Written by Cory Puffett
Published December 3, 2019

The 2019 AFL playoff picture gained a lot of clarity in Week 13. For the first time since we moved to a three-division setup, only the wild card spot is still up for grabs. In fact, we came very close to all four playoff spots being locked up before the final week of the season for the first time since 2014.

On Monday night, Eric Meyer trailed Evan Ash by a little less than 15.2 points. Adam Thielen had been downgraded to out and it was too late for Evan to make any moves other than one that would involve dropping Thielen to waivers. His only hope was for Dalvin Cook to score fewer than 15.2 points as he sought to keep his playoff hopes alive.

It was a bleak hope as Cook’s second lowest total all season has been 15.3 points. Things looked even bleaker at halftime when Cook had already reached the 13-point threshold.

Evan got lucky with a fumble and injury to Cook early in the third quarter that kept him out of the rest of the game. Evan snuck away with the win and remains alive in the wild card race.

The other half of that race is Anthony Battle, who could have clinched that spot with a victory against Sean Kennedy this week. Instead, Anthony finished last in scoring for the second time this season. The good news for him is that he owns the head-to-head tiebreaker, so a win or a loss by Evan in Week 14 will earn him a chance to play for a return trip to the AFL Championship Game.

Congratulations also to our three division winners. Eric’s AFL Central title is his fifth division title in six years. Sean is the AFL West champion and earned his first title since 2014.

The AFL East champion is Brandon Saunders, who clinched his third career division title and his first since 2015. He beat Will Massimini and Andrew Perez lost to William Battle to wrap up that division.

Due to regular season losses to both Evan and Anthony, Brandon has already been relegated to the #4 seed for the playoffs. Eric can clinch the #1 seed with a victory regardless of other outcomes thanks to his Week 10 victory against Sean.

All in all, Week 13 was a fairly low scoring week as the twelve teams totaled 1,320.30 points, the 37th highest total in our league’s 95 regular season weeks. It was our highest total of the last four weeks.

Despite that, we actually had two managers post top 75 all-time single-game team scores, the most since Week 8.

Stephen April hadn’t reached the 100-point threshold in six weeks, one of the longest futility streaks in league history. His guys broke through in a big way and totaled 162.12 points in Week 13, good for the 11th most in league history. This marks Stephen’s first Tom Brady Award since joining the AFL in 2018.

William, like Stephen, came into Week 13 fighting to avoid a 10th loss. He did so with a 143.06-point effort, good for 67th in league history.

We didn’t have any players turn in top 40 all-time individual performances at their positions. As for weekly top five performers, it was the first time since Week 6 that Lamar Jackson played and didn’t appear as a top 5 quarterback in the AFL.

Despite a below-average fantasy effort from Jackson, Sean won his fifth career Peyton Manning Award and extended his 100-point streak to 19 straight regular season games. If he scores 100 points in Week 14 he will be just the second manager ever to do so in every game of a regular season, joining Eric’s 2018 campaign. He also is now just four regular season games shy of Eric’s record 23-game 100-point streak.

The two managers with the longest 100-point streaks behind Sean are Danny Hatcher at three games and Cory Puffett at two games.

Our coach of the week is Alex Kincaid. He took two coaching risks this week by starting O.J. Howard instead of Jimmy Graham and Royce Freeman instead of Latavius Murray and earned his team a league best 10.8 points thanks to them.

Alex is also our defensive streaming coach of the week as New Orleans Saints kicker Wil Lutz contributed 18.4 points to his winning effort. The victory earns Alex at least a .500 record in his first season in the AFL with a team he took over after the draft.

Our defensive coach of the week, Stephen, earned 23.0 points from the LA Rams defense that had an answer for everything the Cardinals tried to do this week.

The worst coach of Week 13 is actually one of the best coaches this season. Will failed on two coaching risks, costing his team 12.18 points. He went against projections by starting Kyler Murray instead of Carson Wentz and he cut Chase Edmonds in favor of adding Jay Ajayi, who had a lower projection and wound up scoring fewer points.

Evan earned a lucky victory against Eric as he finished just 9th in scoring. Our unlucky loser this week was Danny, who was 4th in scoring but suffered his league-leading 10th loss of the year.

Check out the review of Week 13 and updated power rankings below:

Game of the Week: Sean Kennedy at Anthony Battle

In what could have been a playoff-clinching game for one of 2019’s most volatile teams, Anthony finished dead last in scoring, giving Sean a division-clinching win and putting himself at risk of missing the playoffs altogether.