Written by Cory Puffett
Published December 26, 2018

Congratulations to William Battle on his first league title! He lost in the championship game back in 2015 but returned three years later and defeated his older brother to claim our league’s sixth title. This is the second time a pair of brothers has made the playoffs in the same season in the AFL but the first time they’ve faced each other in the postseason.

Anthony’s 119.8-point performance is the highest score for a losing team in the championship game, beating out Eric’s 119.1-point performance in 2014.

William finishes the year at 10-6, tied for the worst final record of an AFL champ. By no means is that a dig at William or his season. He had a great start, going 7-1 out of the gate. He cooled off for a little while but put things back together in time for the stretch run.

What’s more fascinating about William’s final record is that we’ve never had a league champ with fewer than 10 wins despite having a team make the playoffs in four out of six seasons that wouldn’t have reached 10 wins had they pulled out the championship (i.e., they finished the regular season with 7 wins or fewer but made the playoffs). This would suggest that the teams that have won championships have been competitive teams in their respective regular seasons.

This also is the third straight year in which the league title goes to the AFL Central champion. Seems that going unselected in the division draft may actually be good luck, even if Evan failed to cash in in both 2015 and 2016 after expressing disappointment as not being picked. The AFL West hasn’t served him any better the last two seasons.

Statistics

All of our stat keeping is done for the season and league members will be able to view all stat files on Google Drive shortly. I’d like to point out a few notable stats though

The highest single-game score among quarterbacks this year came in Week 3 when Drew Brees put up 43.7 points for Sean. This stands as the third best game by a quarterback in our six-year history.

The best game among running backs was Derrick Henry’s 49.5-point outburst on Thursday night in Week 14 for Anthony, helping vault him into the playoffs. Henry, like Brees, now stands at number 3 among running backs in league history for single-game performances.

Also in Week 14, Amari Cooper posted the best wide receiver game of the year at 44.7 points for Brandon, helping him make his first postseason appearance since 2013. This is the second highest single-game score for a wide receiver, trailing only Julio Jones and his 44.9-point outing in Week 12 of the 2017 season.

The best game for a tight end was Zach Ertz’s Week 10 performance for Adam in which he scored 33.5 points, good for #2 all-time in AFL history behind a 36.5-point outing for Rob Gronkowski in Evan’s lineup back in 2014.

For season-long scoring records, we only consider points scored by players while on a team’s starting lineup.

Our leading scorer among quarterbacks for the season was Patrick Mahomes, with 344.7 points over 12 starts for Adam. If Adam had started Mahomes over Mitchell Trubisky in Week 1, Mahomes would have finished with 373.8 points and broken Aaron Rodger’s mark of 367.9 back in 2016.

Even more impressively, Mahomes would have done it with just 13 games while it took Rodgers all 15 games, including playoff games on Eric’s championship run, to log his total. Mahomes averaged 28.7 points per game this season, breaking Peyton Manning’s record of 27.3 points per game for Evan in 2013.

Todd Gurley II started in 14 games for William this season and scored 368.2 points. If he had been healthy for the championship game, and assuming he could equal C.J. Anderson’s point total of 24.7 in that game, Gurley would have finished the season with 392.9 points and broken David Johnson’s record for 390.7 for Eric in 2016.

As it stands, Gurley is second on the running back leaderboard and did break Johnson’s per game average of 26.0 by averaging 26.3 points per game this season.

Tyreek Hill scored 249.2 points for Eric this season and averaged 17.8 points per game. While a number of wide receivers have posted higher per-game averages in league history, Hill stands at #2 all-time among wide receivers (and Jalen Ramsey thinks Hill only deserves Pro Bowl recognition as a special teamer).

If Eric had made the championship (which could have happened had one transaction not taken place back in September), Hill would have finished the season with 260.5 points, just 1.3 points behind DeAndre Hopkins and his 2017 season on Danny’s roster.

Travis Kelce set a new single-season scoring record with 226.5 points for Eric this season, breaking the record he set last season with Danny of 192.1 points despite playing in one fewer game. Kelce has scored more points, and averaged more points per game, every season over the past three years. Only Jimmy Graham, on Cory’s roster all the way back in 2013, averaged more points per game (16.5) than Kelce did this season (16.2).

Trade Consequences

One final thing before we look ahead to the offseason. As I was doing my end-of-season stat keeping, I found that Julio Jones and Michael Thomas finished their seasons (both with 13 games played) with just half a point separating them.

Now, this isn’t the closest two stellar players finished on the season in our league. As a matter of fact, Ben Roethlisberger (304.8 in 13) and Drew Brees (304.8 in 13) as well as Matt Ryan (303.4 in 13) and Cam Newton (303.3 in 13) both finished as pairs with smaller differences.

What got my attention about Jones and Thomas, though, was that they were part of a trade back in September, after our draft but before the first game of the NFL regular season. Adam drafted Thomas but wanted Jones. The funny thing is Jones was on the board and Danny took him two spots later, with only Andrew’s keeper (Le’Veon Bell, smh) between them.

Danny was a good sport, though, and accepted a trade offer to swap the two players, one for one.

Now, at the time I felt it was a bad move. I was high on Thomas but I felt that, of the two, Jones had a much better chance of being the top scoring receiver on the year. As it turned out, it was a pretty even trade.

But I was curious to see what affect that trade had and I found one crazy consequence of that trade in my own version of Dave Dameshek’s N “if” L.

If Danny had kept Julio and started him in place of Michael Thomas throughout the season, only one game would have definitely had a different result, and that was his Week 3 game against Cory, a game Danny won but would have lost with Jones starting in Thomas’s place.

During Jones’s bye week, Danny might have gotten that game back because he lost that week but would have won against Anthony if, without having Michael Thomas on his roster, he had moved Alshon Jeffery from flex to wide receiver and started Kenyan Drake in the flex spot.

That game wouldn’t have made changed the consequences of what would have been a loss to Cory in Week 3. That would have given Cory an additional win and all tiebreakers in the division, pushing Cory into the playoffs where he would have faced and beaten William Battle, this year’s champion. Anthony would have missed the playoffs (even if we don’t consider the possibility of Danny winning in Week 8). So Eric would have faced Brandon and won in a very low-scoring affair.

So the championship matchup would have been our two co-commissioners and Eric would have won by a score of 155.4-129.6.

Division Draft

In late April, after the NFL Draft concludes, William and Anthony will participate in the fifth annual division draft. Taking turns, with William leading off, each will select three members of the league to join them. William’s division will be the AFL East and Anthony’s division will be the AFL West. The four remaining competitors will comprise the AFL Central and, if recent form holds true, each will have a 25 percent chance of claiming next year’s title.

We will be switching platforms this offseason. FleaFlicker has no offseason maintenance, though I will not be able to import the league from ESPN until next month. Once that opens, though, we will move over and most data from ESPN will transfer.

Keepers

Two league settings have been adjusted on ESPN in preparation for this move. One is allow keepers in 2019. Ours has always been a single-keeper league, but everything has been done offline to this point. Once we move to FleaFlicker, owners will be able to select their keeper on the website up until our deadline of midnight the Friday before our draft.

Keepers are not automatically assigned to the first round on FleaFlicker as they are on ESPN. However, they also don’t technically become your pick for a particular round either. Instead, they simply remain on your team and everyone drafts in order as if it is a redraft league. So the concept is the same as ESPN’s (keepers basically become your first round pick).

However, the commissioner can go in and take away draft picks from players. So, for example, if William chooses to keep Todd Gurley in the second round next year, I would take away William’s second round pick (his latest second round pick if he participates in a trade involving draft picks and gets a second rounder) to effectively make Gurley his second round pick.

I’ll be more than happy to explain that in more detail to anyone who is confused or concerned about the application of keepers on the new site. The important thing is that we will no longer have to worry about anybody (Adam!) selecting other players’ keepers once we move to FleaFlicker.

The other league setting that has been adjusted is that no transactions are allowed for the time being to ensure that rosters remain as they were at the conclusion of our championship game. Over the course of the next few days, I will go through each roster to determine keeper values for all owned players.

We may explore some keeper opportunities for players beyond choosing a player on your roster and trading for a player on another roster. More on that will come as Eric and Cory begin exploring rule changes this offseason.

Scoring

Scoring will change a bit on the defense and kicker fronts. Kickers will, for the first time in league history, earn fractional points (e.g., 3.9 points for a 39-yard field goal or 6.3 points for a 63-yard field goal). All field goals of 30 yards or fewer will earn the standard 3 points and extra points will continue to be worth 1 point.

We will also reintroduce negative kicker points, last used in the 2015 season. Missed extra points will result in a 1-point penalty. Field goal attempts of 50 or more yards will receive no penalty but shorter kicks will. A missed field goal from 49 yards will result in a 0.1-point penalty while a miss from 18 yards will result in a 3.2-point penalty.

Defenses will return to fractional scoring for the first time since 2015. Defenses will no longer earn 10 points at kickoff for a shutout and there will be no shutout bonus. Rather, they will earn points for things they do well (in many cases, more points than they currently do) and will begin losing points once they have given up too many points or yards.

Point and yard thresholds will be determined by the previous season’s averages allowed by defenses. This year those numbers would have been 21 points and 334 yards allowed (always rounded down to the nearest whole number). Depending on the results of Week 17’s games, it appears that those numbers for 2019 will be 23 points and 354 yards, giving defenses more room for error before they begin losing points.

Once they reach those thresholds, defenses will lose 0.2 points for every point allowed on defense or special teams and 0.02 points for every yard allowed on defense.

Defenses will also earn points for tackles for loss, passes defended, fourth down stops, and three and outs. A full listing of new scoring rules will be available later this offseason.

Fumbles and fumbles lost will each now result in a 1-point penalty – and on the defensive side, fumbles forced and fumbles recovered will each earn 1 point.

The final scoring change that has already been determined is that quarterbacks will now earn 0.04 points for every passing yard rather than 0.2 points at every 5-yard threshold they reach. While ESPN does count hundredths of a point in scoring, it does not display them in the scoreboard. FleaFlicker does.

It’s never been a huge difference. The most I’ve ever seen a quarterback miss out on over the course of a season is less than a point and a half. But theoretically, over the course of 13 regular season starts, a quarterback could lose out on as much as 2.08 points by falling just one yard shy of a 5-point threshold in every game. Now they won’t lose out on any.

Other scoring changes may be explored this offseason, so stay tuned for that.

Other Rule Changes

If any league members have suggestions for new rules or adjustments to current rules, please bring them up as soon as possible. Cory and Eric have not discussed a specific time at which to meet and discuss possible changes, but might do so at any time. All changes to be made for next season need to be discussed and accepted before the division draft on April 28. Any rules discussed after that may not be implemented until the offseason leading into 2020.

2019 Draft Order

The final order of business is the draft order for next year. In order to discourage our members from tanking or dropping valuable players late in the season, our consolation games help determine our drafter order. The winner of the consolation ladder gets to select where he’d like to draft the next season and then the next six finishers in the consolation ladder choose their spots. The four playoff teams go next (third place, then fourth, then second, then the league champion). And finally the “sacko,” or loser of the consolation ladder, gets whatever draft spot is left.

This year’s “draft pick draft” order is as follows:

1st selection: Cory

2nd selection: Stephen

3rd selection: Adam

4th selection: Evan

5th selection: Will M.

6th selection: Danny

7th selection: Andrew

8th selection: Eric

9th selection: Brandon

10th selection: Anthony

11th selection: William B.

12th selection: Sean

Sean had a great run in the middle and latter stages of the season but his team fell apart in the consolation ladder. He was by far the lowest scorer in the league in the first round with fewer than 60 points, the lowest point total of any team this season, and wound up only outscoring Brandon, and by less than a point, after combining the two postseason point totals for each team.

The good news is that the last three teams to finish last in the consolation ladder wound up at least .500 the following seasons – granted one of those team’s was led by Nolan and then relinquished to Viroj the following season. So the “sacko” is not an automatic return trip to the bottom third of the league. It just means you lose a bit of control heading into the following season.

Thanks again to everyone for a terrific season. As any newsworthy fantasy information comes up this offseason I will continue to fill everyone in right here through the Sportsballers blog.