Written by Cory Puffett
Published October 20, 2020

In a week without a single matchup between teams sporting winning records, and in which only half the league reached triple digits when all was said and done, story lines become very contrived.

Stephen April trailed Alex Kincaid 79.34-67.78 with two minutes of football left in Week 6. On the first play out of the 2-minute warning in Dallas, Kenyan Drake scored on a 69-yard run, lifting Stephen’s point total over 80 and securing him a 6-0 start, just the third time in league history that has happened.

A win for Stephen against Will Massimini this week will equal Evan Ash’s hot start to the 2013 season and would put him in position to tie the AFL record for wins to start a season, which Sean Kennedy set at eight en route to his 2019 AFL title.

Stephen’s 80.68-point winning score is the third lowest score in a victory since 2016, when we expanded from eight to nine starting roster spots.

In our league’s most competitive division so far, the AFL West, Brandon Saunders won his fifth game of the season, though it was just the second time this year he’s been a Top 6 scorer. He was facing historic rival Anthony Battle in our Game of the Week.

The two have shared a division three times since we began our annual division draft six years ago and they also faced off in the 2013 NFC Championship game, which Brandon won before losing our inaugural AFL title game.

Brandon once again got the better of Anthony as he now holds a 7-4 head-to-head advantage in their AFL careers. It was Brandon’s sixth career Peyton Manning Award, something that has more often than not eluded him in his opportunities. Brandon is now 6-16 in game of the week appearances.

Anthony’s loss drops him to 13-12 all-time. His 25 game of the week appearances are the most in league history. He has appeared in nearly a quarter of our games of the week all-time.

Evan was coming off his best performance of the season and a Tom Brady Award, to boot. He was facing Eric Meyer, who he beat twice last season (Eric’s only two losses until the playoffs). Evan followed up his great Week 5 with a terrible Week 6, finishing dead last in scoring for the week.

Eric, conversely, secured his 16th career Tom Brady Award, the most in AFL history. It was the 13th time in league history the highest and lowest scorers matched up in a regular season. Eric’s 86.6-point margin of victory is the third highest point differential in those games.

Overall, it was a low scoring week in the AFL as our 12 teams combined for just 1,257.94 points, which is the first week of the 2020 season that doesn’t appear on our league’s all-time leaderboard. Only six teams even reached triple digits, the fewest since Week 7 of last season with only five teams scored 100 or more.

Eric, however, had a great week. His 161.34-point outing ranks 16th in AFL history and three of his players joined our newly-expanded all-time leaderboards, which now includes the Top 100 performances at each position.

Matt Ryan scored 34.04 points, which ranks 72nd all-time among quarterbacks (keeping in mind we only count performances toward our historical records if they were in a starting lineup). Derrick Henry’s 41.6 points, which ties Joe Mixon’s Week 4 performance from this season for 14th all-time among running backs. And Julio Jones contributed 29.7 points to Eric’s win, which ties his own Week 1 performance from 2015 for 94th all-time by a wide receiver in the AFL.

The only other player to join the all-time leaderboards from our league this week was Deshaun Watson, the only player in the game between Brandon and Anthony to score more than 20 points. Watson’s 34.3 points ties him for 65th on our quarterback leaderboard.

In all, Eric had four players record top five starting performances at their positions in the AFL this week. Incredibly, Eric wasn’t the only manager to have four such performers this week as both Cory Puffett and Will Massimini also had four. Eric had one at each offensive position while Will had two of the top five running backs and Cory had two of the top five wide receivers.

Cory looked to be in a bad situation after Dak Prescott’s season-ending injury last week but he made a good waiver wire pickup and rolled the dice on Carson Wentz.

It wasn’t looking good when Wentz had -2 points midway through the second quarter, but a second half scoring outburst by the Eagles that made their game against Baltimore much closer than it had any business being left Wentz with north of 30 fantasy points for the day and helped Cory secure his fourth win of the year.

Will, looking to keep pace with Cory in a division where they’re really the only two contenders at this point, got an important win against Andrew Perez and finished with the third highest point total for the week, thanks to three 20-point performances and James Conner’s 18.7 points, which ranked fifth among starting running backs in Week 6.

Andrew did get hit with an unlucky loss as he was one of the six managers to finish north of 100 points this week. Will is thankful for those four top five performances, though, considering he left a pair of would-be top five wide receivers on his bench this week, including Christian Kirk who scored 21.6 points on Monday night.

The most notable top five performances left on benches this week were Justin Jefferson and Rob Gronkowski. Jefferson’s 35.1 fantasy points were wasted on Evan’s bench. While it wouldn’t have made a difference in his game, it secured Evan the Hue Jackson Award for the week (more on that later) and marked the second time that Jefferson has scored more than 25 points while riding Evan’s bench this season.

Alex Kincaid, meanwhile, left Gronk’s 16.3 points on his bench. It wasn’t a bad coaching decision based on Fleaflicker’s projections, but Alex would be .500 if he Gronk replaced literally any of his starters outside of, of course, his quarterback, defense, and kicker.

In reaching the 100-point threshold, Cory has extended his league-leading streak of triple digit outings to nine games, followed by Will at seven. They are now the only two managers who have reached that mark in every game so far this season. With 100 points in his Week 7 Game of the Week matchup against William Battle, Cory would equal his career record for consecutive 100-point games.

The one game I have not yet mentioned from Week 6 was Alex Mayo’s win against William Battle. Alex is now .500 and has been a top six scorer three times, including each of the past two weeks. Alex earns defensive coach of the week honors after getting 23.5 points from the Pittsburgh Steelers defense.

This week’s kicker coach award goes to Anthony, who got 17.7 points from Justin Tucker, who was the highest scorer in his starting lineup this week. Only Joe Burrow scored more points than Tucker on Anthony’s roster this week, albeit by less than half a point.

Through six weeks, William Battle leads the AFL in defensive scoring with 95.6 points. Sean brings up the rear with 24.8 points from the position. The kicker spread is a little bit more compact, with Anthony leading the way with 73.9 points and Eric continuing to hold the 12th spot, now with 32.7 points.

Since Andrew was an unlucky loser this week, sporting the fifth highest score in the league, somebody had to have gotten a lucky win. That somebody, was, of course Stephen. He finished with the third lowest score of the week.

Our coach of the week is Will Massimini. Nobody was particularly good against projections this week, but Will’s decision to drop Stephen Gostkowski and add Jason Sanders earned him a league-best 5.6 coaching points this week.

Evan was the worst coach of the week, costing his team 36.28 points by failing on two of his four coaching risks. He did earn 1.5 points by starting Jared Goff over Matthew Stafford and another 4.8 points by starting J.K. Dobbins instead of Mecole Hardman. But his failed coaching decisions were really bad. He lost 11.88 points by starting the Titans defense instead of the Bears and another 30.7 points by starting Jerick McKinnon over Justin Jefferson.

Across the league, managers were successful on 8 of 16 coaching risks in Week 6, resulting in a net loss of 29.84 points. As we enter the midpoint of the season, our league has cost itself a total of 101.14 points by going against Fleaflicker projections this season. We suffered a net loss in five out of six weeks so far.

Our luckiest team through Week 6 has been Brandon, who sits at 2.2 WAE according to breakdown and 3 WAE by Top 6 performances. Stephen and Sean both sit at 1 WAE according to the latter metric, but only Stephen joins Brandon with a particularly lucky season by breakdown, as he sits at 1.9 WAE.

On the flip side, Eric and Anthony are both at 1.3 WBE according to breakdown. Nobody else has a breakdown luck factor at or above 1.0 either above or below.

By Top 6 performances, we now have five managers all sitting at 1 WBE – Cory, Will, Eric, Anthony, and Andrew.

Playoff computer now gives Stephen a 90.8 percent chance of making the playoffs and 85 percent odds of winning the AFL Central. Brandon has a 72 percent chance of joining the playoff field and a 52 percent chance of winning the AFL West. Out of the AFL East, Cory is given 63.3 percent odds of making the playoffs and a 59 percent chance of winning the division. In other words, if Cory doesn’t win his division, he doesn’t have particularly strong odds of securing a wild card spot.

Before we get to the final part of our recap, we have added our final power metric to the power rankings formula this week – recency.

Recency takes your results from the last five games, with slightly more wait placed on the last three, and compares it to the league’s average score for the season. The formula is below:

R = (4W + ((L5) + (1.1 x L3) – (2.1xLA))) / 10

W=wins in the last five games

L5=average score in last five games

L3=average score in last three games

LA=league average score for season so far

A recency score of 3 is considered very good while a score of -3 is considered very bad. Last year we saw a very wide range in the opening week of recency values, with scores well above and below those marks.

Right now, Cory leads all teams in recency with a score of 5.3. Stephen’s score of exactly 3 is the second-best mark. On the flip side, Sean has the league-worst score of -2.6 and Alex Kincaid is at -1.8.

Overall, scores are much more balanced at this point in the season than they were at this point in 2019.

Below is our recap of Week 6 and this week’s power rankings:

Game of the Week: Anthony Battle at Brandon Saunders

In a legacy rivalry matchup, Anthony and Brandon each saw less than half of their starters score double digits.  Brandon had three of the top four scorers in the matchup, though, including the only player in the game to score more than 20 points, let alone 30.