Written by Cory Puffett
Published December 11, 2018

The 2018 regular season of the AFL has drawn to a close. The playoff and consolation brackets are set. In two weeks we will have a new league champ, we’ll have an order set for draft pick selection, and we’ll have a new host site to look forward to for next year.

First, let’s get to our final league-wide recap of the season and our last power rankings of the year.

Congrats to Eric, William, and Anthony on their division titles. Anthony’s last division title came in the first season of the AFL when we had four divisions of three teams. Congrats, also, to Brandon for beating a pretty hot team managed by Sean in order to take advantage of Evan’s loss to Eric. Brandon is this year’s wild card.

We had some huge individual performances this week. Three players put up point totals that place them among the top 10 single-week performances in league history at their positions.

On Thursday night football, Derrick Henry recorded 12.2 percent of his career rushing total and 21.1 percent of his career rushing touchdown total on just 3.9 percent of his career rushing attempts. Looking back over Henry’s last 29 games of work (back to the beginning of 2017), 30.2 percent of his scrimmage yards have come in four contests against the Jaguars and 14.3 percent of his scrimmage yards came in last week’s game in particular.

That culminated in a 49.5-point outing, good for 3rd all time among running backs in our league. The top four performances have all come in or after Week 14.

If Henry had scored the 8.5 points he averaged through his first 12 games of the season, Anthony would have lost by 6 points to Danny. Instead, Anthony represents the AFL East in the playoffs. He’ll be looking for Henry to find some success against a non-Jacksonville opponent this weekend.

Amari Cooper had a big game against Philadelphia. His 44.7 points rank second all time among wide receivers in our league behind Julio Jones, who scored 44.9 points in Week 12 last season.

Cooper’s overtime touchdown can be considered the difference in Brandon’s win against Sean. As Henry’s performance did for Anthony, Cooper’s puts Brandon in the postseason.

Finally, George Kittle scored 30.5 points on Sunday, all in the first half of the 49ers game against the Broncos. That performance places Kittle 7th all-time among tight ends.

Flash back to September 12 of this season. Andrew spent $18 of his free agent acquisition budget (FAAB) to pick up George Kittle off waivers. The only other member of the AFL to bid on Kittle was Cory, who only offered $5 for him.

This week, Andrew beat Cory by 35.1 points. Cory’s tight end, Jordan Reed, scored zero points. Swap Kittle over and suddenly Andrew has to find 25.0 points from a tight end to beat Cory and knock him out of the playoffs as he did. The next highest scoring tight end in the league was Rob Gronkowski, whose 20.7 points weren’t enough to lift Evan to victory against Eric.

Anthony is the only member of the AFL to put up a top 75 score this week. His 159.0 points are good for 12th on the AFL’s all-time leaderboard.

The rest of the league slacked a bit this week, though not nearly as badly as it did last week. Only Cory failed to eclipse 100 points this week, but the league totaled 1387.6 points, good for just 14th out of our league’s 82 regular season weeks. While 14th certainly shouldn’t be considered terrible, most of the season has been a pattern of each week outperforming the previous one, so overall it was a rather anticlimactic end to the season from that standpoints.

Eric appeared in his 18th game of the week in league history, tying Andrew for the most appearances. This week marks his 12th Peyton Manning Award and he now only trails Danny who has 13.

Anthony led the league in scoring for the 11th time. Only Eric, with 12, has more Tom Brady Awards than Anthony in league history.

Our defensive coach of the week is Adam, who earned 22 points from the New York Giants defense even after they gave up 16 points in the 4th quarter to the Josh Johnson-led Redskins “offense.” Eric is our kicker coach of the week thanks to Brett Maher’s 11 points in the Cowboys victory over the Eagles.

I’ll hold off on announcing official results for defensive and kicker coaches of the year. I’d like to announce those at the same time I announce the passing, rushing, and receiving coach of the year awards in addition to the overall coach of the year awards. If I can get all the required stats compiled by this time next week, I’ll announce it ahead of the championship game, a la the NFL Honors.

We had two lucky and two unlucky owners this week. Danny lost with a 9-2 breakdown because Anthony was our top scorer this week. In fact, Danny scored 124.4 points, which was exactly the average score for our six winning teams this week.

Sean also had an unlucky loss with a 6-5 breakdown. He lost to Brandon. To be fair, though, that was Sean’s own doing, as we’ll get to shortly.

Our luckiest winner this week was Adam, who posted a 3-8 breakdown but was facing our second lowest scorer, William. Adam’s brother, Andrew, also had a lucky win with a 5-6 breakdown against our lowest scorer of the week, Cory.

Concluding our regular season, we have 8 teams with records better than their breakdowns suggest they should be and four teams with records worse than their breakdowns suggest they should be.

Based on that metric, Eric is our luckiest coach this season with a 2.27 WAE (wins above expected). Cory and Brandon both finish the season with a 1.45 WAE as the next luckiest teams.

Will finishes the season a 3.73 WBE (wins below expected). Sean (1.45 WBE), Danny (1.41 WBE), and Stephen (0.73 WBE) are the only other unlucky teams in the league based on season-long breakdown metrics.

There is another breakdown metric worth considering. It takes every time a team finishes with a breakdown of 6-5 or better and counts that as a win and takes every time a team finishes with a breakdown of 5-6 or worse and counts that as a loss.

The first breakdown metric can give you an idea of how dominant a team is. For example, Eric finished this season with a 107-47 breakdown and was the only owner to finish with more than 85 breakdown wins, and it pales in comparison to his 2016 breakdown of 124-30. But say a team finishes 1-10 in breakdown every week for 14 weeks. That first metric would suggest that team should have 1.27 wins on the season. Consider a team that finished 5-6 in breakdown every week for 14 weeks. Based on that first metric, this team should finish the season with 6.36 wins even though they never once finished among the top half of the league in scoring.

Using this second breakdown metric, we find that Eric should have had 13 wins this season instead of the 12 he actually finished with. But the first metric said Eric was the luckiest owner and should have finished with fewer than 12 wins! That’s because Eric’s average breakdown for the season was 7.6-3.4 (between a 7-4 and an 8-3 breakdown). But Eric only finished with a 5-6 breakdown or worse one time all season (it was a 4-7 breakdown in Week 8).

Remember that far better 124-30 breakdown I mentioned for Eric in 2016? Well in that season, in which he also finished 12-2, he had a 2-9 breakdown in Week 4 and a 5-6 breakdown in Week 6. I’ll leave it to you all to decide, then, which was his more dominant season.

Anyway, using this second breakdown metric, Eric ends up on the unlucky side at 1 WBE, tied with Sean. Stephen and Danny both end up a 2 WBE and Will remains the unluckiest in the league a 3 WBE.

Our luckiest owners wind up as Cory and Brandon at 3 WAE, tied with each other just like the other metric said but far more lucky than the first metric suggested. Adam winds up at 2 WAE while William and Evan are both at 1 WAE. Anthony and Andrew both finished with exactly as many wins as they should have according to this metric.

Some leagues run on points like hockey, where a win counts as one or two points and finishing in the top half of the league in breakdown is an additional point. Maybe one day we’ll consider a format like that. But if we take the luck that comes with a head-to-head league I would have a lot less to write about each week, and what’s the fun in that?

Our coach of the week is Anthony. He earned 34.3 points with a pair of successful coaching risks. Just by making a game-day switch to start Tom Brady instead of Jared Goff, he earned 28.3 points. Goff wound up with negative points in most formats, including ours. He earned his other 6 points by starting the Rams defense over the Jaguars defense.

Our worst coach this week was Sean, who started the Texans defense instead of the Packers, costing himself 10 points in a game he lost by just 2.1 points.

William earns “dishonorable” mention in that category as he also cost his team a win with two failed coaching risks. He only missed out on 4.7 points total – 1.7 points by starting Golden Tate over Tyrell Williams and another 3 points by starting the Broncos defense over the Saints defense – but it was still the difference as he ultimate lost by only 1.9 points.

Back in Week 7, Danny had a game in which he cost his team 22.8 points by starting Matt Breida instead of Latavius Murray, the recommended start by ESPN. He didn’t actually cost his team that game because his other three coaching risks were successful and he actually earned his team 1.5 net points with those four risks. But if he hadn’t taken that fourth risk, he would’ve won that game.

There’s plenty more I could say about how that game, and even more importantly Danny’s Week 8 game, would have changed this year’s playoff picture, but that’s not my points in bringing that game up.

Instead, I want to set up a similar error Evan made this week. He cost his team 2.6 points on two coaching risks, far short of his 7-point margin of defeat against Eric. But he actually was successful on one of those risks.

Evan earned his team 8.7 points by starting Lamar Jackson instead of Kirk Cousins. But then he cost his team 11.3 points (more than his margin of defeat) by starting Tevin Coleman instead of ESPN’s recommendation, Spencer Ware.

This doesn’t officially go down as a coaching lost for Evan, but it might as well be. ESPN recommended Evan start Austin Ekeler, Spencer Ware, and Tarik Cohen in his RB and FLEX spots this week, exactly the lineup Evan used last week when ESPN actually suggested he start Tevin Coleman in Cohen’s place.

Evan earned 27.3 points by benching Coleman last week and then decided to put him in the lineup this week. It’s certainly a move he’ll be questioning since, for all intents and purposes, it cost him his first playoff appearance since 2013.

Congrats to our playoff teams as they head into the first round of the playoffs this weekend. Eric will play Anthony since our playoff seeding is based solely on records and tiebreakers, not wild card status, while William and Brandon will face each other for the third time this season. It will be only the second time in league history that division opponents meet in the postseason.

The top bracket of the consolation ladder, which will determine the order in which the first four league members will select their draft position for next year, pits Evan against Stephen and Adam against Cory.

The bottom bracket of the consolation ladder, which will determine the sacko (the last place finisher for this year and the member who will have his draft position determined after all 11 other members chose their spots, will pit Sean against Will and Danny against Andrew.

Good luck to everyone! I leave you with the review of Week 14:

Game of the Week: Eric Meyer at Evan Ash

Entering Monday night, Evan knew that a loss would knock him out of the playoffs, so his season lay in the hands of Adam Thielen. A 17.5-point performance would win the game, a total Thielen had reached in seven of his first eight games this season but only once since Week 9. Thielen fell 7 points short, Evan missed a playoff birth, and Eric finishes the season 4 games ahead of the field.

Week 14 Playoff Picture

This is pretty much spelled out in the power ranking comments, but I figured I’d put it down here for clarity.

Eric and William have clinched their divisions. Only the AFL East and the wild card are up for grabs.

Will, Andrew, Stephen, Adam, and Sean are all eliminated from playoff contention.

In the AFL East, Cory faces Andrew and will clinch the division title with a win or tie. He can also clinch if Anthony and Danny tie each other, a highly unlikely scenario.

Danny faces Anthony in that other AFL East matchup.

Danny and Cory are 1-1 against each other this year but if Danny wins and Cory loses, Danny will win the AFL East with the division record tiebreaker – Danny would be 4-2 while Cory would be 2-4.

Meanwhile, Anthony is 2-0 against Cory this season, so if he wins and Cory loses, Anthony will win the AFL East with the head-to-head tiebreaker.

In the wild card race, it’s down to Evan and Brandon. Evan has a one-game advantage so he will clinch the wild card with a win or tie against Eric. He’ll also clinch if Brandon loses or ties against Sean.

Meanwhile, if Brandon beats Sean and Evan loses to Eric, Brandon would clinch the wild card since he beat Evan in their only meeting of the regular season.

Good luck to everyone in the final week of the season and thanks for another great year of competition!