For the first time since Gehlke Bros. Football went online in 1998, Glenn and Sean are tied at the end of the regular season and using the postseason as a tiebreaker. Unlike the regular season, picks are being submitted double-blind to Ben and revealed prior to game time.
After 18 weeks of nail-biting football action, the only thing certain about the outcome of the 2025 GBF championship is that nothing is certain… yet. In dramatic fashion befitting a season that has been filled with drama, the Senior Bro overcame the self-inflicted wounds of a calamitous Week 17 to pull even in the battle for the Surfy Trophy on Sunday — forcing overtime in the contest for the first time in at least three decades.
Consider the script officially flipped. From leading the race for this year’s Surfy Trophy by two games coming into Week 17, the Senior Bro suddenly finds himself playing from behind at the end of it. What looked like it might be the end of a seven-year championship drought is now Sean’s to lose with just 16 games left in the season.
Christmas came early across the NawFuL nation this week for several teams that unwrapped shiny new gifts in the form of playoff berths and division titles. But while Santa may have been handing out presents to the likes of Chicago, Seattle, Jacksonville, New England, San Francisco and a few others, he appears in no hurry to visit the Gehlke Bros, who remain in close contention. But he did have some lumps of coal to distribute.
We’ve reached the final quarter of the 2025 Gehlke Bros. Football season, a four-week sprint to the finish line for both the Bros and the football teams whose success or lack thereof on the field will determine who hoists the Surfy Trophy come January. And for some, the end of the season came sooner than planned on Sunday.
You know you’ve reached December when you tune in for a football game and see snowflakes dancing across your screen and grown men shivering on the sidelines beneath giant heaters while they try to stay warm between plays. Snow, ice, mud and muck — that’s how football was meant to be played. Down and dirty in the trenches where every inch is earned, a victory tinged with the metallic taste of blood is twice as sweet, and the defeats are equally more bitter. That was Week 14 of the 2025 Gehlke Bros. Football season.
Thanksgiving weekend marks the beginning of the home stretch of the 2025 GBF season. Time for some easy pickin’s as we kick back for that holiday smorgasbord that is the Thanksgiving Day menu of NawFuL games — three of them — all designed to be blissfully ignored as we digest the turkey and gravy and one last bite of pumpkin pie. Or maybe not. Seems that somebody forgot to tell the oddsmakers that their predictions were full of stuffing.
There’s a new leader in the race for the Surfy Trophy, and for the first time this season it isn’t Glenn. Call it a November swoon, a midseason stumble, or simply bad juju, but it has been a stunning reversal of fortunes for the Senior Bro, who built a 4-game lead over the first six weeks of the season only to lose five out of the next six weeks as Sean made has made his case for why he deserves a seventh consecutive GBF championship.
If they gave a trophy for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, the Senior Bro would be well on his way to winning it in 2025. Unfortunately there are no awards for such things, and Glenn’s odds of laying his hands on the Surfy Trophy this season just got a lot longer after another Sunday Slump down in the Peach State.
It was described as one of the worst games of Aaron Rodgers’ career. A stinker for the ages by the future Hall of Fame quarterback that left the Pittsburgh Steelers just a game up on their division, and reduced the Senior Bro’s lead in the Surfy standings to a similar margin on Sunday night.
For the first time in nearly a month, the Bros were both in the same and proper time zone for the start of Sunday’s action in Week 9. And if there was any doubt as to Sean’s readiness to rumble after stepping off his 14-hour flight from Vietnam, he quickly put such thoughts to rest in correctly picking the week’s only split to trim a game off his deficit in the Surfy standings.
The Senior Bro may have been vacationing in the Hawaiian islands for several days, but it was far from paradise for his lead in the Surfy standings, which took a tsunami-size hit after Sean notched his first winning week of the season. With another split on the line Thursday to open Week 8, what had been a solid advantage suddenly seemed quite vulnerable.
It was a bad week for upsets, which was good news for the Junior Bro. Sean broke into the win column for the first time this season, sweeping a pair of splits that cut his Surfy deficit in half as the Bros registered their picks from more than half a world apart — Sean from the coast of Vietnam and Glenn from the cerulean blue shores of Maui, Hawaii. But it was the Senior Bro who was left feeling blue by Week 7’s results.
The road to the Surfy Trophy passed through Florida in Week 6, as the Bros split a pair of games down in the Sunshine State. Although he was halfway around the world, the Junior Bro hoped that some home cooking would do the trick to eat into a 4-game deficit as the season completed its first trimester.
Logic took a pass under the light of a full moon as we navigated Week 5 of the season and the first of the treacherous “bye” weeks. The results were anything but kind to favored teams, and there were some notable upsets as the last of the unbeatens fell. But through the carnage, the battling Bros emerged pretty much where they entered the week — still 4 games apart.
Let’s hop into the GBF Time Machine, because we have to go back a few years to find the last time the Senior Bro led the Surfy standings by at least 4 games. It was New Year’s Day of 2017, and Glenn was hoisting the trophy on his fourth consecutive championship, capping his longest streak of success in recorded Gehlke Bros history. It’s too early to tell if there is another title lurking at the end of the current season, but if there is we’ll surely bookmark Week 4 as a pivotal moment.
“Football is a game of inches and inches make the champion.” We must assume the legendary Vince Lombardi knew what he was talking about when he uttered those words more than a half-century ago… or perhaps he was commenting on advance films from the 2025 GBF season. Were Lombardi with us today, he’d surely admire the nail-biter the Bros have so far been engaged in just three weeks into the year.
The Bros took a breather in Week 2, going without a single split just one week after putting up eight of them. And while it was nice to have a break from chewing our nails to the quick (we might still be in recovery mode from the season opener!), it was a week of armchair quarterbacking and considering the what-ifs of splits not taken.
If Week 1 was any indication, strap in and get ready for a wild ride as the Bros embark on the 2025 NawFuL Season. And if the Senior Bro hopes to scratch that “seven-year itch” and shake off his longest championship drought in GBF history, he got a solid if not easily achieved leg up thanks to 8 splits right out of the gate.
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