Written by Cory Puffett
Published November 3, 2020

It’s election day in America. While many of us will be glued to our screens this evening (and quite possibly in the coming days) in anxious, agitated anticipation of the results of our election, let’s take some time this afternoon to put that aside and look back on Week 8 of the 2020 fantasy football season.

This week was the beginning of the second half of our regular season in the AFL, and the final week of divisional play until the final three weeks of our season. Everybody has now played each of their division rivals once and so we have a very clear idea of where teams stand as we enter the final six-week stretch to the playoffs.

Monday Night Football provided quite a bit of excitement in our Game of the Week as Cory Puffett attempted to chase down Will Massimini in their battle for first place in the AFL East.

Cory entered the Monday night matchup between the Buccaneers and Giants trailing Will by 18.94 points. Will had no remaining players but Cory had Ronald Jones, the NFL rushing leader in the month of October, and the Buccaneers defense, which entered Week 8 ranks first in scoring with our league’s defensive scoring settings.

Fleaflicker offered Cory a 55 percent chance of victory entering the contest, and after the Bucs’ and Giants’ first drives, those odds were up to 60%. Then Ronald Jones fumbled on a reception from Tom Brady and didn’t see the field for the rest of the first half. Even his return to action in the second half didn’t provide much as Tampa Bay insisted on using Leonard Fournette, who finished with 18 touches and barely 10 fantasy points.

Still, the Buccaneers defense did what they could to pick up the slack in the second half and in the final minutes, got to a point where a takeaway would have lifted Cory to a very narrow victory. Instead, they gave up a late touchdown and Will walked away the victor by less than two points.

It is Will’s sixth career Peyton Manning Award in 12 game of the week appearances. A big part of his victory was DK Metcalf, who bounced back from a poor performance against Arizona in Week 7 where he logged just two catches on five targets. This week he received 15 targets, caught 12 of them, and scored twice, adding 34.1 points to Will’s total, tying him for 36th on the AFL’s wide receiver leaderboard.

Cory, meanwhile, acquired Travis Kelce in a trade this week and he had a solid game of his own, scoring 20.9 points which ties him for 80th on our league’s tight end leaderboard.

Cory and Will once again remain the only managers who had yet to fall below triple digits in a game this season. Cory extended his league-leading active streak of 100-point games to 11, which sets a new career high and puts him one game shy of a tie for the fifth longest streak in AFL history. Will’s streak now stands at 9 games, dating back to Week 14 of the 2019 season.

While the game of the week certainly lived up to expectations by being a close game between two good teams who both scored double digits, there were two much higher scoring games in the AFL this week.

Stephen April faced Eric Meyer and came away with his seventh win of the season thanks in no small part to Dalvin Cook.

Cook scored 50.6 points in an explosive performance coming off injury, helping the Vikings to upset the Packers. That point total is good for 3rd on the AFL’s all-time running back list and it is, in fact, just the third time any player has scored 50 points in our league’s history. Incredibly, despite a strong 2020 so far and a very good 2019 season, this is Dalvin Cook’s only current entry among the AFL’s Top 100 running back games.

Stephen wound up leading the AFL in scoring thanks to Cook’s performance. Cook was Stephen’s only Top 5 offensive player this week, but his team totaled 140.04 points, which ranks #100 on our all-time single game team score list. This gives Stephen his third career Tom Brady Award.

Our annual Battle Bowl was also an exciting one as Anthony improved to 4-6 all-time against his younger brother, William. In fact, Anthony’s 11.4-point margin of victory is the fourth lowest of their 10 career meetings (the lowest was a 95.6-95.4 victory for Anthony in Week 6 of the 2017 season).

Anthony was one of two managers this week to have four players in the top five at their positions, joining Brandon Saunders who won a fairly close game against Alex Mayo. Anthony and Brandon both had two of the top five wide receivers in the AFL in Week 8.

We did have one other offensive player join his position’s leaderboard this week. Alex Kincaid got his third victory of the season, despite finishing 9th in scoring this week, thanks partly to Patrick Mahomes, who scored 38.64 points, 21st all-time among quarterbacks in the AFL. It was the third time this season Mahomes has reached 30 points, the most he’s had in the first eight games of a season (and yes, he missed Week 8 in 2019 due to injury, but he only had one 30-point game up to that point).

Sean and Evan stood out for very different reasons this week. Sean scored 80.32 points in Week 8 but was facing Andrew Perez, who scored just 74.18 points. The two entered Week 8 with identical 1-6 records, and somebody had to win. It seems only right then that the winner would do so with the third lowest winning score since we expanded rosters in 2016.

Evan, meanwhile, finished last in scoring this week with just 62.44 points, the sixth lowest score we’ve seen since the 2016 season. He’s now finished bottom two in scoring in three straight weeks; quite a feat for a team sitting at .500 with just six weeks to go.

Back to Sean and Andrew; despite being such a low scoring game between the teams with the worst records in the AFL, they did earn some positive accolades in Week 8. Sean’s Philadelphia Eagles defense led all starting defenses with 25.00 points, giving him defensive coach of the week honors. In fact, the only defense to score more points than them was that of the Miami Dolphins, who are not currently rostered in the AFL.

Andrew, meanwhile, is the kicker coach of the week thanks to Tampa Bay Buccaneers kicker Ryan Succop, who scored 16.8 points on Monday night, which led all rostered and free agent kickers in our league.

Through eight weeks, Alex Mayo continues to lead the league in defensive scoring with now 115.90 points while Anthony remains the leader in kicker points with 86.3 points. Alex Kincaid trails in both categories, with just 40.06 points from defenses and 48.1 points from kickers. He is one of four managers in the AFL who has earned more points from kickers than from defenses in 2020.

Our overall coach of the week was Brandon Saunders. It was a bad week overall in the AFL and so Brandon takes this award despite only earning 3.52 points from coaching decisions in Week 8. He cost his team 3.0 points by picking up and starting Rodrigo Blankenship instead of Dan Bailey, but he earned 6.52 points by picking up and starting Baker Mayfield instead of Jimmy Garoppolo.

I don’t think I’ve ever explicitly explained about how I define some of these coaching decisions like both of Brandon’s this week. Most coaching decisions are based only on the players a manager has on his roster. If a benched player is projected to outscore a player in the starting lineup, and those players can be swapped for each other (either they’re the same position or via flex spots), I consider that a coaching risk – pretty straight forward.

I never mark down a coaching risk just because a free agent is projected to score more than a player in a starting lineup, until a transaction takes place. If a manager drops a player and picks somebody else up and starts them, that could be considered a coaching risk in one of two ways. If the dropped player was projected to outscore the added player, that is the coaching risk I look at. If that’s not the case, but there was another available free agent with a higher projection than the added player, I mark that as a coaching risk.

So, in Brandon’s case, Bailey had the highest projection among free agent kickers when he added Blankenship and Garoppolo had the highest projection among free agent quarterbacks when he added Mayfield to start him in place of Deshaun Watson who was on bye. One of those “risks” paid off and the other didn’t.

Moving on to our worst coaches of the week, the Hue Jackson Award goes to Alex Mayo, who cost his team 7.48 points and a win by failing on his only coaching risk. He started the Seahawks defense instead of the Steelers defense, which wound up being a Top 5 scoring defense in the AFL this week. Alex lost his matchup against Brandon by 7.32 points.

Alex Kincaid also gets some attention for poor coaching this week as he cost his team a league-high 31.9 points by failing on two coaching risks. Chris Carson was inactive on Sunday but remained in Alex’s lineup (it’s the second week in a row Alex has left an inactive player in his lineup). This is a bit of a miscellaneously defined coaching risk, because Carson was still listed as questionable when the 1pm games started and his game didn’t kick off until 4:25, but coaches had already said they didn’t expect him to play and so the safe decision would have been to start Marvin Jones, who played at 1pm, because there were no other active players on Alex’s bench who could have taken Carson’s place if he was ultimately ruled out, which he was. Carson scored no points, Marvin Jones scored 17.4 points. Alex cost his team an additional 14.5 points by adding and starting the Raiders defense instead of the Dallas Cowboys, who had the highest projection among free agent defenses when Alex signed the Raiders.

In all, managers took a combined 16 coaching risks in Week 8, up 14.3 percent from Week 7, and were successful on six of them. We lost a net 54.36 points across the AFL this week, bringing our total loss up to 186.92 points so far this season. We’ve lost points in seven of eight weeks.

Our luckiest managers of Week 8 were Sean and Alex Kincaid, who were the 10th and 9th highest scorers in our 12-team league, respectively, but still won their matchups. William Battle and Eric, meanwhile, were our two unlucky losers as they finished 3rd and 4th in scoring.

So far this season, Brandon remains our luckiest manager of the 2020 season. He sits at 2.6 wins above expected by breakdown and 3 WAE by Top 6 performances.

By breakdown, our next two luckiest managers are Stephen (1.5 WAE) and Evan (0.7 WAE). By Top 6 performances, Sean now sits at 2 WAE while Stephen, Evan, and Alex Kincaid all have one more win than expected.

On the other side, Eric has been our unluckiest manager of the season. By breakdown he is at 2.6 wins below expected and by Top 6 performances he sits at 3 WBE, so exactly the opposite of Brandon on both counts. In fact, while Brandon’s luck has turned a team that should probably be 4-4 into a 7-1 title contender, Eric’s bad luck has taken what should be a 5-3 team and made it into a 2-6 sacko contender.

Luck is always going to be a part of fantasy football if we want to have the fun of head to head matchups. But it’s important to point these things out.

Our next two unlucky manager by breakdown are Cory (1.3 WBE) and Andrew (0.8 WBE). By Top 6 performances, Cory remains at 2 WBE while Will Massimini, Andrew, and William Battle are all now at one win below expected.

Stephen continues to lead the league in the race to the playoffs and he now has a 93.5 percent chance of winning the AFL Central and a 94.8 percent chance of making the playoffs. Brandon has a 72.5 percent chance of winning the AFL West and an 88.8 percent chance of making the playoffs. And with his win in Week 8 to take the lead in the AFL East, Will has a 70 percent chance of winning his division and a 72.3 percent chance of making the playoffs.

The only other managers with above a 30 percent chance of making the playoffs, according to Playoff Computer, are William Battle (44.8 percent) and Cory (30.3 percent).

Through eight weeks, we already have 14 team performances of less than 90 points. While we’re still on pace to be below the total from the 2019 season, we had just 12 total sub-90-points performances in the entire 2018 season!

Below is our recap of Week 8 and this week’s power rankings:

Game of the Week: Cory Puffett at Will Massimini

For the second week in a row, Cory lost the Game of the Week facing a Seahawks receiver that went OFF. The game came down to the final minutes with the Buccaneers defense giving Cory a late surge, but Will held on and now leads the AFL East with just six games to go.