Written by Cory Puffett
Published September 24, 2019

Scoring can be a finicky thing in fantasy football. Teams can be wildly inconsistent, which brought about a power metric that begins factoring into our power rankings this week. League-wide scoring, too, can be remarkably inconsistent.

Week 1 was, at the time, the fourth highest scoring week in league history. Scoring settings brought about four years ago, in addition to some new defense and kicker scoring changes that don’t guarantee but certainly allow for higher scoring, make it difficult to fall out of our top 40. I certainly doubt we’ll ever get a second sub-1000 point week like Week 11 of 2015 when our 12 owners totaled just 995.30 points or a 90.9-point average winning score like we did in Week 4 of that season.

While we didn’t come anywhere close to missing the top 40, Week 2 was still only the 19th highest scoring week at the time, and now falls to #20 after this past week.

With 1480.12 points, Week 3 was our second highest scoring week in league history. Our six winnings teams averaged just the 5th highest winning score and our six losing teams averaged just the 5th highest losing score. But that consistency put it above every other week except Week 4 of last season when we totaled an insane 1522.80 points.

And now that we’ve gotten through my long-winded introduction to this week’s recap, buckle in because the high scoring was far from the craziest thing to happen the AFL this week.

Our third Game of the Week this season featured Anthony Battle and our first-year league mate Alex Kincaid, and it just may have been the game of the year! Calling to mind last season’s real-life matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Rams, this game is now thehighest scoring matchup in league history with a combined 309.60 points.

Just three weeks into his AFL tenure, Alex is now part of two of the four highest scoring games in league history. He came out on the losing end of this one, though, as Anthony recorded the 4th highest team score in league history with 174.76 points. Alex’s 134.84 points are the fifth highest score in a losing effort in AFL history.

As both the winner of the game of the week and the highest scorer of the week, Anthony becomes the 20th manager to win both the Peyton Manning and Tom Brady awards in the same week. It’s the third time he’s accomplished this feat.

Incredibly, Anthony did not have a single offensive player on his roster record a top 40 all-time performance. What he didhave, however, was five offensive players who finished in the top 5 as their positions for the week, including one at each offensive position.

Alex had three such players, including Keenan Allen whose 37.2 points place him 14th all-time among wide receivers, but it wasn’t nearly enough to overcome Anthony’s historic performance.

And the craziness didn’t end there! Elsewhere in the league, three other managers recorded notable teams scores. Eric Meyer scored 142.38 points and Evan Ash scored 141.22 points, good for 59th and 62nd, respectively, on the all-time team score list.

Meanwhile, Cory Puffett’s 134.06-point effort puts him right behind Alex for the 6th highest losing score in league history.

Cory’s losing score is also worth noting because his margin of defeat against Sean Kennedy was less than half a point. Cory has received a stat correction for the Chicago Bears defense in each of the first two weeks of the season, both worth at least 0.5 points, so he and Sean will certainly be watching to see if that score holds up. Serendipitously, it was the Bears defense that even brought Cory back to within such a small margin. Their 25.92 points were the most among starting defenses this week and earn Cory defensive coach of the week honors.

If a stat correction does change the outcome of this game, Sean would then hold the 6th highest losing score in league history and would fall in this week’s power rankings, as I mention below. This would be especially disappointing for Sean as it would effectively waste a 41.0-point performance by Mike Evans that puts him #7 on the all-time single game wide receiver list.

Unbelievably, this wasn’t the only game decided by less than a point. Andrew Perez beat William Battle by just 0.98 points. This makes these the 20th and 21st games in league history that have been decided by 1 point or less. It is also the fourth time, and the first since Week 2 of the 2017 season, that we have had two such games in the same week.

And we can’t stop there with that game, either. Andrew won this game with just 92.14 points, the second lowest total in the league this week. It is the 10th time in league history a team won with a 1-10 breakdown and the margin of victory is the smallest of any of those games. This is also the third time in league history this phenomenon has occurred in consecutive weeks.

Last week, Stephen April benefited from a 1-10 breakdown win. The losing team in that game was also William Battle.

Unfortunately, we can’t quite leave it there with William as, also for the second week in a row, he earns distinction as the worst coach of the week for costing his team a victory by ignoring Fleaflicker projections. Last week he had two failed coaching risks, and would have won his game had he gone withprojections on either one of them.

This week he actually did have one successful coaching risk and earned 3.7 points by starting D.J. Chark over Miles Sanders. One of last week’s coaching risks was starting the Jaguars defense over the Chiefs defense. Well, this week the Jags were projected to score more and William flip-flopped. The Chiefs scored 15.5 fewer points than did the Jaguars and the -11.8-point differential between those two decisions cost William his game against Andrew.

Our best coach this week was Will Massimini, who earned a season-high 29.44 points against projections with two successful roaching risks. He started Carson Wentz over Kyler Murray at quarterback and in the flex he went with Mark Ingram over John Brown.

Will earns a little additional distinction for starting Ingram because his 35.1 points are good for #39 all-time on the single-game running back performance list.

Despite a pretty good week, Will still came up on the short end of his matchup against Brandon Saunders, who actually earns a lucky win with his 5-6 breakdown. Brandon was aided by an all-time performance of his own as Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson scored 43.44 points, good for fourth on the all-time quarterback list.

With Andrew and Brandon both getting lucky wins, our two unlucky losers are, as you may have already guessed, Alex and Cory, who had the fourth and sixth best breakdowns in our 12-team league this week.

And as we finally head into the Week 3 review and power rankings, the only thing left to do is hand out the kicker coach of the week award. This week the award is shared by Eric and Stephen who earned 10.8 points from Green Bay Packers kicker Mason Crosby and Los Angeles Rams kicker Greg Zuerlein, respectively.

I try to mention every manager in every post. Last week I wasn’t nearly successful, thanks to a largely unremarkable week. No player recorded a top 4 scoring performance at his offensive position and Evan was the only owner to post a score among the top 75 in league history.

I think the only owner left to mention is Danny Hatcher. His team wasn’t terrible, despite finishing just 9th in scoring this week. It also wasn’t great, despite scoring 91 percent of its optimum point total. But I didn’t want to stop at just 91 percent (11 of 12) league managers mentioned, so I had to make sure I got him in here.

Check out the review of Week 3 and updated power rankings below:

Game of the Week: Alex Kincaid at Anthony Battle

Anthony earned this Peyton Manning Award in convincing fashion. It is the 20th time in AFL history that the winner of the Game of the Week led the league in scoring, and Anthony is responsible for three of those occurrences.