams objectively.  After much internal debate about what each division is "worth", we finally asked ourselves the question, which is HARDER: winning any division once, or winning the next lowest division twice?  In other words what's a greater achievement: winning one D2 title, or winning two D3 titles?  We all agreed that it's probably harder to win one D2 title, which led us to weight divisions in the following format: 

• A D1 championship is our baseline since it's the best a team can do.  Let's make that worth 100 points.  
• A D2 title is worth, at BEST, 49% of that, since two D2 titles don't quite equal a D1 title (you can argue it should be LESS than 49%, but we've made the choice to weight lower divisions as heavily as reasonably possible here).  49 points for a D2 title.
• A D3 title should be worth 49% of THAT, so about 24 points for each D3 championship.
• Every subsequent division is worth 49% of the previous one, so D4 is worth 11 points, D5 is worth 5 points, and D6 is worth 2 points.

 

If we try to compare two different teams using this weighting system, one team would need two D2 championships AND one D6 championship to equal another team's one D1 championship.  Or they'd need about nine D4 titles, or twenty D5 titles, any combination that gets them to 100 points.  It's a little subjective as far as the points we've assigned each division, but we feel confident that it's a decent system.

 

One challenge we CAN'T really account for when adding up each team's weighted points is if a team has changed names over the years.  Look, we're smart enough to know that Matty's Angels and The Angels are the same team, and we know that Ryan Puckett All-Stars and Puckett All-Stars are the same people too, so we combined those teams championship points when doing out All-Time Rankings.  But didn't Bobby McConnell used to QB for 1-2-3 Gawron?  Do they consider that the same team as Eyes Downtown?  We have no way of knowing, so the two are tracked as two separate teams here.  Alternatively, if two completely DIFFERENT teams used the same name (ex. are the Fall 2011 "Riley Street Station" the same people as the Spring 2012 "Riley Street Station"?) we would have no way of knowing that either, so we have to treat all teams with the same name as the same group.

 

With that being said, we've calculated the points for every championship winning team in that first chart above.  Without further adieu, here are the greatest teams in TSL history, based on strength and number of championships won:

 

 

Once you see where your team is ranked in the chart above, you'll instantly decide you hate our methodology and you'd be higher ranked if we "just measured it differently".  Come on.  That's loser talk.  Win more championships, and history will remember you more fondly.

 

So let's see what our chart is telling us!

 

Observations on Rankings & Championship Listing

 

Public Enemy is the #1 team in TSL history.  That may come as a surprise to some the way people still talk about how great Green & Associates used to be.  The thing is, our rankings are the best teams in TSL history, and some of Green & Associates championships came from the MileSports days before Topper and Lenny broke away and made history.  Green & Associates are like Ichiro putting up great stats in Japan before he jumped to MLB - they might have been the greatest in history, but they're not the greatest in OUR history.

 

Green & Associates are the #2 team in TSL history, but only if we don't consolidate Bobby's two teams into one.  If 1-2-3 Gawron and Eyes Downtown are considered the same team (we have no idea if they share any personnel besides Bobby) then that combined team would immediately supplant Green & Associates in the #2 spot with higher combined points (three combined D1 titles AND a D2 title).  And Eyes Downtown are still active, so they can continue to climb the chart with more championship wins.  

 

Public Enemy has the most championship wins at ANY level in TSL history with five, and of course all are in D1.  The only other team in TSL history with four championships is A&A, who first won D5, then D4, then publicly called out the D3 champions the same afternoon they won D4, then decided NOT to move up a division the next session and won D4 again, and then eventually won D2. 

 

There are three teams in TSL history to have won championships in three different divisions: Gryffindor (D2, D3, D4), Sticky Bandits (D2, D3, D4), and A&A (D2, D4, D5).  No team has ever won championships in four or more divisions, though individuals certainly have (Joey Batts for example has won D2, D3, D4 and D5, and is a betting favorite to win D1 this session).  The Sticky Bandits would become the only four division winner in TSL history if they win the D1 championship this session.

 

The 112 championships in League History were won by 78 different teams.  23 of these have won multiple championships, while 55 teams have won just a single championship.  We would have thought there would be a lot more success stories of teams winning one division just to move up and win another, but only 16 teams in TSL history have won championships in different divisions.

 

There are only 9 teams in TSL history that have won championships in back to back sessions, including four teams that moved up after winning their first division and still won again (Riley Street Station D4->D2, Dinner For Two D4->D3, Sticky Bandits D3->D2 and Spinelli's Plumbing D6->D5), three that won lower divisions and chose to stay there to win again (Hung Buffalo in D5, A&A in D4, Puckett All-Stars in D4) and two D1 teams that repeated as champions at the highest level (Green & Associates and Public Enemy each did it once; amazing there haven't been more repeat D1 winners in 20 seasons).  Riley Street Station is the only champion to ever move up two divisions the next session and still immediately win another championship.

 

Never mind consecutive championships: no team has EVER won either D3 or D6 twice at any point in TSL history.  Every other division has had at least one team win it multiple times.

 

There are a few active teams towards the top of our chart that could bolster their all-time ranking by winning a championship this Spring 2022 session, including Tight Ends in Motion (would jump from 7th to 3rd), Eyes Downtown (8th to 4th), Sticky Bandits (12th to 7th), and the DILFS (18th to 11th).  In total, 17 of our 46 currently active teams have won a championship at some point in our League history.

 

There are only two teams in TSL history to have won both D1 and a lower division championship: Tight Ends in Motion and 1-2-3 Gawron (both of whom won D2)

 

We hesitate to write this next part because although we absolutely mean it as a compliment, many will absolutely take it as disrespect: it's a known fact that the GameOn league is not as competitive as the TSL, and teams that come over to our League usually have to drop a couple divisions compared to what they were playing over there (GameOn D2 = TSL D4).  Having said that, we're told the Wanderers have won like ten of their D1 championships (we don't know the actual number), which is like winning ten of our D3 championships.  Rather than all that "they'd never win OUR D1" talk we heard at the bar last season, let's take a second to appreciate that even ten D3 championships would give them the equivalent of like 240 points in our weighting system, and rank them among the top teams of all-time regardless of where they've played.

 

Cobblestone was the last place team (0-9-1) in the lowest division in the first year of the TSL.  Their last championship was Spring of 2013, nine long years ago.  This season might be the best chance they've had in years to finally end the TSL's most prolific championship drought.  Coronas are on Darryl if they can pull it off!

 

So that's your objective, championship-based approach to the greatest teams in TSL history.  Don't like it?  Complain at the bar like everyone else.

 

***

Just a reminder that our Non-QB rankings next week are the Best Female Players in the League.  We DON'T have "championship stats" to support this ranking, so it will be entirely subjective based on Committee observations.  If you've got thoughts and want to highlight a girl that has stood out to you this season, let us know this week before it's too late!

Categories for the rest of the season are as follows:

• May 19: Best Female Players in the League
• May 26: Best Male Players (Non-QB) in the League
• June 2: Division All-Star Teams Announced
• June 9: Most Likely TSL Hall of Famers

 

***

 

That's it for this week!  As always, if you have any thoughts on why you hate this article (your team’s QB should be ranked higher?  you don't like math based rankings and you wanted your team to be higher on the all-time list because you're just, like, so much better in your opinion?  you're furious that Peachy Platoon and the Tommy Hughes Experience somehow have the same ranking on our chart?) please send an email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..    Seriously, we can do this BETTER if you TELL us about your team!

 

What’s YOUR ranking?

 

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