Written by Cory Puffett
Published September 10, 2019

About a week and a half ago, as we got set to enter the seventh year of our 12-team league, named after the Emmy-nominated show “A Football Life,” and abbreviated AFL, I very excitedly pointed out that it would be our first year returning all 12 managers from the prior year.

Alas, it was not meant to be as just 15 hours after our league held it’s draft, one of our members decided he would no longer be playing. It’s certainly no fun to try and find somebody to join a league so last minute, and even less fun to break the news that they’d be taking over a team that had already been drafted.

Lucky for us, Alex Kincaid stepped up to bat and took over Adam Perez’s team. Alex’s older brother, Scott, was in this league’s predecessor, a 16-team league that made it two seasons before we realized it wasn’t going to last in that form.

Alex immediately get to work on making his team more to his liking. He worked out a trade with Cory Puffett (as I mentioned last year, I refer to myself in the third person for these recaps) to acquire Marlon Mack and Tre’Quan Smith while sending away Duke Johnson and Courtland Sutton.

Later in the week we had the Antonio Brown drama to contend with and that led to a second trade before the season had even really started. Hours after AB was released by Oakland, Brandon Saunders worked out his own trade with Cory. Brandon wanted AB and Cory wanted Darren Waller, so the two worked out a trade in which Brandon also received Kyle Rudolph and Cory received A.J. Green, with hopes that he will return from injury for long.

Finally we got to the action on the field.

William Battle, our return champion, kicked off the year with a rematch of last year’s title game against his brother, Anthony. It wasn’t a great game as neither team got into the top half of the league in scoring, and in fact their optimum point totals were the two lowest in the league in Week 1. But William became the third consecutive league champion to kick off the following season with a victory.

With his 9th career game of the week win, William is one away from being the 5th league member to reach double digit GOTW victories. Anthony’s appearance in the GOTW was his 18th, tied with Andrew Perez and Eric Meyer for the most in league history.

While his matchup may not have had all eyes on it heading into the week, Alex’s team certainly earned everybody’s attention by the end of it. He led the league in scoring with 160.48 points. It is the 10th time a team has scored at least 160 points in AFL history. In doing so, he had four offensive players among the top five scorers at their respective positions for the week.

Alex is the first person to lead the league in scoring in his first matchup. Evan Ash technically did it in 2013 during our league’s inaugural week, but we’ll have to discount that for obvious reasons.

Alex’s victim was last season’s newcomer, Stephen April. Stephen scored 135.32 points, which stands as the third highest score in a loss in AFL history. Also third highest in league history was the two teams’ combined point total of 295.8 points.

One team did finish the week between the two. Sean Kennedy has finished dead last in his divisions for the past three years but did come within a game of a .500 finish last year. He looks to continue climbing the ladder and he got off to a great start. His 139.36-point performance is No. 70 on the all-time list.

Sean was helped by three offensive starters who finished among the top five at their positions. Lamar Jackson was the highest scoring quarterback in the league with 25.26 points, good for the 37th highest single-game QB performance in AFL history. Sean also had Austin Ekeler, the second highest scoring running back this week. His 37.6 points rank 19th all time for running backs.

The only RB to outscore Ekeler this week was Christian McCaffrey, who gave Anthony 39.8 points in his losing effort. McCaffrey’s performance places him 13th on the running back list.

Some of you may ask about Sammy Watkins. His 42.3 points (low compared to some, I know, because we’re half-PPR and we don’t offer all the crazy bonuses for reaching arbitrary yardage thresholds) would have made him the highest scoring playerin the AFL this week. Unfortunately that performance wasted away on Will Massimini’s bench in his loss to the 3-time AFL champ, Danny Hatcher. Since I only track stats for players while in their teams’ starting lineups, that performance will be lost to history.

I mentioned Stephen’s unlucky loss, but he wasn’t the only manager to lose despite an above-.500 breakdown. Evan had the 5th highest point total in the league this week but was matched up against Sean.

Meanwhile, our two lucky winners were William, as I said before, and Danny, who fell just outside the top 6 in scoring but was facing Will, one of just two teams to score fewer than 100 points.

Despite earning the “lucky” moniker to begin the year, Danny gets to wear a more favorable title this week as the league’s best coach. His coaching risk to start T.Y. Hilton over Matt Breida not only earned him 19.5 points, but it also made the difference in his game against Will, earning him the victory.

Nobody cost their team a game this week, but we still have to crown the league’s worst coach of the week. For Week 1, that crown goes to Evan, who cost his team 7.22 points by starting the Eagles defense instead of the Bills defense.

Our defensive coach of the week was Sean, who earned 21 points from the Minnesota Vikings defense and our kicker coach of the week was William, who got 18.1 points from Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker. Sean is looking for his second defensive coach of the year award while William seeks his first kicker coach of the year crown.

Check out the review of Week 1 below and this season’s opening power rankings below:

Game of the Week: Anthony Battle at William Battle

William became the third straight league champ to defend his title against the runner-up. Anthony’s conservative Week 1 coaching strategy cost him the game.

Power Rankings

Last year I created a new weighted formula for our power rankings. This year, once again, I have changed things up. No longer are you looking for a higher power score. Under the new formula, a lower score is better. This formula uses several familiar metrics (record, points, breakdown, roster strength, and coaching) and a couple of new metrics (consistency and recency). The latter two won’t start factoring into the equation until weeks 3 and 6, respectively. Most metrics will be weighted differently throughout the season, with some having a heavier influence on teams’ power scores later in the season and others gradually becoming less of a factor as the season wears on.

A perfect score on this scale is 1.0 while the worst power ranking a manager can earn is a 12.0.