Written by Cory Puffett
Published December 9, 2020

A lot of fantasy leagues begin their playoffs this week. Not us; our highly competitive 12-team league only gets four playoff teams, so we are now entering the final week of our regular season.

It's going to be an exciting finish despite one division title and our wild card locked up. Two divisions are still up for grabs. Better yet, the teams vying for each of those divisions face off this week in de facto division championship games! I don’t normally do previews in my articles, but this week I think it’s worth doing just that before my Week 13 recap.

Before we get to those two games, we begin in the AFL Central. Stephen April locked up a playoff spot a couple of weeks ago but with his victory over Alex Kincaid this week, he clinched the division. Stephen joined the AFL in 2018 and will make his first playoff appearance next week. Alex joined us last year and hopes the third time will also be the charm for him.

Meanwhile, Evan Ash has finally broken his cold spell. A win against Eric Meyer makes him 6-6 all-time in their head-to-head and clinches him our league’s wild card spot, marking his first playoff appearance since our inaugural season in 2013 and snapping the longest streak of seasons played without a playoff appearance in our league’s history.

The story for Evan is one of finally not choking. Even a loss next week would give him just one loss in the final six games of 2020. If he wins, he’ll have lost one game in the last eight. It’s a stark contrast to how he’s become accustomed to his seasons ending.

In 2019, Evan started 7-1 and appeared to be a shoe-in for the playoffs. Then he won just once in the final six weeks of the season. In 2018, he started 7-2 and then lost four of his last five. In 2017, he started 4-2 before winning just one game of his last eight. And in 2016, he lost six of his last seven after starting 5-2.

With Evan’s second career playoff appearance, the only original member of the AFL still in the league with fewer playoff appearances is Will Massimini, who made a title run in 2017 but lost in the AFL Championship Game to Danny Hatcher, who left the league after the 2019 season with three career league titles.

Will has a chance to make his second playoff appearance with a victory in the AFL East title game against Cory Puffett this week. Cory lost to Sean Kennedy in Week 12 and his season appeared to be over, but then Sean beat Will this week to set up this title bout.

Cory is 5-4 all-time against Will, but Will got the better of him in a narrow 3-point victory back in Week 8 of this season. Cory has outscored Will by about 170 points on the season but has about 110 more points scored against him than Will does.

Still, Will holds the advantage as he would clinch the division not only in the event of a win but in the unlikely event of a tie, something our league has seen just once in 654 regular season games and which is more unlikely since our league’s scoring now goes to the hundredths of a point.

But, a victory for Cory will knot them up at 7-7 and give him the AFL East title due to tiebreakers. They’d be 1-1 head-to-head this season and they’d both have 4-2 records in the division, so it would go to the points tiebreaker and we’ve never seen anybody come close to outscoring another manager by 170 points in a week, even when they’re not matched up with each other.

Cory’s last playoff appearance was in 2017, the same as Will, where he lost in the wild card round. A victory this week would give him his third straight 7-7 season and his fourth career playoff appearance.

In the other title game, which will be our Game of the Week, we have Brandon Saunders and Anthony Battle in a similar situation to Will and Cory. Brandon holds a one-game lead in the division over Anthony and a narrow 13-point lead over Anthony on the season, but this one won’t come down to points.

Like Will, Brandon can clinch the division with a victory or a tie. If Anthony wins, however, he’ll have a 5-1 record in the division compared to a 4-2 record for Brandon, giving him the division title.

Brandon won the pair’s first meeting of the season back in Week 6 by a comfortable 16-point margin, thanks in part to Deshaun Watson’s 34-point outing. Thing may get a bit dicey this week as his lead back, Antonio Gibson, nurses a turf toe injury and is currently listed as doubtful.

Both managers are on two-year streaks of making the playoffs. Anthony lost in the title game in 2018 and then in the wild card round in 2019. Brandon lost his wild card game in 2018 and then lost last year’s title game to Sean.

The only time these two have met in the playoffs was back in 2013 when Brandon beat Anthony by 1.5 points in the NFC Championship game (we had conferences then).

All-in-all, we have a very exciting week of action coming up as these four teams vie for two playoff spots, Alex Mayo attempt to be the only first-year manager (excepting 2013) to post a winning record (or become the fifth straight to go 7-7 in his first season), and the rest of the league fights for positioning in our consolation bracket, which determines the order in which we select our draft picks in 2021.

Let’s get to our recap of Week 13.

We have to start, once again, with Stephen, the #1 seed in this year’s postseason who will face the winner of the AFL East title bout between Will and Cory next week.

Stephen led the league in scoring for the fourth time this season, something nobody else has done more than twice. With 151.46 points, Stephen’s game ranks 46th all-time in the AFL. Stephen’s Tom Brady Award is the fifth of his career

His biggest contributor was Darren Waller, whose Week 13 game against the Jets doesn’t rank all that highly in NFL history according to Football Outsiders, but who did set a new scoring record in our league. Back in 2014, Rob Gronkowski had a Week 8 game to remember on Evan’s roster when he scored 36.5 points. Darren Waller broke that record this week with 38.5 points!

Also joining the all-time single game list for tight ends was Travis Kelce in Cory’s lineup, who scored 23.6 to put his name in a 4-way tie for 47th. Two of those other three to score 23.6 were Jimmy Graham, both times also in Cory’s lineup.

Cory and Evan each had four offensive starters in the top five at their positions, including two wide receivers. Of note, both of Evan’s Top 5 WRs are Minnesota Vikings players.

Cory’s Week 13 victory over Andrew Perez came down to Tuesday Night Football. Part of what made the game so close was a big fantasy day for Derek Carr on Sunday, whose last-second touchdown heave gave him 32.84 points on the day, just missing our league’s Top 100 quarterback games.

Greg Zuerlein missed three kicks in the game for Andrew. He would have needed to make all of them to give Andrew the victory, but it’s a moot point thanks to a poor coaching decision on Andrew’s part. The #3 wide receiver of the week, Cole Beasley, spent Week 13 on Andrew’s bench, a decision that cost him 18 points, well more than 11.74-point margin of defeat.

You won’t see Andrew named our worst coach of the week, however, because he also made two coaching decisions that earned him points and he finished with a net positive coaching week and didn’t officially cost himself the win. If he had gone with every decision as Fleaflicker suggested, he would have actually finished with fewer points than he did.

Cory, meanwhile, gets the coach of the week nod thanks to the league-high 16.06 points he earned, which is more than his margin of victory. He cost himself 6.4 points by dropping Mason Crosby to add and start Michael Badgley, but he earned 7.66 points by adding and starting the Raiders defense instead of the 49ers and another 14.8 points by starting Brandon Aiyuk instead of Latavius Murray.

This week’s Hue Jackson Award goes to William Battle, who cost his team a league-high 24.6 points and his position as the league’s best coach of 2020 in terms of points earned. He lost 10.3 points by starting Richard Rodgers, who failed to receive a target in the Eagles loss, over Jared Cook and another 14.3 points by starting Jason Myers over Harrison Butker, who was the #1 kicker of the week.

In all, our managers took 18 combined coaching risks and were successful on 10 of them, but suffered a net loss of 10.52 points across the league.

Will Massimini had his second week of the season as the league’s lowest scorer and his point total of 68.12 ranks as the 13th lowest score since 2016.

Despite that result, Week 13 ranks 50th in our league’s 109 weeks of regular season action with 1,306.84 points scored by our 12 teams.

Brandon won his seventh career Peyton Manning Award with his victory in Alex Mayo’s first career game of the week appearance. Brandon improves to 7-15 in his appearances and will hope to make that 8-15 this week. Brandon also extended his league-leading active streak of 100-point games to 10, followed by Eric at three games.

Speaking of the two of them, they split the defensive and kicker coach of the week awards. Miami Dolphins kicker Jason Sanders was the highest scoring starting kicker in our league this week, contributing a cool 14.8 points to Brandon’s winning cause. Meanwhile, the Minnesota Vikings were the highest scoring starting defense of the week. Unfortunately, their 16.16 points went to waste as Eric lost his game to Evan in the final minutes of Tuesday night’s game between the Ravens and Cowboys.

With one week remaining, Alex Mayo leads the league in defensive points with 192.58. The last time we had a season where no manager got 200 points from a defense was in 2016 when Cory led the league with 196 points from the position. Only Alex is realistically within reach of that threshold this season.

Alex Kincaid is currently last in defensive points with 91.68 and in kicker points with 92.5. He’ll hope for a solid week from both positions to get up over 100 in both categories. He’s had four weeks this season that would do the trick.

Our leading kicker coach to this point is Will, with 133.3 points. We’ll see where his kicker streaming lands him all-time at the end of the season but he appears to be about on line with our average kicker leader in AFL history. Brandon is the only manager within 10 points of him entering Week 14.

We had a lot of noteworthy benchwarmers this week in the AFL. Eric could have won his game but he left two big scorers on his bench. Baker Mayfield’s 31.06-point outing was the third highest score by a quarterback this week and Corey Davis scored 29.7 points to lead all receivers. Both were on Eric’s bench. Starting either of them, as long as Aaron Jones remained in his lineup, would have given Eric the victory over Evan.

Brandon left the #2 defense of the week, the LA Rams, on his bench, though he only lost six points from that. And Alex Kincaid left the #5 receiver, Marvin Jones, on his bench.

Interestingly, seven of the Top 11 receivers of Week 13 were either on teams’ benches or were free agents. Both free agents in this group, Rashard Higgins and Tim Patrick, were on Sean’s roster in the past month. In fact, Tim Patrick was cut by Sean just this week and should have started in his lineup according to Fleaflicker projections.

Andrew suffered an unlucky loss this week, his second of the season, despite being the #5 scorer of the week. He’s been a Top 6 scorer three times this season, never higher than 5th, but has just one win on the year.

Sean got himself a lucky win as the #8 scorer of the week.

To this point, Evan has been the luckiest manager by breakdown with a mark of 3.0 wins above expected. Stephen (1.8 WAE), Brandon, and Alex Mayo (1.2 WAE each) are the next two luckiest managers.

By Top 6 performances, Sean now sits at 3 wins above expected. Alex Mayo and Evan are each at 2 WAE while Brandon, Stephen, Alex Kincaid, and William are at 1 WAE.

Eric extends his lead as the unluckiest manager by breakdown. He didn’t suffer an unlucky loss this week but he did finish barely outside the Top 6, so he is now at 3.5 wins below expected while Cory (2.9 WBE) and Andrew (2.2 WBE) round out the list.

Cory remains our unluckiest manager by Top 6 performances as he has 10 of them on the year but only six wins to show for it. Eric is at 3 WBE while Will and Andrew are at 2 WBE.

Below is our recap of Week 13 and this week’s power rankings:

Game of the Week: Alex Mayo at Brandon Saunders

Brandon has historically struggled when his game is highlighted for his league mate mates. Not this week, however. Led by Deshaun Watson and Davante Adams and assisted mightily by his kicker/defense combo averaging 14.9 points between them, Brandon staved off Alex Mayo to set up a win & in Week 14 scenario for himself.