The Luckiest Start in League History
Jordan started Kyle Pitts in the 2025 quarterfinals because he had no other tight end on his roster. Pitts dropped 45.6 points — the highest fantasy TE playoff score ever recorded — and won the game by 1.98. The case for why this is the single luckiest start the league has ever seen.
On six independent measures, this is the luckiest playoff start in the history of the league. No other game touches more than three.
Across his 13 games in the 2025 regular season, Pitts averaged 10.1 pts with a median of 7.9. His best week all year was 18.0 — and that came in a week no one in the league had even rostered him.
Pitts’s 45.6 pts broke the previous TE playoff record (Travis Kelce, 38.8 pts in 2018) by a 17.5% margin. Highest fantasy TE playoff score in league history.
Pitts is 7.20σ above his own regular-season distribution — a 1-in-many-millions outcome under any normal model. The leaderboard below ranks every playoff start in the dataset; the gap from Pitts to the next entry is the largest single-step jump on the list.
Pitts went for 45.6 of Jordan’s 134.7. Subtract him and the team scores 89.1 — a 43.6-pt loss instead of a 2.0-pt win.
Jordancycled through nine different tight ends in 2025. By Week 15 his only rostered TE was Pitts. There was no decision to make; he had run out of bodies — including the same Pitts he’d benched in W10 and W12.
Pitts’s surplus over his season median (+37.7) was 19.0× the game margin (2.0 pts). The previous record for a decisive lucky playoff start: 3.7×. Pitts is five times more decisive than the runner-up.
Every game Pitts played in 2025. Each bar is a single week; the green one is the Week 15 quarterfinal.
9% of everything, in one afternoon.
Across 5 seasons and 54 games rostered in this league, Pitts has scored 509.0 fantasy points. Week 15’s 45.6 was 9% of that entire career — more than his whole 2023 season (32.3 pts).
The luckiest playoff starts on record, ranked by how many standard deviations the game cleared the player’s in-season norm.
| Rk | Game | Player | Manager | Pts | Reg Mean | Z | Game Margin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | 2025 · W15 | Kyle Pitts Sr. TE | Jordan | 45.6 | 10.1 | 7.20 | +2.0 |
| 02 | 2020 · W16 | Myles Gaskin RB | Dite | 33.9 | 14.6 | 5.33 | +54.9 |
| 03 | 2022 · W17 | Mike Evans WR | Dite | 48.7 | 12.1 | 4.79 | +10.4 |
| 04 | 2021 · W17 | Ja'Marr Chase WR | Rob | 55.6 | 17.2 | 4.69 | +79.4 |
| 05 | 2025 · W17 | Derrick Henry RB | Drake | 45.6 | 14.5 | 4.38 | +76.8 |
| 06 | 2020 · W16 | Stefon Diggs WR | Kyle | 41.5 | 18.1 | 4.33 | +50.4 |
| 07 | 2025 · W16 | Chris Olave WR | Rob | 36.8 | 14.2 | 4.15 | -15.8 |
| 08 | 2023 · W15 | James Cook RB | Mitch | 36.1 | 13.7 | 3.74 | +18.0 |
| 09 | 2021 · W16 | Tee Higgins WR | Mitch | 43.4 | 13.8 | 3.61 | -26.4 |
| 10 | 2020 · W16 | Mike Evans WR | Dite | 40.1 | 14.6 | 3.57 | +54.9 |