Now that the SuperBowl is over and the casuals have gone back into hibernation for the summer, it’s time to put the wraps on another successful Axe Elf fantasy football season–and, as it turns out, on a whole lot more than that. Those of you diehards who are already planning your first fantasy drafts of 2024 deserve to be the first to know, because it will mean more to you who are intimately familiar with Axe Elf than it will to those who have only heard the whispers.
But I don’t want to get ahead of myself…
First of all, get your "Thank You, Axe Elf!"s out of the way now–did I kill it in 2023, or what?? Raheem Mostert, Zach Moss, Adam Thielen… just about every sleeper who carried a team through the year came from Axe Elf–and of course way back in the preseason Axe Elf gave you the TE who was worth more in Championship Weeks 16 and 17 than Travis Kelce–Mike Gesicki–so as usual, you’re all welcome!
As you know, though, Axe Elf battles not against mere flesh and blood, but against the very gods of irony and retribution themselves, so largely through being cursed by too many good players to choose from each week, coupled with the slings and arrows of outrageous scheduling fortunes, Axe Elf cashed in less than half of his managed leagues AND less than half of his Best Ball leagues this season, which I’m sure will come as a bottomless fount of amusement to all of the ubiquitous haters out there. Heck, I didn’t even finish in the top 5,000 in Yahoo’s postseason Champion of Champions tournament this year! On the other hand, I did win half of my Consolation Brackets, and correcting for all the games in which I had the points to win on my bench, but the guy I started instead got hurt on the first play or something, my Corrected Overall Record™ was 72-42 on the season, finishing at .500 or better in every league.
That’s awesome, but it’s not all about Axe Elf. Just judging from the rotisserie of player talent from which I was choosing each week, one can only imagine that any of you who followed Axe Elf’s drafting lessons this preseason enjoyed a similar level of success–and that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Your smiling faces hoisting aloft your Championship Trophies while chanting “Thank you, Axe Elf!”–THAT is what Axe Elf always remembers about every fantasy football season, not how many leagues he personally dominates (although, there is that).
But this year, a new enemy has arisen to face Axe Elf–or perhaps I should say an old enemy, one that can never fully be defeated, even though I might have won the first round of battle to send my life into overtime.
If I had lived at any other time in history other than in the past 50 years, I probably would have died before I turned 48. But I got a two-minute warning at the age of 47 in 2010; a series of heart attacks that apparently had passed themselves off as heartburn eventually led to a Saturday morning 3am trip to the emergency room, diagnoses of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes–and an emergency triple bypass open heart surgery scheduled for Monday morning. I was in the hospital awaiting surgery over the Hall of Fame Game weekend that August, and I watched the Cowboys and the Bengals open the season on the Sunday evening before my surgery, wondering if it would be the last football game I ever watched.
The triple bypass ended up only being a double bypass, since part of my heart was already too damaged to hold a graft, but it was good enough to give me a 12-year overtime period–a “fifth quarter” to my life, so to speak.
But this past fall, I haven’t been doing too well. I have zero stamina; walking across the house makes me pant and get tightness in my chest, and my legs feel more like blocks of wood these days anyway. I wake up to throw up about half the mornings, and once again, as I approach the end of my 60th year on Earth, I wonder if I have seen my last football game, now that Mahomes and the Chiefs have brought another Super Bowl Championship to my home town.
That achievement axually marks the culmination of another high water mark in Axe Elf’s storied history of calling longshots–being on record at FFToday saying that the Chiefs would win three of the next five Super Bowls, sometime after Mahomes’ first season as a starter.
Bullseye.
Now it would be nice to see if they could do what has never been done before by winning three in a row, but at this point, I really don’t know if I will make it to next season–and if I do, I don’t know if I will make it to the end of next season–but I’m really ok with it. After decades of being a football fan living in the land of football futility that was Kansas in the 20th century, the Kansas Jayhawks, the Kansas State Wildcats, and the Kansas City Chiefs all won their final games in what could be my last season of my favorite sport. No sports fan could ever go out happier.
And that’s why, after exactly 30 years of dominating fantasy football from 1994 to 2023, I think it’s time to draw a line under the career of Axe Elf, and let someone else take on the role of the World’s Foremost Authority on Fantasy Football.
I’m sure there will be "Dread Pirate Axe Elf"s that pop up here and there–I’ve already been cloned on a few boards already–but don’t be fooled. Even if I make it to next season, the most I would do would be to play some daily fantasy or something. I’m drawing a firm line on participating in season-long leagues, right here, right now. And as much as I want to give you some hints of who you should be looking to draft next season, the line is that much thicker if I don’t. I don’t want there to be any of the Axe Elf legend to linger into next season; the 30 year line needs to be drawn. So if you see “Axe Elf” playing in season-long fantasy leagues next year, or giving advice on a fantasy football site–it ain’t me.
Having now retired, I plan to post this notice to whatever communities still allow Axe Elf to post on their sites, and I’d like to spend the rest of this announcement looking back at my memories of all of you.
(To be continued below…)