In this week's P.O. Box:

On Sunday I was in California eating burritos and drinking Modelos with my college buddies.

On Thursday, I was quoted in an ESPN article about a massive cheating scandal that rocked the fantasy space.

So ya, it’s been quite a week.

When I landed back in Boston on Monday after a red-eye, I had a mountain of unread messages in a group chat with our Stat Chasing crew. The contents of those messages would result in uncovering the largest fantasy football scandal since Ethangate.

We had collectively registered a team in the NFFC’s “Hold ‘Em” playoff contest and talked about it on a show during our Playoff Contest week on Ship Chasing.

As far as fantasy playoff contests go, the NFFC format features almost Byzantine-level complexities.

Fortunately, Ben Gretch—my co-host on Ship Chasing—and the Stat Chasing Fellas (Sackreligious and DricoOut) were up for the challenge.

Thanks to their obsessing over the format, they had positioned our squad to legitimately compete for the $150,000 top prize in the contest with some sharp moves.

Part of that obsession involved hawking teams similar to ours at the top of the leaderboard and figuring out ways to out-maneuver them with our own lineup decisions. In doing so, they uncovered that an NFFC employee had illegally altered one of our competitor’s lineups post-lock on two different occasions.

I won’t belabor all of the details. If you want the full sequence of events, you can watch this (excruciatingly long!?) 45-minute video we posted on Wednesday night that goes through everything blow by blow, including how we discovered a close connection between the cheating employee and the competitor:

But things went parabolic after we went live with the news.

Mathew RT’d it. Jeff Edelstein wrote it up for Rotogrinders. Major news outlets picked it up (s/o Fox News!), including the aforementioned ESPN piece that David Purdum interviewed me for.

And it didn’t end there.

Despite the NFFC guaranteeing everyone that this was an isolated incident, we received a tip on Thursday night that indicated it was not:

That brings us up to the present, but this story is very much not over. We still have lots to learn about how many times this cheating occurred.

It feels good to have helped uncover this (Gretch, Drico, and Sackreligious did all of the heavy lifting) and bring it to the masses, but it’s been a legitimately draining and time-consuming saga.

It also feels shitty to have recommended our Ship Chasing audience play on a site that could allow this to happen.

And as I said to Purdum, the seeds of distrust will unfortunately spread far beyond the NFFC walls to all other fantasy operators.

If there’s any silver lining here, it’s that we hopefully get even more transparency from the sites we do continue to play on and trust.

But for now, let’s try our best to keep our eyes on the real scandal this week…the public learning that I’m 36 years old.

Did you really have to do me like that, David?

💎 Conference Championship Pick ‘Ems. On Fantasy Life, pivoted from Hidden Gems and put together a correlated entry for the Niners/Lions game with my reasoning behind the selections. You can tail it here.

☣ NFFC Cheating Scandal & Barstool/Draftkings Deal. Classic LOLz ep.

🏆 Fantasy Life roundup. Recapped the Bills collapse to the Chiefs, the wild coaching carousel, and the two conference championship x-factors.

💪 Swolecast: Draftkings Conference Championship picks. The episode where Davis pulled a hammy.

☕ Divisional Round DFS Recap & Playoff Best Ball Sweats. We recap our action on Underdog Fantasy from the Divisional Round weekend, including Battle Royale teams, advancing playoff best ball lineups, and some Pick 'Em sweats.

🍾 Gil’s Shootout Recap & Super Bowl Conspiracies. Jack returns to the Club to recap his performance at Gil's shootout and his beloved Ravens making the AFC Championship game.

Book #1: Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results by Shane Parris

Progress: 50%

I had previously planned to use today’s edition to share some of the feedback from the Book Club form I circulated last week and hone in on some selections for February, but, um, things came up.

I’ll save that for next week and give us time to wrap up Clear Thinking.

I loved this bit from Shane about how so many of our “decisions” aren’t driven by “reasoning” but rather by our “defaults.” I’ve gotten better about this over the years, but it’s still so hard not to react impulsively. Nail this to the goddamn wall and stare at it every day:

“None of these examples count as decisions. That doesn’t mean we’re not responsible for them. We are! It simply means we’re not reasoning. We are not consciously thinking. Instead, we’re reacting, and giving up our deciding moment to our defaults. It’s in these moments that we often do something contrary to what we’d decide is best if we reasoned instead of reacted. When we react without reason, we cause more problems than we solve. If only we had the hindsight of our future selves as out foresight now!”

We got 3 shows on tap this weekend:

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