Written by Cory Puffett
Published October 29, 2019

It’s been quite a season for Sean Kennedy. He is the first manager in AFL history to open a season on an 8-game winning streak. This week was a bit of an adventure for him, but it wasn’t the first time. In fact, two of his previous seven wins were more “adventurous” than this one.

Perhaps surprisingly, this was Sean’s first game of the week appearance of the season. Not at all surprisingly, it was his first appearance since rejoining the AFL after taking one-year hiatus in 2015 and then taking over another manager’s team in 2016.

Sean has been terrible ever since returning. He was certainly set back by an awful 2015 roster that didn’t have any good keeper options. Then he made the mistake of not keeping anybody (which included Stefon Diggs) in 2017. But it seems he’s finally righted that ship and is well on his way to his first playoff appearance since losing his only postseason game in 2014.

Since the matchup between Sean and Anthony Battle was the game of the week, I’ll discuss the game itself at the back end of this write up just before the power rankings.

Sean won the game by 2.08 points, which incredibly is only the third smallest margin of victory in his eight wins to open the year. It also was the first time all season that he fell out of the top half of the league in scoring. Ironically, that only happened because Will Massimini passed him during Monday Night Football with JuJu Smith-Schuster, whom Sean traded to Will this past week in exchange for Mark Ingram.

Sean’s team still had a solid outing, despite finishing 7th in scoring the week, and a big part of that was Mike Evans. He scored 37.3 fantasy points this week, tied for the 13th highest wide receiver score in league history and only his second highest total of the season. Evans is the 5th highest scoring receiver in fantasy this season, and three other players on Sean’s roster rank higher than that at their positions!

If this sounds a little familiar to the rest of the league, there’s a good reason for that. Sean’s team is reminiscent of Eric Meyer’s 2016 team on which Aaron Rodgers, David Johnson, Mike Evans, and Travis Kelce were all Top 3 fantasy scorers.

What always separates Eric’s 2016 squad from others was his incredible breakdown. He finished the regular season with a 124-30 breakdown.

It’s going to be very difficult for Sean to equal that mark as he already has 25 breakdown losses, but Eric’s first eight games weren’t that much better than Sean’s have been. Eric was 68-20 at this point that year, only five games better than Sean’s breakdown. It’s a tall order, but Sean is still in it.

Only two other managers this year still have fewer than 30 breakdown losses. Evan Ash has the second best breakdown in the AFL at 62-26 while Eric is just one game behind him at 61-27. The only other two managers with winning breakdowns are Anthony and Cory.

Speaking of, Cory Puffett finished in the Top 6 in scoring for the sixth time this season, tied for the second highest mark in the league despite his .500 record. Aaron Jones led his team in scoring with 39.4 points, tied for 17th on the AFL’s running back list. Deshaun Watson also turned in a great performance for Cory and those two players were the highest scoring starters at their positions in the league this week.

Evan, meanwhile, led the league in scoring to earn his 12th Tom Brady Award, which ranks third all time, and his second of the season. Tevin Coleman scored four touchdowns and had 37.9 fantasy points, which is 23rd all-time for running backs.

Evan’s team total of 173.68 points is the sixth highest team score in league history. It is also the third score of at least 170 points this season, which doubles the total number of such team performances through the AFL’s first six seasons.

Sean’s Peyton Manning Award was his fourth all-time after he won three of them in his first two seasons in the league. He improves to 4-6 in game of the week appearances while Anthony falls to 12-9 after losing the last two games of the week.

Meanwhile, William Battle had another great week, finishing second in scoring for the second week in a row. This time he wasn’t matched up against the highest scorer and he got his second win of the season to stay one game out of the AFL East division lead (yeah, you read that right). William’s total of 141.58 ranks 68th in AFL history.

As a whole, our 12 managers totaled 1,470.30 points this week, making it the 6th highest scoring week in the AFL’s 90-week history.

In this 90th week, we do have a few scoring anomalies to report. Evan’s league-leading score came while matched up with Stephen April, who was our only manager to finish in the double digits – Danny Hatcher barely made it on Monday night with a final score of 100.04.

It’s the 11th time in AFL history that the highest and lowest scorers were matched up against each other. Evan’s 90.56-point victory is the second highest point differential in those 11 games.

Sean, meanwhile, has tied the second longest streak of 100-point games to begin a season with eight of them. This was his 14th consecutive regular season week with at least 100 points dating back to last season, which now stands alone as the second longest in league history, nine games shy of Eric’s 23-game streak that ended earlier this season.

Danny, despite his 2-6 record, has the second longest active 100-point game streak at four.

Andrew Perez is our defensive coach of the week. The San Francisco 49ers were a Week 6 waiver pickup for him and they came up with 24.5 points, well more than his margin of victory against Brandon Saunders.

Our kicker coach of the week is Sean. Vikings kicker Dan Bailey scored 16 points for him on Thursday night to help give Sean an early lead in that game of the week.

Through the season’s first eight weeks, our defensive streaming spread is 169.04 points for Anthony to 78.16 points for Cory. Last year the highest and lowest scoring defensive streamers at this point were 121 points and 63 points.

On the kicking side, Anthony remains in the lead with 90.3 points to date while Brandon has fallen to last place with 53.0 points. Last year’s spread through eight weeks was 78 down to 45.

We very nearly had just our sixth week ever where the top six scorers all won their games. Will messed that up on Monday night by passing Sean and then Cory for fifth in scoring. He winds up our lone unlucky manager this week since he was matched up against William.

Sean, as alluded to earlier, got a lucky win by finishing 7th in scoring and beating Anthony, who finished 9th.

Our coach of the week is Cory who earned 15.7 points by ignoring Fleaflicker’s suggestions for starting wide receivers, going with Alex Erickson and Emmanuel Sanders instead of Marquez Valdes-Scantling and Curtis Samuel.

His opponent, Alex Kincaid, meanwhile cost his team 22.5 points and a win by failing on one of two coaching risks. He did earn 0.6 points by starting Keenan Allen instead of Anthony Miller but he lost 23.1 points by starting Melvin Gordon instead of Latavius Murray, whose projection rocketed up north of 19 points after Alvin Kamara was ruled out in the days leading up to Sunday.

After a very strong coaching week from the league as a whole in Week 7, we took a bit of a dip this week. We took more coaching risks than any other week this season with 15 of them, but were only successful on eight, which ties our high for the season but that came in a week where we only took 11 total risks.

For your luck update – to date, Sean is the luckiest team by breakdown with 2.3 WAE. Eric (1.5 WAE) and Evan (1.4 WAE) are the other two luckiest teams.

By Top 6 performances, Brandon, Evan, Eric and Andrew are now joined by Sean with all of them having one more victory than Top 6 performance on the year.

Our unluckiest team by breakdown is Will at 1.9 WBE, followed by William (1.5 WBE) and Alex (0.7 WBE).

By Top 6 performances, Will joins Cory at the 2 WBE mark with his unlucky loss this week. William sits at 1 WBE.

Check out the review of Week 8 and updated power rankings below:

Game of the Week: Anthony Battle at Sean Kennedy

After trailing by more than 40 points entering the late afternoon slate of Sunday games, Anthony made a huge comeback to take a 1.02-point lead entering Sunday Night Football with Tyreek Hill left for him and Travis Kelce going for Sean. It stayed close throughout but Travis Kelce’s touchdown catch at the end of the first half wound up making the difference as Sean won the closest game of the week.