Written by Cory Puffett
Published October 1, 2019

Last week, we saw the second most points scored in a single week in AFL history and I led off the write up by discussing how finicky scoring can be in fantasy football.

Just a week later, our 12 teams combined for just 1269.90 points, thanks in part to half the league falling below the 100-point threshold. The last time we had six such teams in our league was the final week of the 2017 regular season and we still put up nearly 80 more points that week.

In fact, that week still ranks at #25 all-time for our league! You have to go back to Week 9 of that 2017 season to find a week in which we scored fewer points than we did this past weekend. It’s the first time since then that we had a week that did not register as a top 40 scoring week.

Only one manager recorded a top 75 single-game score. Eric Meyer’s 149.6-point effort is #35 in league history. He had the league’s top quarterback and wide receiver this week, the Buccaneers duo of Jameis Winston and Chris Godwin. For his part, Godwin’s 35.2-point performance ranks tied for 23rd in league history among wide receivers.

The only other top-40 player performance of the week came in the same game, for Eric’s opponent. Nick Chubb scored 39.8 points for Alex Kincaid in Sunday’s early window, giving Eric cause for concern before Tampa Bay kicked off at 4 o’clock. Chubb tied Christian McCaffrey’s Week 1 performance for 13th all-time among running backs.

Perhaps the craziest thing about this week falling outside of the AFL’s all-time top 40 scoring weeks is that all 14 weeks of the 2018 regular season currently sit within the top 33! In fact, 10 of those 14 weeks were, at the time they ended, top 5 scoring weeks in league history!

Eric and Alex both recorded their fourth consecutive weeks with at least 100 points to open the season. Sean Kennedy is the only other manager in the AFL who has not fallen below that threshold now as both Evan Ash and Anthony Battle failed to reach that mark for the first time this week.

Eric is the only manager in league history to open the season with more than 8 consecutive 100-point games (or 88.9-point games prior to 2016), and that came last year when scored at least 100 points in everycontest. Dating back to the 2017 season, Eric has scored at least 100 points in 22 consecutive regular season games.

This basically becomes an Eric-centered recap because I can’t move on until I mention that he played in, and won, this week’s game of the week while also leading the league in scoring. He wins his 13th Tom Brady award and his 14th Peyton Manning award of his career. Both of those break ties for the most all time in league history. Anthony Battle has 12 Tom Brady awards (his most recent coming just last week, before bringing up the caboose in scoring this week) and Danny Hatcher has 13 Peyton Manning awards.

Eric’s 14-6 record in game of the week appearances gives him the second best winning percentage, trailing only Danny’s 13-4 record.

This is the 21st time in league history that the game of the week featured the highest scorer of the week and it is the fifth time it’s happened in consecutive weeks – it has yet to happen three weeks in a row.

Of those 21 times, Eric accounts for seven of them! No other manager has more than three.

And now we can move on from Eric and highlight our other undefeated team after four weeks. Sean led all managers with four offensive players among the top 5 performers at their positions this week, with one quarterback, one running back, one wide receiver, and one tight end. In a relatively rare occurrence, every manager had at least one such player this week.

Sean team has been the most consistent one in the league this year. That’s fairly easy to determine with a simple eye test, as he is the only manager whose team has been among the top six in scoring every week this season. But our new consistency formula confirms it.

To determine a team’s consistency score, you first subtract the average weekly score for all teams in the league so far this season from a given team’s average score and then divide that number by the standard deviation of that team’s scores.

In Sean’s case, that formula reads: (130.48-116.32)/12.89

That produces a result of 1.10, which is the best consistency score in the AFL.

While this is called a consistency score, it really seeks to define which teams have been the most consistently goodteams, as well as those that have been consistently bad.

For example, Will Massimini and William Battle both have lower standard deviations than Sean, which would imply that their teams have more consistent point totals this season, and that would be true. But both teams have an average point total below that of the league average, nearly 20 points below league average in William Battle’s case!

Because of that, William has a consistency score of -1.61. The absolute value of a consistency score indicates that true consistency of a team, so William’s team has been more consistent that Sean’s. But the negative shows that the team is below league average in point production, and it would be disingenuous to ignore that in our consistency rankings. Thus, William ranks 12th in consistency through four weeks.

Alex has been the unluckiest manager of the young season. He led the league in scoring back in Week 1 and is now coming off three straight losses while scoring among the top 6 in each week. He sits at 1.7 wins below expected based on his 30-14 breakdown, which is 4th in the league.

Our other unlucky manager this week was Brandon Saunders, who had a 6-5 breakdown but was matched up with Stephen April, who finished second in scoring for the week.

On the other side, Andrew Perez was our luckiest manager as he drew Anthony, who came very close to being the first manager this year with fewer than 80 points. Andrew posted just a 3-8 breakdown in his win.

Evan, meanwhile, was the first man out of the top 6 in scoring, but William finished one spot below him and Evan pulled off the victory.

To be fair, Evan helped himself a bit in that victory, which had a margin of just 1.7 points between him and William. Evan took one coaching risk, starting the Bills defense over the Eagles, which netted him 3.08 points and the win.

To be fairer, William cost himself the win, the third week in a row he’s done that, by going against Fleaflicker projections. William actually earned 12.28 points for his team by starting the Chiefs defense over the Jaguars. In fact, Kansas City’s 17.2 points make William the defensive coach of the week! But William also took a risk by starting D.J. Chark over Robert Woods, a move that cost him 16.5 points. In the end, that netted him a loss of 4.22 points.

William actually only gets honorable mention for worst coach of the week, though. His brother, Anthony, went against projections by starting the Ravens defense over the Patriots. That coaching decision cost him 28.5 points, far more than his 7.48-point margin of defeat against Andrew.

Our kicker coach of the week is Will Massimini who got 14.3 points from Panthers kicker Joey Slye. That moves Will up to third place in kicker streaming so far this season, behind Stephen and Cory Puffett.

Our top three defensive streamers so far are Anthony, Sean, and Stephen.

Note: At the time of last week’s write up, we had two games decided by less than one point. There were a number of stat corrections in the game between Andrew and William, three that benefited Andrew’s players and two that took points away from William’s players. There were no stat corrections in the matchup between Cory and Sean, so that is the only game from Week 3 with an official margin of victory of less than 1 point.

Check out the review of Week 4 and updated power rankings below:

Game of the Week: Eric Meyer at Alex Kincaid

For the second week in a row Alex appeared in the game of the week, and for the second week in a row he lost that game despite having one of the six highest scoring teams in the league that week. Nick Chubb went off and had Eric feeling nervous until Winston and Godwin combined for 66.1 points and led him to a comfortable victory and a 4-0 record for the second straight year.