Written by Cory Puffett
Published October 14, 2020

We’re officially through the first third of our season and it’s certainly been a journey. We’ve seen two games get postponed to later weeks in the season. Two other games threatened to be postponed and we had to make contingency plans in case they didn’t happen, including last night’s tilt between the Buffalo Bills and the Tennessee Titans, just the third game in NFL history, and second in our lifetimes, to be played on a Tuesday.

As we continue to make our way through this season, we will undoubtedly come across more obstacles. The most important thing, though, is that we are still competing and making the most of the season we have.

Week 5 saw the most exciting fantasy game of the year to date, with Stephen April and Anthony Battle facing off in the Game of the Week, one that was not decided until the fourth quarter of Tuesday’s game when Josh Allen found T.J. Yeldon in the end zone for a 22-yard touchdown strike to give Stephen the lead and, ultimately, a victory by less than three points.

It was Stephen’s third career appearance in a Game of the Week and this marks the first time he has claimed the Peyton Manning Award. It was Anthony’s 24th career appearance, tied for the most in AFL history; he is now 13-11.

Theirs was the third highest scoring game of the year as just shy of 270 total points scored. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the matchup is that Anthony scored his 133.42 points without a single top 5 offensive performance on his roster. Of his nine starters, though, only his tight end Evan Engram failed to reach double digits.

Evan Ash took our other weekly award, the Tom Brady Award, by leading the AFL in scoring for the 14th time in his career. His 143.36 points ranks 74th all-time in our league, and came thanks in large part to four top five offensive performances in his starting lineup.

In addition to Evan’s four players, including two top 5 running backs, six other AFL managers had two top five performers each. Most notable of them was Alex Kincaid, who sported both the top quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, and the top running back, Mike Davis. Their performances were wasted, however, as Alex was the only manager in the AFL who failed to score at least 100 points this week.

A few potential top 5 performances were left on benches this week. The most notable of them, however, was Mike Williams and the 25.4 points he scored riding Eric Meyer’s bench. Eric had the top WR scorer of the week, Brandin Cooks, in his starting lineup. But if he had started Williams instead of his free agent pickup, Cole Beasley, Eric would have secured a much-needed second victory of the season.

Cory Puffett’s team had been red hot to start the year, but it suffered a huge blow this week as Dak Prescott blew out his ankle and will miss the rest of the season. He’ll look to fill that spot on his roster as he tries to continue his run of consecutive 100-point games. His leading active streak currently sits at 8 games, followed closely by William Battle’s 7-game streak. They are two of five managers who have scored triple digits in each of 2020’s first five games.

Speaking of William, he earns defensive coach of the week honors for Week 5 thanks to a 24.5-point outing from the Baltimore Ravens defense. Kicker coach honors go to Stephen for the 16.7 points Wil Lutz contributed to his victory.

Our defensive spread has ballooned to more than 50 points through five weeks, as William leads the AFL in defensive points with 77.42 and Sean Kennedy brings up the caboose with 24.60. The kicker spread is slightly tighter with Anthony at the top with 56.2 points and Eric at the bottom with 24.8 points.

After two straight weeks of the top six scorers all winning their matchups, we have two lucky winners and two unlucky losers this week.

Anthony was the third highest scorer in Week 5 in his loss to Stephen and William was the fifth highest scorer, but lost to Will Massimini.

Sean was the luckiest winner with just the 8th highest score of the week. Brandon Saunders was just outside the top six, but it is the third time this year now that he has won a game despite not being in the top half of the league in scoring.

Our coach of the week is Stephen. He went against Fleaflicker projections and started Kenyan Drake instead of JuJu Smith-Schuster. The move earned him 9.7 points, which was well more than his margin of victory over Anthony.

Andrew Perez gets the Week 5 Hue Jackson Award after costing his team 28.74 points and a win. He left Devonta Freeman on his bench, at first leaving Melvin Gordon in his lineup despite the possibility (and ultimate reality) that his game would be postponed and then later adding and starting Darrynton Evans because his other players had already gone; that cost him 16 points. He also added and started the Kansas City Chiefs off waivers instead of the Dallas Cowboys, who had the highest projection among free agent defenses. That cost him another 12.74 points. Andrew lost his matchup by less than eight points, so reversing either one of those coaching risks would have resulted in a victory.

William also cost his team a victory by starting David Moore instead of Randall Cobb, resulting in a net loss of 7.7 points in a game decided by 5.82.

In all, our 12 managers took a combined 14 coaching risks, up 75 percent from Week 4. We were successful on six of those, resulting in a net loss of 24.62 points across the AFL.

Our luckiest team of the season so far, by far, has been Brandon. He stands at 3 WAE by Top 6 performances and 1.7 WAE by breakdown. Stephen has also been a bit lucky by breakdown at 1.1 WAE, but Sean is the only other manager who has Top 6 luck with one more win than expected (he has yet to be a top 6 scorer in a week in 2020).

By Top 6 performances, four managers currently sit at 1 WBE (Cory, Will, Eric, and Anthony). Eric has had the worst luck of them all by breakdown at 1.3 WBE.

Stephen currently has the best playoff odds in the league with an 81.3 percent chance of making it there according to Playoff Computer. William (61.8%) and Brandon (58.5%) have the next two best chances despite being in the same division.

Division odds give Stephen a 70 percent chance of winning the AFL Central, Cory a 50 percent chance of winning the AFL East, and William a 43.5 percent chance of winning the AFL West.

Below is our recap of Week 5 and this week’s power rankings:

Game of the Week: Stephen April vs Anthony Battle

In a game that truly lived up to the hype, Anthony trailed for less than one minute when Tom Brady threw an incompletion to start the week and then never trailed again until Josh Allen threw a 22-yard touchdown pass to T.J. Yeldon in the fourth quarter of just the third Tuesday Night Football game in NFL history to give Stephen the victory and a 5-0 start to the 2020 season!