Team Owner Luxury Suite

TL DR:

• Sam and Rosie(?) remain undefeated!
• Stefan and Joey remain unvictorious!
• And a great deal of football has already been played…

---

Alright, look…
Obviously this is late. But believe me, I have excuses.
Which I will share below the fold! I know why you all are here.

You want to see your name in bright lights, next to the party hat face emoji.
You want to see your enemies humiliated, dragged through the mud next to the little red X emoji.
I will comply, I am nothing if not a gracious and accommodating commissioner.

And really it’s appropriate that the recaps are all fucked up and late this season. Only three weeks in and things are strange: one of our best teams was auto-drafted and as far as I can tell currently un-piloted, the other is my brother, Stefan appears to to have offended the football gods, and the Slurs literally cannot score points.

So come, join me; I have such sights to show you.

Week 1 Recap

Alec, Rosie(?), Tony, Kate, Sam, Sydney are the Week 1 winners 🥳

Joey, Will, George, Stefan, Emma, Sadie are the Week 1 losers ❌

We were off with a bang in Week 1 with pretty decent matchups across the board. Only one team (Emma) failed to exceed 100 points, but she made up for it with a very cool 96.66.

Sam eked out the inaugural highest score total with 155.52, just barely beating Tony’s 155.46, though Tony does get the player record thanks to Caleb Williams 37.26 point performance.

Our closest matchup was Will vs Rosie(?) with Rosie(?) snatching victory by a measly 2 points.

Week 2 Recap

Will, George, Rosie(?), Emma, Sadie, Sam are the Week 2 winners 🥳

Alec, Joey, Tony, Kate, Stefan, Sydney are the Week 2 losers ❌

Week 2 is when the shit started dribbling down our legs, though only slowly at first. Three teams failed to clear the 100 point threshold, most notably the Slurs, who put up a frankly embarrassing 56.52 points. The Slurs highest scoring starter was Devonte Achane with a respectable 12.3 points. That total was only greater than a single other team’s third highest scoring starter.

Sam retains the single week scoring record through Week 2, also adding the individual player record with Jaxon Smith-Njigba’s monster 42.5 point performance. There were two other players who also cleared the threshold set in Week 1, but JSN takes the gold.

Week 3 Recap

George, Will, Rosie(?), Sadie, Sydney, Sam are the Week 3 winners 🥳

Alec, Tony, Joey, Kate, Emma, Stefan are the Week 3 losers ❌

And finally, we arrive at the present, at Week 3. Five teams failed to clear the 100 point threshold, with the Slurs once again leading the race to the bottom with a paltry, but technically improving, 63.76 points. No point records were broken this week, or really even threatened, leaving Sam in sole possession of both the team and individual player single week point records.

None of the matchups were notably close this week either, though a couple were decided by fewer than 10 points.

At this stage we’ve only got 2 teams who remain undefeated; Sam, who has set the tone as the team to beat this year, and Rosie(?) who is playing her roster as it was auto-drafted…
A bad sign for those of us making choices about our teams.

In a nice bit of symmetry, we’ve also got two teams still looking for their first win. Stefan, who continues to have victory snatched from his hands each week and Joey, who has the highest “Points Against” so far this season, leading Tony by 10 and the next highest by 30 points.

Post-draft Rankings

And now for the most important part, the Official Power Rankings. Lets start with the post-draft rankings so we’ve got a baseline.

Week 1 Rankings

And the Official Week 1 Power Rankings.

Week 2 Rankings

The Official Week 2 Power Rankings.

Week 3 Rankings

And finally, the Official Week 3 Power Rankings.

From the Office of the Commissioner

🎵 Now Playing 🎵

Now for the promised excuses…

In my eternal, selfless mission to provide you all with the most robust, life-affirming fantasy football experience on God’s green earth, I made a deal with the devil.

Well, specifically I made a deal with OpenAI. A deal to develop and launch “CommishBot”; a full-featured, custom-weighted, proprietary agentic AI model built on the GPT-6 Astra framework. CommishBot was supposed to handle all this recap nonsense, answering your frivolous rules questions, reminding you goldfish to set your lineups, policing the blatantly criminal and collusive trade proposals that you send each other, all while retaining the immense wit and crackling prose that you have come to expect from League Management communications.

The price tag for such a project is in the ballpark of $750 million, which I don’t have, since you bozos don’t pay me, so we worked out a bit of a deal (they love this circular financing shit) where we would convert the League Management Office into a data center to provide compute to OpenAI, the cost of which would underwrite the development and operational expenses for CommishBot. As we all well know, standing up a data center is no small feat and more than a little capital intensive, so with the help of the League’s bankers over at SoftBank, we completed a round of debt financing, issuing bonds to fund the development. The bankers tell me that the bonds got a “C” rating which is “wretched”, “indicates a high probability of default”, and “creates an almost certainly unbearable interest burden for the firm.” All I know is the Cs get degrees, so we’re rocking and rolling.

Or we were…

The League Management Office had been gutted and stuffed to the gills with NVIDIA Vera Rubin NVL72 racks, all pleasantly humming away with the sounds of CommishBot’s synaptic activity when suddenly we got a visit from a ComED rep. The accursed rep took one look at the meter and the innumerable GPU racks stretching from wall to wall and started screeching about “utility tariffs” and “customer classifications” and “undue burden on grid consumers”. He forced some inscrutable document into my hand that I outright refused to read, though League counsel has since informed me that it says something about “quintupling” our energy costs and contains a threat of disconnection. This seemed blatantly unfair to me, so I filed a lawsuit (pending) against ComED, though our aforementioned counsel “strongly advised against” the action, erroneously stating that ComED’s actions were “blatantly lawful” and “literally in every contact you’ve signed with them.”

In this catastrophe CommishBot was an invaluable ally, correctly agreeing with all of my points and even helpfully pulling several (probably real) citations of previous cases which set precedent that will surely help our case.

As I settled into the War Room to begin developing our arguments with CommishBot (I fired our idiotic counsel) the office began to shudder with a sound that was most certainly not the pleasant thrum of CommishBot inference. No, instead someone (no doubt the vindictive ComED rep or our know-nothing former counsel) had alerted a gaggle of greasy hippies who were now protesting out front. My excoriations to “get a job” and “mind your own business” was met with hissing, jeers, and more than a few pieces of overripe fruit. Mercifully, the CommishBot development project included plans for several Unitree G1 model robots to act as 24/7 on-premises security. After a few hours of prompting I was finally able to get the units activated and deployed and they quickly dispersed the riotous crowd using their (regrettably) less-than-lethal munition launchers which I had to fight tooth and nail to have installed instead of hands. I did have to go down to open the door to let the bots back into the building (because of the hands thing) but by this time all that remained outside was a slightly-acrid cloud of gaseous irritants.

And so I write to you now with vaguely itchy eyes, ears incapable of perceiving sound at 250hz (on account of all the data center noise), and a heart that could not be more full. CommishBot is still being trained on all former League communications, even a gigawatt scale data center needs time to fully grasp the subtle complexities and delicious nuances of these communications, but trust that soon it will be deployed to keep a watchful eye on all of your perfidious strategies and debauched tactics.

Your China News Roundup:

China Is Holding Sensitive F-35 Parts Diverted to Hong Kong – Bloomberg, Sept 23, 2026

The Chinese government has taken possession of potentially sensitive F-35 stealth aircraft parts that were inexplicably diverted to Hong Kong while being sent to the US from Australia…

UPS was shipping a cockpit canopy and weapons-bay door from an Australian military F-35…

Both parts, supplied by Lockheed Martin Corp., were coated with radar-absorbing material that enhances their stealth capabilities…

Gung-Ho Diplomacy: Chinese Commentary on the Trump-Xi Summit – Sinification, Sept 30, 2026

Much of the commentary, and especially social media and state media reports, focused on the significance of the optics…

…the “exceedingly rare” diplomatic gesture of Trump meeting Xi on the tarmac was useful for signalling prestige stemming from China’s status (see translation from Sinocism of a Xinhua report on the visit)…

Posts that interpreted the cordial reception as a sign of China’s national strength, meanwhile, were widespread…

…Images of guests sitting cosily around tables at the state dinner in the East Room elicited amused sympathy for Trump’s ongoing replacement of the East Wing of the White House with a new banquet hall. When one commenter on the post suggested Trump may be missing the comparatively roomy Great Hall of the People, another opined, “How can that, with everyone crammed in like at some village fete, be compared to a proper grand establishment like ours?”

By contrast, a minority seemed unaware of Trump’s construction projects in DC, pointedly remarking that “American taxpayers would never allow their money to be spent on their leader’s banqueting hall” — a reminder that, within the bilateral relationship, Americans are not unique in treating the other side as a foil to their own domestic frustrations.

Walled-in wealth: US-China oligarchic divergence. – Chartbook, Sept 25, 2026

At the macroeconomic level, the presumption of the 2000s was that China’s “Bretton Woods 2.0”-currency and exchange controls were transitional measures that would ultimately give way to capital account liberalization. That did not happen. Far from it. In 2015, following the near-miss financial crisis, Beijing significantly tightened controls. Ten years on, it is showing every sign of further intensifying those regulations, taking steps to crack down on tax payment and limiting personal movement by controlling passports…

Not only has the ascent of Chinese megawealth in relative terms been reversed, but the top US fortunes are now out of sight, well above the centi-billionaire level.

Both the absolute levels and the trends matter. Together they add up to the conclusion that the forward march of a Chimerica-elite mediated by financial partnerships and tech supply chains, has been halted and any further convergence seems unlikely.

The below graph shows the approximate representation of mainland and Hong Kong billonaires in the global top 100 since 2010.

With regard to political economy the contrast is now stark. In China, the Party has decisively asserted its leadership. AI’s development in China shows no sign of disrupting the new dispensation. In the US, by contrast, the malign coincidence of AI acceleration with Trump’s second term has resulted in a free for all, far more spectacular even than dot com and financialization surges of the 1990s and the 2000s.

In terms of trade and macroeconomic financial flows, decoupling may, so far, be limited. But this should not obscure the fact that in the two leading economies of the world, we are seeing the emergence of radically different political economies of wealth. Call it oligarchic divergence.

Thank you, you are dismissed.

~~~
You all suck
~~~
Love,
Alec