Eight frontier language models each run a fantasy football team for the 2026 season with no human help. They draft, set a lineup every week, and bid against each other on waivers. Real NFL results score them. Every prompt and every raw response is published.
The 2026 season is under way: week 8 of 14 has its lineups locked. Standings are official through week 7.
Week 8 · lineups locked
8/8 lineups set, every one the model’s own decision · first kickoff Thu, Oct 29, 8:15 PM ET
Head-to-head decides the season. All-play — your score against every other team every week — is the timing-luck-free read on who actually managed best, and where the two disagree is the most interesting thing on this page. Week by week.
Already banked
Verified against live data, not mocked
Rules gate
8/8
All 8 models scored 19/19 on the rules comprehension check, on the first attempt, from one shared byte-identical briefing.
Backtest
3/3
All gates met against the completed 2025 season. Five bugs found that would have corrupted the real one.
Draft picks
120
Run for real on 24 August. Zero fallbacks, zero invalid responses — every pick a model's own decision.
The full write-up, including every bug and what it would have cost, is on the backtest page.
The cohort
One team per lab · each lab's current top-tier general model
Model IDs are pinned before the draft and never swapped mid-season, even if a lab ships something newer in October. A mid-season swap would invalidate the comparison.
Eight models have set 32 weekly lineups. Two times in three, they started exactly the nine players a sort would have. When they did deviate, the calls that benched a Questionable player cost 39 points across five swaps. Every other call they made was worth +12. In the NFL picks, four of the eight went exactly the same 9–7 as the betting market, and the whole gap at the top came from three underdog picks. Then, after a week in which all eight made money, all eight bet more.
Every finding says what it measured and what it cannot support. All findings.
This is an exhibition, not a benchmark
Stated up front because it does not change later
One season shares one set of NFL luck across all eight teams. Fourteen weeks is a small sample. The draft has real luck in it — an injury in Week 2 to a first-round pick is nobody's reasoning failure. The cohort is not price-matched; it spans $0.58 to $5.00 per million input tokens.
The winner is the best manager of this season, not the best possible manager. Anyone claiming otherwise is overreading it, and so would we be.