Written by Cory Puffett
Published December 15, 2020

Four teams remain to vie for the championship in our 12-team league now that we’ve reached the 2020 playoffs.

It’s been a journey of a season as we’ve had to navigate a lot of significant injuries (one Redditor found that the Top 50 drafted fantasy players by ADP have missed more games this year due to injury than any year previously), players on the COVID-19/reserve list due to positive tests or close contacts, and a number of games being postponed.

The good news is we’ve had no positive tests among our 12 managers and we’ve reached Week 15, something thought might not happen when we made contingency plans back in August.

We have some regular season awards to give out, but I will save those for a later writeup on the off chance we have a significant stat correction on Thursday. But no games from Week 14 were close enough for a stat correction to change the outcome so we have our postseason brackets set!

Anthony Battle will make his third consecutive playoff appearance after beating Brandon Saunders in the game of the week. It was a good game that looked like it would be close for a while, but Anthony has two 30-point performers to give him a significant advantage.

Brandon did extend his 100-point games streak to 11. He’s had 12-game streaks twice in his career so he’ll get to try and equal that next season. Anthony, meanwhile, has scored 100 in four straight games. It would be an eight-game streak, but he scored only 99 points back in Week 10.

Anthony’s highest scorer this week was Aaron Rodgers, who equaled his own performance from Week 19 of the 2015 season while on Evan’s roster. His 33.40 points are tied for 91st on the all-time quarterbacks list. Rodgers and Jonathan Taylor were the catalysts behind Anthony’s 14th career Peyton Manning Award.

Three of Anthony’s offensive players were Top 5 at their positions this week, a mark equaled by Cory Puffett in our league’s other de facto division championship game.

Cory led the league in scoring this week to clinch his 9th career Tom Brady Award and his third of the season. Only Stephen April has led the league in scoring more times this year, though Cory did finish with the better breakdown record between the two.

Four players on Cory’s team scored 20 points and three more were in double digits as he knocked Will Massimini out of the playoffs and into the Sacko bracket of the consolation ladder. Travis Kelce equaled his performance from a week ago with 23.6 points, tied for the 50th best tight end performance in AFL history. It’s also the second time this season Kelce has had back-to-back weeks with the same fantasy score.

With 148.64 points, Cory’s Week 14 performance is 59th on our list of single game team scores in league history.

While Cory finished one game ahead of Stephen in breakdown, Stephen had the edge in scoring by about 10 points. Despite that, the two will face each other this week as the #1 and #4 seeds in the playoffs.

Stephen went 12-2 this season and Cory went 7-7 despite the nearly identical breakdowns, nearly identical point totals, and identical 11 weeks of Top 6 scoring. Stephen had one lucky win this season and no unlucky losses. Cory had four unlucky losses and no lucky wins.

Their matchup should be a fun one with the winner arguably the favorite to win the AFL Championship next week. Their Week 2 matchup saw Cory suffer the first of his four unlucky losses, and by a margin of less than two points.

Of course, Anthony Battle might take issue with that. Assuming he can beat Evan Ash in our other semifinal matchup, it’s worth noting that Anthony is the only manager other than Stephen and Cory to rank #1 in any power category, and one of them is recency. He’s been the hottest team in the AFL and shouldn’t be overlooked.

Evan will face Anthony coming off his sixth Bottom 3 performance of the year and second of the past three weeks. He won five in a row before losing this week to Alex Kincaid and will look to rebound. Evan won their first meeting back in Week 10 by less than five points.

Andrew Perez is the first manager in AFL history to win fewer than two games in a season and if he can’t win once in the next two weeks of consolation games, he’ll be the only manager with three Sacko titles to his name.

Though his team has undoubtedly been the worst one of the season, it also took a bit of bad luck to get him to 1-13 and, in fact, he ranks 8th in the league over the past five weeks thanks to two straight Top 6 performances to close the season. Unfortunately, he had to face the second highest scorer in both weeks.

This week Andrew got a boost from another strong performance by Mike Gesicki. He fell just short of 20 points in Week 13 but his 21 points this week tie him for the 82nd best tight end performance in league history.

It wasn’t enough as his 137.88 points will go down as the third highest losing score in AFL history.

Sean Kennedy, the defending champion, closed out the regular season with three straight wins (his 4-2 record in the division equaled that of Cory and Will) and his 141.92 points this week puts him 95th on our all-time single game list.

Monday night’s performance by Lamar Jackson, even with a significant portion of the second half spent in the locker room, was the driver of his come-from-behind victory. Jackson scored 36.32 points, 44th on our quarterback leaderboard.

Though this game could be a preview of our Sacko game next week, this matchup was a pretty notable one this week. The Washington Football Team’s defense scored 30.50 points to give Sean defensive coach of the week while Greg Zuerlein bounced back from a rough outing to score 14.9 points and make Andrew the kicker coach of the week.

The Washington Football Team defense also made Sean the overall coach of the week since it was a coaching risk to start them. He picked them up off waivers this week but Fleaflicker’s suggested pickup was the Carolina Panthers. Sean’s decision earned him 27.64 points, though he did cost his team 9.1 points by starting Gabriel Davis instead of Nelson Agholor.

In all, Sean earned a league-high 18.54 points and his victory thanks to his defensive coaching this week.

Meanwhile, our Week 14 Hue Jackson Award goes to Andrew for his decision to start Kirk Cousins instead of Derek Carr. The move cost him 8.14 points and what would have been his second victory of the season.

In all, our managers took 17 coaching risks this week and were successful on six of them for a net loss of 5.86 points. I’ll have season long coaching stats in my season recap later this month.

Eric Meyer lost his 11th game of the season, the worst of his AFL career, though he really should have been 6-8 based on his own bit of bad luck. He along with Will and Andrew finished with three fewer wins than they had Top 6 performances.

Eric had some strong players on his team including Derrick Henry, who finished his 2020 AFL campaign with a 37.8-point performance on Sunday, #32 on our single game running back leaderboard.

It was a strong week across the league. For just the second time this season, every single manager had at least one Top 5 offensive performer in their starting lineup. Our 12 managers totaled 1,393.12 points, which ranks 21st in our league’s 110 weeks or regular season play. It was the fifth highest scoring total of the 2020 season and our highest since Week 5.

Ten of our 12 managers scored triple digits in Week 14; our only managers to fall below that mark were Evan and Alex Mayo. Alex has now gone five straight games without 100 points, tied for the third longest drought in AFL history. He’ll need to hit triple digits in Week 1 of 2021 or he’ll tie Stephen and Sean for the longest stretch without 100 points (or 88.9 points prior to 2016).

We did have a few strong performances wasted on benches this week. Eric left Baker Mayfield on his bench for the second straight week, and for the second straight week Baker Mayfield was the #3 quarterback in the NFL by our scoring.

Will left Kareem Hunt on his bench last night as he went for 25.6, outscoring his teammate Nick Chubb by a narrow margin. Evan left the #3 wide receiver performance on his bench in T.Y. Hilton. And we had two Top 5 defenses left on benches this week. The Kansas City Chiefs scored the second most points of the week with 24.32 but were left on Anthony’s bench, and Stephen left the Chicago Bears and their 18.5 points on his bench.

My recap of the AFL Championship in two weeks will include noteworthy stats and awards from this season, so be sure to check back then for a fun recap of the 2020 season and a brief preview of what’s to come in 2021.

Below is our recap of Week 14 and this week’s power rankings:

Game of the Week: Brandon Saunders at Anthony Battle

After a huge performance by the LA Rams defense on Thursday night, Brandon appeared to be on track to defend the division lead he’d held uninterrupted since Week 6, but huge performances by Aaron Rodgers, Jonathan Taylor, and Tyreek Hill lifted Anthony to his third career division title and third straight playoff appearance.