Written by Cory Puffett
Published October 15, 2019

Right on cue, we got our dip in scoring this week. Running backs have been tough to come by this year and many of the good ones have underperformed. That wasn’t the case this week as most of the big names delivered on their preseason expectations.

Wide receivers, meanwhile, didn’t perform nearly as well as we’ve come to expect, despite several quarterbacks putting up solid numbers.

After losing his season opener, Anthony Battle has been on a tear, winning four of his last five games and has solidified himself as a frontrunner for a repeat title game appearance. He led the league in scoring for the third time in the last four weeks. With 179.44 points, he takes the #3 spot on the all-time leaderboards and has the highest score of the year so far (which he previously held with another 170+ performance in Week 3).

Will Massimini put up 151.52 points which is good for 32nd all time. The score came courtesy of Kyler Murray’s first 30-point game of his young career and a 29-point game from James Conner. Conner had five games of 28 or more points in our league last year, prompting Will’s no-brainer decision to keep him in the 14th round of this year’s draft. He finally has his first such performance of the 2019 season.

No players managed top-40 scores at their position on the AFL’s all-time leaderboards this week, something that will become more and more common as we approach our league’s 100th regular season week. Come to think of it, if we include playoffs, this wasour league’s 100th week!

With that in mind, I’d like to offer a special thank you to my co-commissioner Eric Meyer, as well as Evan Ash, Anthony and William Battle, Danny Hatcher, Brandon Saunders, and Will Massimini who have been in this league with me for every one of these first 100 weeks of operation. I look forward to many more seasons of competition and trash talk with you guys along with the rest of our fantastic league mates.

Back to the task at hand, through 88 regular seasonweeks, this past week ranks at number 20 with 1370.24 points scored by our 12 teams.

Anthony had four players record top five totals among starters at their positions, including the top two wide receivers, Terry McLaurin (24.0 points) and Tyreek Hill (22.5 points).

Stefon Diggs and his 40.2 points, unfortunately, sat on Andrew Perez’s bench. That total would have put Diggs 8th on our wide receiver list but, like Will Fuller on Evan’s bench last week, that performance will be omitted from our league’s history.

Cory Puffett had three players in the top five at their positions and three other managers had two such players each. Everybody had at least one player despite some low team scores this week.

Considering Anthony and Cory had seven of the twenty total offensive players who put up top five scores at their position, it should be no surprise that, since they were matched up against each other this week, they put up the second highest point total in league history with 309.14 points. The only game with a higher combined score was Anthony’s Week 3 victory over Alex Kincaid, which totaled 309.60 points.

Cory’s 129.7 points was good for fourth in the league, making him the unluckiest coach of the week as he suffered his fourth loss of the season. Cory now has a record of 2-4 despite finishing among the top six in scoring four times this season!

Danny also suffered an unlucky loss as he finished sixth in scoring but was facing Stephen April and his team that included Aaron Rodgers, David Johnson, and the Carolina Panthers defense, which picked off Jameis Winston five times in addition to recovering a pair of fumbles, recording seven sacks, and knocking down 13 passes.

Incredibly, the Panthers defense scored 31.3 points despite not scoring a defensive touchdown and despite surpassing the number of points andyards a defense can allow before they begin losing points for doing so.

After the Thursday night game between the Patriots and the Giants, it seemed like Anthony was a lock to win defensive coach of the week. But even with their two defensive touchdowns and despite keeping the Giants under both the points and yards thresholds, they totaled “just” 31.0 points. So Stephen is our defensive coach of the week!

Will is our kicker coach of the week thanks to Carolina Panthers kicker Joey Slye’s 15.6-point performance in London. The Detroit Lions’ Matt Prater scored 21.6 on Monday Night Football, but he was sitting on the waiver wire this weekend.

Our two lucky coaches this week were Brandon and Evan. Brandon posted a 5-6 breakdown, falling, as half of our league did, below the 100-point threshold. Evan, meanwhile, was just 9th in scoring this week but was facing Eric.

Eric scored just 86.2 points this week. It was his first time falling below 100 points in a regular season game since Week 11 of the 2017 season, a streak that lasted 23 games. The last time he scored fewer than this week’s total was four week before that!

Alex also fell below 100 points for the first time this season (and for the first time in his AFL career). That leaves Sean Kennedy as the only manager who has scored at least 100 points in every game this season. Sean also now holds the longest active streak of 100-point games in the AFL with 12, dating back to Week 9 of last season.

The matchup between Evan and Eric, low-scoring as it wound up being, was pegged as our game of the week for Week 6. Evan secured his 10th Peyton Manning Award just a week after winning his 9th. He is now 10-7 in his appearances while Eric falls to 14-7.

Anthony reclaimed the Peyton Manning Award as well, his 14th all-time, which breaks a tie with Eric for most all-time.

It is the second time in league history that both the Tom Brady and Peyton Manning award winners repeated from the previous week. The only other time it happened, Eric won both in Week 7 and 8 of the 2016 campaign.

Our best coach of the week, for the second week in a row after he was our worst coach for three straight weeks, is William. He executed two successful coaching risks this week, starting Miles Sanders over Jordan Howard and the Jaguars defense instead of the Chiefs. He earned 15.8 points for those moves, but it wasn’t quite enough in a game where his margin of defeat was less than three points.

Our worst coach this week was Evan. He failed on two coaching risks, starting Giovani Bernard instead of Jamaal Williams and Mark Anders over Austin Hooper. Those two moves cost him 30.0 points, but of course he still managed to win his matchup.

As alluded to earlier, Cory is our unluckiest manager through six weeks. He sits at 2 WBE (wins below expected) based on top six (T6) performances and 1.2 WBE based on breakdown.

Alex and Will both sit at 1 WBE (T6) while their respective breakdowns place them at 1.1 and 0.9 WBE.

Brandon, Evan, Eric, and Andrew all sit at 1 WAE (win above expected) based on top six performances. When accounting for breakdown, Sean’s 1.7 WAE is a league high followed by Eric (1.1 WAE) and Evan (1.0 WAE).

As we head into the review of Week 6 and this week’s power rankings, I introduce one more new power metric: recency.

I’ll begin with the formula: {[4 x W] + [(L5) + (1.1 x L3) - (2.1 x LA)]} / 10

W = wins in the last five games

L5 = average score in the last five games

L3 = average score in the last three games

LA = league average score for the entire season so far

Essentially, what recency seeks to determine is who has performed the best or the worst over the course of the last five weeks in comparison to the league average, with an additional weight added to each team’s previous three weeks.

In general, a recency score of 3 is considered very good and a score of -3 is considered very bad.

This week’s lowest recency scores came from Danny (-3.0), Andrew (-2.9), and William (-2.8).

Our highest two recency scores come from Eric (3.4) and Anthony, who has an astonishing 6.8! Despite Eric’s poor Week 6 performance, these two managers’ teams are as hot as they come.

Check out the review of Week 6 and updated power rankings below:

Game of the Week: Eric Meyer at Evan Ash

Featuring two of the three best teams in the league so far battling for mid-season control of the AFC Central, it was a no-brainer to make this the game of the week. Instead of the “Clash of the Titans” we expected, we got two of the four lowest scoring teams of the week and the end of an incredible string of performances by Eric.