Written by Cory Puffett
Published November 5, 2019

In six seasons, just five teams have finished with only two losses on their record. Nobody has finished with fewer.

With five weeks remaining in the 2019 regular season, we have three teams in the running to match or beat that mark.

Sean Kennedy suffered his first loss of the season, despite finishing the week fourth in scoring. Eric Meyer has rattled off three straight wins after a terrible Week 6 outing. And Evan Ash, despite losing for the first time since Week 1, still sits at 7-2 and has a two-game lead in the wild-card race.

For handing Sean his unlucky loss, Brandon Saunders undoubtedly deserves a bit of a spotlight this week.

Brandon has never finished an AFL season with more than seven losses, but he sits at 4-5 so far this season. The good news for him is the five remaining teams on his schedule have a combined winning percentage of .400 and three of those games are against his division rivals, all of whom are behind him in the standings.

It’s been a touch season in the AFL East. Brandon leads it but even William Battle’s 2-7 squad is just two games out. And Brandon hasn’t exactly “shown up” for his division games. He holds a 2-1 record against his rivals this season but he’s been among the league’s six lowest scorers in each of those three weeks and both William and Will Massimini rank ahead of Brandon in our league’s recency metric, which looks at the previous five weeks while giving a bit of extra weight to the last three.

Part of Brandon’s woes come from the kicker position. He ranks last in kicker streaming so far this season with just 59 points from the position. But he got a nice lift this week from his quarterback, Russell Wilson. His 40.82 points ranks 13th all-time among quarterbacks in league history.

Wilson’s monster day was a big part of Brandon’s win. He was the only manager to win his matchup despite having fewer top five offensive scorers than his opponent. Brandon had two such players while Sean had three of them.

Anthony had the most top five players with four of them. That helped him to his fourth Tom Brady Award of the season, which ties a league record. Eric won four Tom Brady awards in 2016, Will won four of them in 2017, and William won four of them last year. Anthony has five weeks left this season to win another one and set a record. Of those other three, only William won all four of his in the first nine weeks of the season (he finished just 0.1 point out of winning a fifth in Week 13 last year).

Of Anthony’s four top scoring players, two of them join the all-time Top 40 leaderboards at their positions. Christian McCaffrey scored 38.5 points this week which ranks number 20 among RBs in our league’s history. Tyler Lockett scored 33.7 points which is 33rd all-time for wide receivers.

Christian McCaffrey has had an unbelievable season so far. He has outpaced all other fantasy running backs by more than 30 points to date despite every team he’s faced ranking in the top half of the NFL for fewest fantasy points allowed to opposing running backs.

Anthony’s team total of 155.50 points this week is the 27th highest team score in AFL history. He posted that total despite a rare low-scoring week from the Patriots defense. Their 5.5 points against the Ravens marked the first time all season they failed to score at least 12 points (which was their Week 1 total). Despite that low score, Anthony remains atop the defensive streaming leaderboards for the season with 174.54 points at the position.

He’s also maintained his spot atop the kicker streaming board with 97.2 points coming from that position. He’s on pace to set an AFL record for the highest percentage of his points coming from non-offensive positions since we added a seventh offensive starter to our lineups in 2016.

This week’s Peyton Manning Award goes to Eric. It’s his 16th of his career and his fourth of the season. Only two other managers have ever won four Peyton Manning Awards in a single year, Evan and Danny Hatcher, and they both did it all the way back in 2013, our inaugural season.

Eric will get his chance to set a new season record this week as he faces Sean Kennedy. There has never been a matchup between teams with less than two losses after Week 7 of the regular season until this coming week.

Sean, for his part, doesn’t even have to “bounce back.” Even in this week’s loss he outscored Eric and extended his regular season streak of 100-point games to 15 in a row. Eric and William are now tied for the second longest active streaks at three game each.

William earns recognition as our kicker coach of the week after Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker put up 19.3 toward his cause in a losing effort.

Will, meanwhile, got a much-deserved lucky win after finishing just outside the top half of the league in scoring but he does get defensive coach of the week honors. He started the Pittsburgh Steelers defense and they scored 27 points for him.

Will opponent, Stephen April, was the lowest scoring team in the league for the second week in a row. He also is our worst coach of the week as his decision to keep Kenyan Drake on the bench in favor of Danny Amendola cost his team 23.3 points.

Cory Puffett is this week’s top coach as his decision to start Zach Ertz in the flex over Frank Gore netted him 18.2 points and earned him the win over William.

In all this week, managers took a season-low 5 total coaching risks. Cory’s was the only successful one as the other four risks lost their managers a combined 51.64 points.

As we take our weekly glance as lucky and unlucky teams, Cory once again stands alone as the unluckiest team in the league by top six performances. He is tied for the second most weeks in the top half of the league with scoring with 7, but has just five wins to show for it putting him at 2 wins below expected. Will’s lucky win puts him back with William at 1 WBE.

By breakdown, William is the unluckiest team at 1.7 WBE with Will (1.4 WBE) and Danny (0.7 WBE) behind him.

On the other side, Brandon, Evan, Eric and Andrew each remain at 1 WAE based on top six performances. By breakdown, our luckiest managers are Eric (1.8 WAE), Sean (1.5 WAE) and Evan (1.2 WAE).

Check out the review of Week 9 and updated power rankings below (fonts and dimensions are a little different thanks to an updated version of Microsoft Office – the old one wasn’t compatible on Mac’s new operating system):

Game of the Week: Eric Meyer at Andrew Perez

In yet another game that came down to the final game of the week, Eric and Andrew each had one player going on Monday Night Football. An incredible touchdown catch by Michael Gallup seemed to have Andrew in position to win but a defensive touchdown with less than 10 seconds left in the game allowed Eric to take control of the AFL Central.