Written by Cory Puffett
Published September 17, 2019

After a very high-scoring opening week in which the AFL scored the fourth most points in league history, things fell off a bit this week. With 1,362.56 total points scored, it barely falls in the top quarter of our league’s history.

Evan Ash was the only manager to record a top-75 performance as his 143.26 points lands him at #53 on the all-time list.

It’s been rare to this point to not see a single offensive player record a top-40 scoring week at his position, but it happened this week. Maybe weeks like this will become more common as we approach the 100th week of AFL play (Week 14 will be the 96th regular season week in league history).

Evan’s league-leading point total earned him his 11th Tom Brady award in his career. He is now tied for the second most weeks leading the league in scoring. He was helped by a number of terrific offensive performances. He had four players in the top five at their offensive positions, one quarterback, one running back, one wide receiver, and one tight end. In fact, Julio Jones and Mark Andrews both tied for the highest point total of the week at the WR and TE positions, respectively.

Having players in the top five at their positions usually spells success. Sean Kennedy and Eric Meyer each had three such players this week, and both won their matchups. In fact, Stephen April was the only manager to win his matchup with fewer such players than his opponent.

Stephen’s victory is notable for a few reasons. Not only did he have no offensive players in the top five at their positions while his opponent, William Battle, managed one with Saquon Barkley, Stephen also won despite having two goose eggs in his lineup. Alshon Jeffery left the Sunday night matchup early with a calf injury and David Njoku suffered a concussion in the first quarter of the Monday night game.

As you might imagine, this probably led to a pretty low score for Stephen, and you’d be right. His 88.66 points were the second fewest in the league this week. This marks the 9th time in AFL history that a team won a game with the second lowest point total in a week, and Stephen’s 3.16-point margin of victory is the second smallest in those games.

Stephen wasn’t the only lucky winner this week. Our Peyton Manning award for the winner of the game of the week goes to Eric, who beat Cory Puffett despite positing a 5-6 breakdown. It is Eric’s 13th career game of the week victory, tying him for the most all-time. It was also his 19th game of the week appearance, which breaks a tie with Anthony Battle and Andrew Perez, while Cory moves into a tie for second place with those two at 18.

As always, with those two lucky victors come two unlucky losers. Will Massimini scored the fifth most points in the league this week, earning a 7-4 breakdown, but fell to Anthony and his 9-2 breakdown. Andrew, meanwhile, came in just behind Will at 6-5 but lost to Sean.

Both Will and Andrew fall to 0-2 with those loses. While the metrics say that neither team is all that good, neither should be in danger of this losing streak continuing indefinitely.

Our defensive coach of the week is Anthony. He had the New England Patriots defense and, in our league, they put up a ridiculous 41 points, but it was only four more than they would have scored if we had identical scoring settings to what we used last year.

Our kicker coach of the week is Will, who picked up and started Joey Slye of the Carolina Panthers and got 17.4 points from him.

Our overall coach of the week is Stephen. He earned 8.2 points and that asterisk-laden win with one successful coaching risk, starting Calvin Ridley instead of putting Devin Singletary in the flex.

Evan led the league this week in coaching points earned with 12.1 thanks to his risky move of starting Josh Allen over Philip Rivers.

Our worst coach of the week was Stephen’s foe, William. He cost his team 12.72 points and the victory by failing on two coaching risks. He started Baker Mayfield over Jared Goff and he went with the Jaguars defense instead of the Chiefs. If he had gone with Fleaflicker’s projections on either one of those two risks, he would have won that game.

Check out the review of Week 2 and updated power rankings below:

Game of the Week: Cory Puffett at Eric Meyer

Eric overcame a negative performance by Drew Brees, who left his game early with a hand injury, thanks in part to Cory’s receiving corps totaling less than 10 points. Eric improves to 6-1 all-time against Cory and is one of two unbeaten teams after just the second week of the season.

Power Rankings

As we head into Week 3, a new consistency metric will be included in the power rankings. This metric will look at how consistently good (or consistently bad) your performances are. Essentially, it take the difference between a team’s average score and the average single-game point total for the league over the course of the season to that point and divides that number by the standard deviation of that team’s point totals.

This metric rewards those who have a low standard deviation and an average score above that of the league and penalizes those who have a low standard deviation but an average score below that of the league. Those with a high standard deviation will generally fall in the middle regardless of which side of the league average they fall on.

In a few weeks, a seventh and final metric will be incorporated into the power rankings: recency. More on that when the time comes.