Written by Cory Puffett
Published December 22, 2020

And then there were two. We have reached the annual conclusion to the fantasy football season as two teams remain to vie for the league championship.

For just the third time in AFL history, the top two scorers in the semifinals will both advance to the championship game!

Stephen April’s team has been red hot pretty much since the get-go. His first two weeks left him just fifth in our power rankings, but he maintained the average score of those two weeks over the course of the season, something else nobody else could do. He led the league in scoring and became the fourth manager to win 12 games in a single regular season.

Darren Waller kicked things off for him this week with yet another monster game on Thursday night and Josh Allen kept things rolling on Saturday, posting the second highest quarterback score in AFL semifinal history!

Stephen’s 148.22 points rank 60th in AFL history and third among all AFL semifinal performances.

The only manager to keep pace with Stephen over the course of the regular season was Cory Puffett, who finished within one point per game of him on the season and, in fact, finished one game ahead of him by breakdown.

This wasn’t Cory’s week, however, as Drew Brees’s return forced Taysom Hill back to his bench and dud performances by Amari Cooper and Mike Davis contributed to a 35-point margin of defeat. His was the lowest scoring out of the league’s four semifinalists, but he did reach triple digits making this the third time in eight years all four teams scored at least 100 points in this round.

In the other semifinal, Evan Ash handed Anthony Battle his second straight semifinals loss in similar fashion. Josh Jacobs had a terrific Thursday night outing and Jalen Hurts made a splash in his AFL debut, landing among our Top 50 quarterback performances in league history!

His 140.12 points don’t quite land among our league’s Top 100, but that hardly matters when you’ve punched your ticket to the Super Bowl.

It’s an unceremonious end to a 2020 season in which Anthony finished third in the AFL in scoring and had to win seven of his last eight games just to make the playoffs as the AFL West champion by tiebreakers.

Still, Anthony became just the second manager to make three straight playoff appearances. I’d predict the road to becoming the first to make four straight appearances will be tougher without Christian McCaffrey next season, but he barely had him this season so maybe it won’t be such a struggle after all.

This marks both Stephen’s and Evan’s first championship appearances. Stephen had not posted a winning season in his first two years in the AFL leading into 2020 but a strong draft mixed with some savvy trading put him squarely in the title conversation my midseason.

Stephen used his fourth overall pick to secure the league’s leading running back, Dalvin Cook, the only non-QB to reach 300 points while in starting lineups in the AFL this year. Josh Allen turned out to be a terrific pick in the 7th round as the fifth quarterback off the board, though technically he was the seventh since both Patrick Mahomes and Lamar Jackson were kept but with later picks.

His 15th round selection of the Indianapolis Colts, the 14th defense taken, was also a great value considering they are currently the #2 scoring defense in our league’s settings. The second defense drafted back in September was taken 40 picks earlier!

Then came his trades. During the leadup to Week 7 he sent Blake Jarwin and a 4th round pick to Eric Meyer for Darren Waller and a 6th round pick after Eric had given up on his season. Two weeks later he sent Mike Evans and a 7th rounder to Andrew Perez for Calvin Ridley and an 8th rounder.

Three days after that he flipped Kareem Hunt, JuJu Smith-Schuster and an 8th round pick to acquire Chris Carson, Cooper Kupp, and a 7th rounder from Alex Kincaid.

There’s no doubt Stephen is the odds-on favorite to win the title this week, but that doesn’t mean his team won’t have to show up to claim it. Evan’s trip has been far quieter but it’s gotten the job done in some key moments this season.

Last week’s writeup discussed Evan’s past propensity for late-season tank jobs, but his team has won seven of its last eight games. Still, his team has had a somewhat fluky season.

Evan finished the 2020 regular season 10th in scoring out of 12 teams. He spent more than half of the season in the bottom half of our power rankings. He finished 2.9 wins above expected by breakdown and 2 WAE by Top 6 performances.

A lot of those regular season difficulties can be attributed to bad luck. He spent the first overall pick in the 2020 AFL Draft on Ezekiel Elliott, who can’t seem to hold onto the ball. Tony Pollard scored more fantasy points this past week than Ezekiel Elliott has scored in his last 16 games and Elliott had more fumbles lost than the Top 7 rookie running backs combined.

Evan used his fourth-round pick on Courtland Sutton, who appeared in one game before suffering a season-ending knee injury. The very next pick was Marquise Brown in the 5th, who at one point had five straight games with less than 8 points.

Perhaps the best pick of his draft came in the 12th round, however, when Evan selected rookie wide receiver Justin Jefferson to pair with his second-round selection of Adam Thielen. It took Evan a while to plug him into his lineup as he missed both his Week 3 27-point game and his Week 6 35.1-point outburst. He’s been terrific since then, though, with more than 100 points in his last eight games. He’ll be one of Evan’s top keeper options heading into 2021.

We have a couple of other noteworthy matchups this week. The consolation championship will determine who gets first selection of where they will pick in the first round of the 2021 AFL Draft. Since Christian McCaffrey was a first-round keeper this year, he’s not eligible to be kept next fall and will likely be taken by whoever has the first overall pick.

That matchup pits AFL West competitors Brandon Saunders and Alex Mayo against each other. A three-game losing streak for Brandon in the second half of the season ultimately led to his Week 14 loss preventing him from making his third straight playoff appearance. Meanwhile, Alex suffered three straight defeats to end the season and prevent him from being the first new player to post a winning season in his debut since our league was founded in 2013. A first overall pick could go a long way toward making him the first second-year team to go above .500 since 2016.

Meanwhile, the 2021 Sacko Bowl features Will Massimini and Sean Kennedy. Will was a title contender this year but Week 13 and 14 losses to Sean and Cory relegated him to the bottom bracket of the consolation ladder and his was one of two teams to fall below 100 points in Week 15.

Sean, meanwhile, won the Sacko two years ago before winning the title in 2019, so he faces the very real possibility of going worst to first to worst.

The winner of their game will get the 7th pick in the 2021 draft pick draft while the loser will get whatever is left after the four playoff teams get their pick. A loss for Sean might make him regret trading away so many assets. Though he did gain some draft capital for 2021 but with those trades, he may have also cost himself some control over where exactly those picks will fall.

Good luck to everybody, and especially to Stephen and Evan, in the final week of the 2020 AFL season! Next week we will crown our eighth champion, announce all of our season awards, and have information regarding the 2021 AFL rules summit as we look at changes, both definite and potential, for the 2021 season.

Merry Christmas, everyone!