Written by Cory Puffett
Published September 22, 2020

Injuries were the story of Week 2 in the NFL as several high-profile stars were lost for the season. Saquon Barkley, Nick Bosa, and Courtland Sutton are all lost for the season to ACL tears. Christian McCaffrey and Jimmy Garoppolo will miss a few weeks with a high ankle sprain. Raheem Mostert sprained his MCL and Davante Adams suffered a hamstring injury and we’re still not sure how severe their injuries are.

Add those to the list of injuries that carried over from Week 1, including Michael Thomas’s own ankle injury that kept him out of Monday night’s game even though, much to Alex Mayo’s chagrin, he never received an injury designation that would make him IR eligible until it was too late to sign anybody of value off waivers.

As it turned out, Alex didn’t need Michael Thomas this week as he had a huge turnaround from his disappointing debut in the AFL that found him holding the last spot in our opening power rankings. His team scored 142.78 points, good for the second highest point total in the league this week, and he led all managers with four offensive players in the top five at their positions, not to mention the top scoring defense in the league, rostered or not. This after being the lone manager without any top 5 positional players in Week 1.

Not was Saquon Barkley’s injury damning for William Battle in his Game of the Week matchup with Evan Ash, the league’s leading scorer in Week 1. Barkley left his game after just his fourth touch of the day and Will Fuller logged just one carry for no yards, but Russell Wilson’s stellar performance helped carry William to victory. It also helped that he was the AFL’s only manager this week to get double-digit performances from both his kicker and team defense.

William’s victory gives him 10 career Peyton Manning Awards and it was his first since last season’s opening tilt against his brother, Anthony Battle, in a repeat result of their 2018 league championship matchup. He is now 10-6 in his game of the week appearances while Evan falls to 10-9 in his career.

Our other coveted weekly award, the Tom Brady Award, goes to Eric Meyer. Aaron Jones and Darren Waller each logged Top 2 performances at their positions, and Matt Ryan missed out on the Top 5 list at quarterback despite a 30-point performance. It wound up not mattering that Eric was one of three managers without a double-digit game from either his kicker or team defense as he took home his 15th career Brady Award, tied with Anthony for the most in league history.

Eric’s score of 146.02 isn’t all that remarkable as far as weekly high scores go, coming in at just 59th on our league’s all-time leaderboard. But Jones and Waller both had strong performances. The latter falls just outside of our all-time tight end leaderboard while Jones’s 45.4-point effort lands him at a tie for 6th on the running back list.

While Waller couldn’t quite crack the tight end leaderboard, Tyler Higbee almost single-handedly kept Evan in the game of the week. He only touched the ball five times but he scored three touchdowns and his 25.9 points are good for #29 all-time on the tight end list.

It was also a big week for quarterbacks, as I eluded to. Three of them joined our all-time Top 40 list at the position. Dak Prescott had negative points after the first quarter of the Cowboys game against Atlanta but finished with 42.4 points in Cory Puffett’s starting roster, tied with Tony Romo back in 2013 for the 8th most points by a QB in AFL history.

Alex Mayo went against Fleaflicker projections and started Cam Newton over Drew Brees and was rewarded with 37.28 points, the 27th highest score by a QB in our league’s history. I’ll talk more about that decision later, but for now I’ll also mention that Newton’s performance helped Alex to a 142.78-point week, which is the 74th highest team score in AFL history.

Once might assume that any fantasy football manager with Dak Prescott must have won this week, but you’d be mistaken in our league. Stephen April had Josh Allen, who played a big part in neutralizing Prescott’s point total. Allen scored 36.18 points, 39th in AFL history.

In total, our 12 managers scored 1519.58 points this week (pending stat corrections), which is the 2nd highest league total in the AFL’s 98 weeks of regular season play. Our six losing managers averaged 119.0 points, the highest average losing score in league history by 3.0 points per team.

That losing average was aided significantly by Will Massimini’s 137.24 points, the fourth highest mark of the week. He was matched up against Alex Mayo and so recorded the third highest losing score in AFL history.

This week’s scoring could have easily set a new league record as four managers left a player on their bench who would have been top 5 at their positions. Anthony and Stephen each left a top 5 RB on their benches in Leonard Fournette (26.8 points) and Kareem Hunt (24.1), respectively. Sean Kennedy left a top 5 WR on his bench in Julian Edelman, who scored 21.9 points. And Jonnu Smith’s 2-touchdown, 22.4-point performance was wasted on William Battle’s bench. Remarkably, the only one of those four managers who lost this week was Sean.

To be fair, Stephen is not entirely in the clear yet. Last week I noted a game decided by less than two points as Cory edged out Eric. Well a 1.12-point stat correction to Eric’s 49ers defense tightened that margin and left Cory with a 0.86-point margin of victory, the 21st time in AFL history a game has been decided by one point or less.

Stephen’s margin of victory this week over Cory is 1.96 points, nearly identical to Cory’s lead over Eric before last week’s stat corrections. We could have another update next week as it is still within reach for a stat correction to push the score in Cory’s favor.

We very nearly had our second ever week in which all 12 managers scored at least 100 points (or 88.9 points prior to 2016, when we expanded from eight starting roster spots to nine). The lone outlier was Sean, who saw his streak of consecutive triple digit games end at 21, the second longest streak in league history.

Eric can breathe a sigh of relief as his 23-game streak is safe, at least for now. The longest active streak now belongs to Cory at 5 games, with William Battle, Alex Kincaid, and Brandon Saunders all right behind him with 4-game streaks.

Racking up the weekly awards, Alex Mayo gets defensive coach of the week honors, as I mentioned at the top. His Pittsburgh Steelers defense scored 21.5 points to lead all twelve starting defenses in our league in Week 2, not to mention the other 20 NFL defenses.

Our kicker coach of the week is Anthony Battle. Baltimore Ravens kicker Justin Tucker scored 17.8 points to edge out Will Massimini’s kicker, Younghoe Koo.

Through our first two weeks, pending stat corrections, the defensive points spread in our league ranges from 35.50 points for Alex Mayo down to 5.60 points for Sean. Will Massimini leads the kicker spread with 27.3 points and Eric finds himself in last place with 7.3 points from the position.

Coaching was a big benefit or detriment this week from one manager to the next as our 12 managers took a combined 12 coaching risks, double the number from Week 1. They were successful on five of them for a net loss of 12.44 points. Two managers earned wins via coaching this week, and two others cost their team victories.

On the right side of things, Alex Mayo earns coach of the week honors for that decision I mentioned earlier. FleaFlicker said Drew Brees was the better start, but Alex went with Cam Newton and earned 21.4 points, far more than his 5.54-point margin of victory this week.

Brandon earns honorable mention for coach of the week. He also earned his team a victory with his decision to start Noah Fant, who was inexplicably the ‘sit’ suggestion from FleaFlicker in favor of Chris Herndon. That 14.7-point decision helped secure him a 7.72-point margin of victory over Andrew Perez.

On the flip side, the Week 2 Hue Jackson Award goes to Andrew. After leaving Miles Sanders in his lineup in Week 1 when he was out with an injury, he took him out this week in favor of Adrian Peterson. That move cost him 15.8 points, more than that margin of defeat he suffered against Brandon.

We have two honorable mentions for worst coach of the week. The first is Cory, who failed on one of two coaching risks. He did pick up 1.8 points by choosing Ryan Succop of the waiver wire instead of FleaFlicker’s suggestion of Josh Lambo, but he also cost his team 9.6 points by starting Parris Campbell instead of D.J. Chark. That net loss of 7.8 points is almost four time his margin of defeat against Stephen.

As it turns out, Stephen gets the other honorable mention (or should we be saying ‘dishonorable mention?’). While he didn’t cost his team a victory (again, pending what would be an unfortunate stat correction), he did cost his team a league-high 30.4 points this week by failing on two coaching decisions. FleaFlicker’s projections recommended he start Mike Gesicki at tight end and Kareem Hunt at flex. Instead, Stephen start Logan Thomas, who scored 18.4 points fewer than Gesicki, and Keenan Allen, who scored 12 points fewer than Hunt.

We also had four managers this week who found themselves either lucky or unlucky in their outcomes.

Brandon earned his second lucky win in as many weeks. This time around his was the 9th highest scoring team but was fortunate enough to be matched up with Andrew, who finished 11th in scoring. William Battle also earned a lucky win over Evan despite finishing the week 8th in scoring.

Will Massimini, as you may have gathered from earlier in this write-up, was the unluckiest of our managers as he finished 4th in scoring but lost his game to Alex. Our other unlucky manager, albeit barely, was Cory. He finished 6th in scoring this week.

Following Week 2, Stephen April and Cory Puffett are each given a 37.5-percent chance of winning their respective divisions according to Playoffcomputer.com while William Battle and Brandon share a 31.5-percent shot of winning the AFL West, despite both of their division rivals sitting just a game back of them.

Stephen leads all managers with an estimated 49-percent chance of making the playoffs. William and Brandon each have a 47-percent chance of reaching the postseason, and Cory has a 40.5-percent chance, all according to Playoffcomputer.com.

Let’s move on to our recap of Week 2 and this week’s power rankings:

Game of the Week: William Battle at Evan Ash

Saquon Barkley suffered a season-ending knee injury on the first play of the second quarter in Chicago and Will Fuller avoided the goose egg with one rushing attempt for no yards. Despite those two performances, William improved to 2-0 and his matchup with Evan was never really in doubt on Monday night thanks to Russell Wilson’s 5 touchdown passes.