The Breakfast League’s third season featured change – a lot of it.
 
First, the league expanded – from ten to twelve teams. And with the departure of Cal Gregg, that meant finding three new owners. The commissioner did either a really good job finding candidates, or a really bad job, depending on whose opinion you ask: RJ Dechow, Al Ohlinger and Alex Annan (college friends of the commish) currently rank in the top five of active members League-wide for career win percentage. The class of ’16 would consistently dominate the league in future play, even if none would win a title until 2020.
 
As the league became larger, the commissioner wanted a way to make it better, stronger, and more fun. He focused on owner involvement, and decided to set in writing a constitution that would rule the league for years to come.
 
Along with that constitution (ratified on The Holiest of Days, Draft Day 2016) came an election – it was written that the commissioner would be elected by a majority of the league. Pancake won re-election to the seat, and appointed Ethan Maas as his lieutenant commissioner.
 
Other changes included an increase in QB passing TD values (increased from 4 to 6), fundamentally increasing the points ceiling for season scores – and a provision was added in to the constitution to allow for league members to concealed carry at league functions. If any member actually took advantage of this amendment, they obviously did it well, because we are all unaware of it.
 
Finally, Sean Alumbaugh didn’t have the first pick in the draft – it was 2014 champ Kaelan Carlson who selected WR Odell Beckham Jr. with the first pick. Two QB’s were drafted in the first round. Notably, rookie Ezekiel Elliott was drafted in the first round by Pancake. The risky move would pay off.
 
It might not have been as high-scoring a campaign as 2015, but the season was easily the most competitive the league had ever been. The season wasn’t defined by individual stories, but by the collective story of a competitive league: when the final week of the regular season arrived, seven of the twelve teams still had a mathematically possible path to the four-team playoff.
 
To make sense of all that chaos, college student Al Ohlinger created the Bubble Tracker – a way to track every possible outcome from the final week. It became a beloved resource for the league for years to come.
 
The playoffs seeded as follows:
#1 Al Ohlinger (10-3)
#2 RJ Dechow (8-5)
#3 Kenneth Pancake (8-5)
#4 Sean Crowell (8-5)
 
The first rounds were blowouts, but in the completely opposite direction of what was expected. #3 Team IHOP destroyed #2 Detroit SB Champs by 44 points. Meanwhile, #4 Team Crowell (remember when I said he redeemed himself?) destroyed the dominant #1 seed, Party Like It’s 1599. And that was how the class of ’16 took the top two seeds in the playoffs, and promptly blew them.
 
The league’s tradition of deciding matches by the 5-point seeding advantage continued, but it was in this way that the 2016 title was easily the most controversial. Kenneth Pancake and Sean Crowell faced off for the title in a match that came down to the very last game of the regular season: Green Bay vs. Detroit on a cold Monday night in January of 2017.
 
The final score from all the players? Pancake 197, Crowell 200.
 
The final score after the seeding advantage? Pancake 202, Crowell 200.
 
The championship is still seen as legitimate; however, this prompted the league to remove the seeding advantage from the playoffs for all future years, as it had a significant role in deciding EVERY league champion in the Breakfast League’s three years of existence.