The
winning squad, MikeTorok, took one zero due to a player's team being eliminated, Amari Cooper CLE in the conference championship round where it was x3. They picked a near-complete playoff bracket, picking a winning team in 11 of the 12 games (every one except PHI-TB in the wild card round). 2 of their 11 picks were wrong (CLE over HOU and then CLE over BAL), but that only led to the one zero (x3) because the only Cooper was the only CLE player that they took. They generally nailed their picks, with only 3 players scoring less than 10 points (including Cooper's zero); that's x11 under-10s after weighting. It helped to have Dak & Lamb in the WC scoring 28.62 & 20.5 instead of getting zeros in a later round, and LaPorta & Gibbs in the conference championship scoring 23.2 & 14.6 (x3). No BAL in the conference championship was a mixed bag: they missed out on Zay Flowers's 22.9 that week, but also dodged the Likely/Edwards bullets (4.6 each) and got Lamar in his higher scoring divisional game (36.08 vs. 19.58). All told, MikeTorok outscored second place by 94 points.
Five squads took no zeros from an eliminated team. Only one of those 5 squads,
Manatees, was aggressive about picking a near-complete playoff bracket - they called winners in 10 of the 12 games. Manatees finished 6th overall, hurt by some bad picks such as Likely & Edwards in the conference championship - in total they had 8 players score less than 10 points (x20 after weighting).
douggannon was another zeroless squad who got there by being much more conservative about picking games - they picked winners in only 6 of the 12 games, and had only SF+KC in the conference championship and beyond. They had 6 players under 10 (x16 after weighting) and finished in 15th, but would have been top 5 if they had just put McCaffrey in the Super Bowl and Aiyuk in the conference championship instead of doing the reverse. The other 3 no-zeros-from-elimination squads all did that by going hyperconservative with their brackets, with just a single team in the Super Bowl (SF for all 3) and a single other team in the conference championship (BAL for all 3). This did not go well for them, as they finished
71st,
120th, and
216th. Also 2 of the 3 squads took zeros from an inactive player (Gabe Davis in the divisional round for both) and one of those 2 also had a zero from a touchless Charlie Kolar in the conference championship.
Looking over the complete
standings: The winning entry took the 6th fewest weighted zeros from eliminated teams (x3), coming in right after the 5 zeroless (from elimination) squads. 13 entries took 4 or fewer weighted zeros, 21 entries took 6 or fewer, and 97 entries took 13 or fewer weighted zeros. All of the top 20 finishers were among those top 100ish squads in fewest zeros-from-elimination (out of the 3929 total entries).
The DAL wild card loss was one of the biggest culprits behind so many squads taking zeros. All 4 of the entries that placed 2nd-5th had the Prescott-Lamb stack in either the divisional or the conference championship round. For 3 of the 4 squads those were their only zeros; one also had Flacco-Cooper in the divisional round.
That squad with 4 zeros (x10 after weighting) actually finished in 2nd place, thanks to nailing almost all of their other picks, with only SB Deebo Samuel scoring under 10. The 2nd-5th place entries all picked near-complete brackets, picking winners in 10-11 of the 12 games and getting 1-3 of those wrong.