Written by Cory Puffett
Published September 18, 2018

After a great first week of action in which only two teams failed to reach triple digits, and in fact only one team failed to reach 90 points, we had another high-scoring week.

This time three teams fell below the century mark and the total output from the league fell two points shy of last week’s performance. Despite that, nobody fell below 92 points and this, our 70th regular season week, was still the fourth highest scoring on record in our league.

This week’s Peyton Manning Award goes to (Sportsballer) Eric Meyer. He defeated William Battle in the game of the week thanks to two bits of good fortune. Russell Wilson turned the ball over twice on Monday Night Football and William went against ESPN projections by starting Robert Woods instead of Bilal Powell. If either of those two things hadn’t happened, William would be 2-0 while Eric would be 1-1.

William Massimini was our highest scorer this week and takes the Tom Brady Award. Last year he led the league by taking four of these weekly awards. The world may never know how Ben Roethlisberger managed to surpass 40 fantasy points this week, but he paced Will to an output of 151.6 points. That places Will at number 14 on the league’s single-week team scoring list and is the second time in league history he has scored at least 150 points.

Danny Hatcher was about 10 points behind Will and finds himself sitting at 34th on the team scoring list.

While Ben Roethlisberger now sits in the 6th position on the quarterback single-game scoring list for the AFL, his was not the highest score of the week. Patrick Mahomes is now 5th on that list with his 41.1-point effort starting in Adam Perez’s lineup.

A third quarterback, Kirk Cousins, owned by (Sportsballer) Evan Ash, also finds himself on his position’s top 40 list. He totaled 35.9 points in Sunday’s tie with the Packers and, poetically, is now tied for 24th on the list.

Cousins’ top target, Stefon Diggs, snuck onto the top 40 list for wide receivers with 31.5 points in Andrew Perez’s winning effort. He sits right at number 40 in AFL history.

Finally, Eric got 26.4 points from Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, the 18th highest single-game output from the position.

This week’s top-scoring starting defense was the Chicago Bears, who gave Will M. 21 points as he kept them in his lineup even after they surrendered the Sunday night comeback to Aaron Rodgers in Week 1.

Our top-scoring starting kicker was Lions kicker Matt Prater, also owned by Will. Prater scored 9 points under our settings.

Last week, the top six scoring teams all won their matchups. Not so this week, as Anthony Battle had a 6-5 breakdown (i.e., he was the sixth highest scorer in our 12-man league) but lost in his matchup to Will, who led the league in scoring. Meanwhile, Brandon Saunders had a 5-6 breakdown but was facing Stephen, who finished last in scoring this week.

Interestingly, if Brandon had scored just 0.6 more points, we would have had our sixth occurrence of all top six scoring teams winning their games. That has never happened in consecutive weeks in our league and only once has it occurred twice in the same season.

Our top coaches of the week were Brandon and Andrew, who each earned 3.1 points with a successful coaching risk. Brandon started Chris Thompson instead of ESPN’s recommendation, Carlos Hyde. Andrew went with Michael Crabtree in his lineup over Randall Cobb.

Our worst coach of the week was William B. since he cost his team the win with his coaching risk. He started Robert Woods instead of Bilal Powell and lost out on 5.9 points in a game he lost by only 3.4 points.

Danny and William B. each had three offensive players in the top five at their positions. Five other players had two such players. Only Cory did not have a single player represented on those lists.

Interestingly, this is only the second time in AFL history where five starting quarterbacks all scored at least 30 points. Back in Week 11 of the 2015 season, Tyrod Taylor was the fifth highest-scoring starting quarterback when he scored 30.0 points for Will M.

Check out the review of Week 2 and this week’s power rankings below:

Game of the Week: Eric Meyer at William Battle

Travis Kelce paced a strong lineup for Eric while Todd Gurley II gave William a chance to come back on Monday night by finding the end zone three times and converting two 2-point tries. A pair of turnovers by Russell Wilson in his MNF tilt against the Bears was the difference as Eric won by less than four points.