Written by Cory Puffett
Published November 12, 2019

An epic matchup between two one-loss teams ended with one suffering not just his second loss of the season but his second in a row despite finishing fourth in scoring both weeks.

Eric Meyer held off Sean Kennedy to improve to 9-1 on the year, the third time he’s had at least 8 wins in the first 10 weeks of the season. He’s finished two seasons at 12-2, including last year, and is looking to add some more hardware to his shelves.

Now Eric gets to face Will Massimini, who has finished in the top half of the league in scoring just once in the last four weeks, before the end-of-season division schedule during which Eric will look to solidify himself as the top seed for the playoffs.

Sean did everything he could to win his game. He went with projections this week and finished with 98 percent of his optimum points. He even had the league’s highest scoring starting quarterback, Lamar Jackson, whose 35.42 points put him 39th among quarterbacks in AFL history, and highest scoring starting tight end, Travis Kelce.

Eric totaled barely more than three quarters of his optimum total and he still won by double digits! The bulk of his missed points came from Christian Kirk, who scored 34.8 points on Eric’s bench which would have been the 28th highest single-game wide receiver score in league history.

Even so, Eric had two running backs score at least 30 points as Derrick Henry and Dalvin Cook were the AFL’s top two starting running backs for Week 10.

It goes without saying that this was the game of the week. Eric won his league leading 17th Peyton Manning Award, his fifth of the season, and is now 17-7 in game of the week appearances. Sean falls to 4-7 in his appearances.

The Tom Brady Award goes to Alex Kincaid, his first since Week 1 when he made his AFL debut. He scored 144.72 points, good for 59th on the all-time single-game list. Alex improves to .500 with the win and sits just two games out of the wild card spot despite currently being last in the AFL West.

Overall, scoring remained down a bit this week as our twelve teams totaled 1318.40 points, which ranks 38th among the league’s 92 regular season weeks, seven spots behind last week’s league total.

A big part of that was on account of Danny Hatcher totaling just 69.08 points. That was the lowest team score this season. The only other sub-80 week was Stephen April’s 74.86-point performance in Week 9.

Stephen didn’t do much better, though, as he has now reached four straight weeks with less than 100 points.

Danny had a rough week overall. His optimum point total wasn’t very good, but it was higher than his opponent, William Battle’s, actual point total. Granted he would have also had to go against projections by starting Tyler Eifert over Vance McDonald to have gotten a win, Danny still had a terrible coaching week. He never adjusted his lineup leading up to Sunday’s 1 o’clock games.

Devonta Freeman and Michael Thomas were coming off their respective bye weeks and both played at 1 p.m. but Danny didn’t log in until after 1:35 p.m. and it was too late to put them back into his lineup. Instead he had to pick up a couple players to replace James White and DeAndre Hopkins, who were on bye. Nyheim Hines and Josh Reynolds got him a few points, but in all he still lost a league-worst 15.9 points for that mistake.

I also have a journalistic duty to report a coaching error Brandon Saunders committed this week. Officially, Brandon did not cost his team a win since he earned his team 6.1 points against projections but succeeding on two of three coaching risks. However, the risk he failed on cost him 6.6 points which is more than his margin of defeat against Anthony Battle. Had Brandon held on to the Colts defense instead of cutting them and starting the Saints defense, he would have remained in sole possession of first place in the AFL East.

Anthony, on the other hand, earned his team a league-best 10.9 points and the win by succeeding on one of two coaching risks. His decision to start Phillip Lindsay on a bye rather than pick up Nyheim Hines, who had the highest projection among available running backs, cost his team 6.7 points. He earned that back plus an additional 10.9 points by starting the Baltimore Ravens defense instead of the Chicago Bears, who cost him $49 in FAAB this week and had a higher projection than the Ravens.

Will Massimini and William Battle repeated as defensive and kicker coaches of the week, respectively, and with the same divisions to boot. Will got 32.5 points from the Pittsburgh Steelers defense and William earned 16.3 points from Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker.

Anthony is the first manager to reach the 200-point threshold for defensive scoring this season as he’s up to 203.54 points from the position. Cory Puffett is last in that category with 89.64 points from defensive streaming. Last year’s spread at this point was 167 to 80, so the bottom end doesn’t reflect the same inflation that the top end does.

Our leader in kicker streaming at this point is William, who takes over the top spot from his older brother. William has 111.2 points from kickers while Sean ranks 12th with 67.3 points. The kicker spread through 10 weeks in 2018 was 93 to 56.

In addition to Sean’s unlucky loss to Eric, Brandon’s loss to Anthony was also unlucky since he finished the week sixth in scoring. Our lucky winners for the week were William, who finished 10th in scoring, and Cory, who finished 9th, meaning that the four lowest scorers in the AFL this week were spread between just two games.

Despite the unlucky loss, Sean did keep his 100-point streak alive and his run now stands at 16 games. He’s only the second manager in league history to begin a season with 10 games in a row in the triple digits.

Eric remains the luckiest team in the league by breakdown at 1.9 WAE and joins Evan Ash and Andrew Perez at 1 WAE based on top 6 performances.

Will is the unluckiest team in the league at 1.8 WBE according to breakdown expectations. By top six performances, Will, Sean and Cory all sit at 1 WBE.

Interestingly, despite being one of three unlucky teams based on top six weeks, Cory is the third luckiest team in the league by breakdown at 0.9 WAE. Cory has finished in the top half of the league in scoring seven times in the first ten weeks of the season, third most in the league, but his breakdown is just 56-54, indicating that most of his good weeks are just barely in the top half and some of his bad weeks have been very bad weeks.

Check out the review of Week 10 and updated power rankings below:

Game of the Week: Sean Kennedy at Eric Meyer

We’ve never seen two one-loss teams face off this late in the season and the matchup certainly lived up to the hype as both teams were in the top four in scoring. Eric handed Sean his second loss in a row thanks in large part to a pair of 30-point games from his running backs.