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Written by Cory Puffett
Published November 23, 2021
With the trade deadline looming at 6 a.m. Tuesday morning, just hours after the Buccaneers Monday night victory over the Giants brought Week 11 to an end, one final trade was proposed and accepted late Sunday night.
Last week I discussed the most notable trades of the year and this one certainly would have qualified. Coming off a 6-game losing streak that snapped thanks partly to underwhelming performances by Leonard Fournette and Kadarius Toney on Monday night, 2020 AFL Champion Stephen April has decided to sell the farm.
He offloaded 2021 first round keeper Dalvin Cook and Jerry Jeudy, along with his 6th round pick in 2022, in exchange for Cordarrelle Patterson, Mike Williams, and Evan Ash’s 2nd round 2022 draft pick.
The move makes sense for April. Despite the payoff he received in the form of a league title in just his third season, Stephen was annoyed with his draft pick situation entering this fall and will be thrilled to have three of the first 24 selections in next year’s draft.
The trade also offloads a piece he likely wouldn’t have next year anyway since Dalvin Cook’s status as a first-round keeper this year means he will reenter the draft pool next season. Cook figures to be one of the top options for the first overall pick in 2022.
For Evan, it also makes sense. He’s one game out of the AFL West division lead and despite having one of the strongest rosters in the league he’s not been able to find much consistency from his team, particularly from the running back position. He gets a consistent, albeit injury-prone, running back. And all he traded away was a wide receiver he doesn’t care much for and who has been his second flex player all season, a position he figures, correctly, is replaceable.
Now, I would argue that the draft pick swap was a bit steep considering Evan is not a solid playoff team looking to solidify himself as the title favorite. But Evan figures that he has stayed out of trades virtually his entire AFL career and has just two playoff appearances and one championship game appearance to show for it. I applaud the risk he’s taking here.
Getting to our results from Week 11, it was a pretty crazy week. Five offensive players logged Top 100 all-time performances at their positions, the most since Week 5, and two managers recorded Top 100 team scores in AFL history.
Despite those numbers, our 12 managers combined for just 1,300.2 points this week. It’s our first time with at least 1300 points since Week 7 but it is not a Top 50 scoring week in our league’s history.
Our managers had a pretty solid coaching week relative to the rest of our season. We were only successful on a third of our risks but limited the damage to just 17.58 points and nobody cost themselves a win this week.
We’re up to 141 combined coaching risks this season and we’ve been successful on just under 40% of them and cost ourselves 244 points compared to FleaFlicker’s suggestions.
As we enter the final four weeks of the season, everyone remains in the playoff race. Andrew Perez, Stephen April, Brandon Saunders, and Will Massimini are all in danger of being eliminated from their division races this week. But all should still be alive for our wildcard with only Brandon in danger of being eliminated from playoff contention this week.
Now, before we jump into the game-by-game recap for Week 11, I want to pull one bit of information that I normally would share within the context of one particular game and discuss it here because there’s a larger conversation it lends itself to.
Jonathan Taylor was the story of the week from a player standpoint for sure. He scored five touchdowns in the Colts blowout win over the Bills and recorded a first down on a remarkable 44% of his carries!
That all added up to 58.84 fantasy points for the second year running back out of Wisconsin, a new AFL record both at his position and overall!
The previous record-holder was Jamaal Charles, who scored five touchdowns in Week 15 of the 2013 NFL season. Any time a game like that comes that late in the season, there’s a risk it won’t show up in our record books, as was the case for Alvin Kamara’s 6-touchdown game last year on a fantasy team that had been eliminated from the playoffs. That game for Charles, though, helped Danny Hatcher win the first of three AFL championships during his seven years as part of the league.
This time, though, there was no need to worry about that. But that’s sort of beside the point. Let’s move on to the bigger picture.
This would not have been an AFL record if we had not adjusted scoring this offseason. Taylor’s ridiculous first down rate took full advantage of our updated scoring settings. Under our old settings, Taylor would have scored 55.1 points, just under Charles’s 55.5-point outing.
But the whole point of our updating scoring was to make sure that one of the most valuable contributions a player can make to his team’s effort, a new set of downs, is rewarded and his impact is properly reflected in his fantasy value. Jamaal Charles did all 215-yards of his damage on just 16 touches on that day. 195 of those yards came through the air on 8 catches, so he had a lot of big plays.
In fact, Charles wound up with five touchdowns but only seven first downs, and remember that a touchdown is a first down. That means that of Charles 15 touches that did not result in him crossing the goal line, he only moved the chains on 13% of them. With our current scoring settings, he would have scored more than he did back then, but not by nearly as much as Taylor did. Charles’s total would have been 55.96 using this year’s scoring.
Jonathan Taylor, meanwhile, was much more consistent. He had a lot more touches, 35 of them to Charles’s 16. Where Charles averaged about 13.4 yards per touch during that record setting day in 2013, Taylor’s average was just 5.8. On first glance, then, it would seem Charles was the more valuable player.
But you consider that Taylor moved the sticks on 33% of his touches that did not result in a touchdown and remember the number Charles posted, which was just 13%.
Do you feel first downs are overrated? Do you think they’re important but are overvalued in our league? Or do you agree that Taylor’s contributions on Sunday were just a bit more substantial to Indy’s victory than Charles’s were in that December 15 56-31 Chiefs victory over the Raiders?
Alex Mayo vs Evan Ash (2-0 all-time H2H)
Alex Mayo vs Evan Ash (2-0 all-time H2H)
For the first time in league history, the Tom Brady and Peyton Manning awards go to the same manager for a third week in a row. After Alex Kincaid became the second manager to win both awards in consecutive weeks, Evan took home both pieces of hardware in Week 11.
Evan’s 165.44 points rank 13th in AFL history. His two biggest contributors were Aaron Rodgers and Justin Jefferson, both of whom topped 30 points in the game.
Rodgers scored 35.18 points, which is good for 73rd all-time among AFL starting quarterbacks, and Jefferson added another 33.52 points, good for 43rd among starting wide receivers. Oh, and Evan also had the #2 wide receiver of the week in his lineup!
This was Evan’s 16th career Tom Brady Award and it’s his 14th career Peyton Manning Award. He is now 14-11 in game of the week appearances over his career. Alex falls to 2-4 in his appearances.
Alex still had a strong performance. In fact, he had the best quarterback of the week in Justin Herbert. The second-year Chargers quarterback scored 39.44 points, his second highest total of the season and good for 26th all-time by an AFL starting signal caller.
That performance was a big part of lifting Alex above the 100-point plateau for the 11th consecutive time to open this season. It’s been a few weeks now since the rest of Alex’s peers had a sub-100-point game and he keeps chugging along.
Last year, Cory Puffett lasted the longest by going 11 games before finally failing to reach triple digits. In 2018, Eric Meyer made it 14 games. The only manager ever to go an entire season, playoffs included, was Sean Kennedy in 2019. Alex is now in the elite company of three AFL Champions.
Alex wound up as the league’s #5 scorer this week, making this his third unlucky loss of the season. He’s had a pair of lucky wins to help offset some of that bad luck, but it’s still frustrating to lose with a score above the league median.
As it was, Alex needed a pretty bad coaching outcome from Evan to even get as close as he did. Evan is our Hue Jackson Award winner for Week 11. He went against FleaFlicker projections and added Chicago Bears kicker Cairo Santos instead of San Francisco 49ers kicker Robbie Gould this week.
Santos wound up with a goose egg (ironically, both kicker goose eggs this week were in this game) while Gould wound up scoring 15.3 points. That was Evan’s only coaching risk of the week, but the 15.3 points he cost himself were a league-high.
Even with the loss, Alex has the second highest odds of making the playoffs in the AFL according to PlayoffComputer with a 65.8% chance of being in the Final Four.
William Battle vs Alex Kincaid (2-1 all-time H2H)
William Battle vs Alex Kincaid (2-1 all-time H2H)
It’s been a few weeks since we’ve had two managers with Top 100 team scores in AFL history and we nearly had two in the Top 50. Alex scored 151.76 points this week, good for 54th in league history.
This was another matchup between Top 6 scorers, with William’s loss a bit more frustrating than Alex Mayo’s for a couple of reasons. First, he was the #4 scorer, ahead of Alex at #5 this week. Additionally, where Alex has suffered three unlucky losses and has two lucky wins to offset them, this was William’s fourth unlucky loss of the season and he’s only got one lucky win which doesn’t do much of anything to balance the scales.
With a luck factor of 3 WBE (wins below expectation) using weekly median scores and 1.9 WBE using breakdown, William is by far the unluckiest manager we’ve had this season.
The competitiveness of this game came thanks to the two managers’ running backs, in particular Jonathan Taylor and Austin Ekeler.
I already talked about Taylor’s contribution in the introduction (if you skipped it, be sure to go back and then let me know what you think about it within the context of our league’s historical scoring settings).
But Ekeler also had a big game and did everything he could to give William s chance. He scored four touchdowns on just 17 touches and scored 40.32 points, good for #20 on our league’s all-time running backs list.
Alex has had an interesting season and an impressive run. After opening the year with four weeks of either being second highest or second lowest in scoring, he had four weeks during which he was either 4th, 5th, 6th, or 7th in scoring, and now he’s finished Top 2 in scoring for three straight weeks.
This latest stretch actually gives him the second longest 100-point streak behind Alex Mayo at three games.
Alex also earned defensive coach of the week recognition this week of his pickup of the Philadelphia Eagles defense. They scored 19.88 points and were the highest scoring defense in an AFL lineup.
That point total was enough to bump Alex up to first in season-long defensive scoring, usurping Stephen April at the top of the list. Alex has 161.62 points from his defenses now this year.
As we enter our last week before the season-concluding divisional round robin, Alex has the highest playoff odds of anybody in the league. He has a 67.2% chance of winning the AFL East and a 92.8% chance of making the playoffs according to PlayoffComputer.
Sean Kennedy vs Andrew Perez (5-5 all-time H2H)
Sean Kennedy vs Andrew Perez (5-5 all-time H2H)
Sean currently has the third best chance of making the playoffs according to PlayoffComputer at 64.9% but that didn’t help him avoid a tough loss this week to see his division lead shrink to a single game.
Believe it or not, Andrew’s two-game streak of hitting triple digits is alone as the third longest active streak in the AFL and his three-game winning streak is the second longest active winning streak in the league.
Both managers left big scores on the table this week. Sean left the #2 kicker on his bench in Jake Elliott, who scored 20.7 points in the Eagles victory against New Orleans on Sunday.
Former Eagle Zach Ertz is now the #4 scoring tight end on the season in the AFL but has rarely been in a lineup. This week his 25.1 points, the highest total by any tight end, went to waste on Andrew’s bench.
This was the first time all season that Andrew used the same defense in consecutive games and it seemed to work out. He remains the only manager with fewer than 100 points from the position this season, but he had only been averaging 6.8 points per game from his defenses and the Cleveland Browns delivered 9.52 this week. It’s an improvement.
Sean, meanwhile, was one of two managers without a Top 5 offensive starter.
Cory Puffett (6-3 all-time H2H) vs Brandon Saunders
Cory Puffett (6-3 all-time H2H) vs Brandon Saunders
We do have one more 100-point scorer to get to this week, but before we get there we’ll transition to the other manager without a Top 5 offensive starter.
Brandon finished the week with just 65.16 points despite four of his nine starting players hitting double digits, one of them being Christian McCaffrey who scored 21 points!
That total ranks as the 8th lowest team score the AFL has seen since starting rosters expanded from just eight players back in 2016.
Cory god a bit lucky to earn his win, in more than one sense. Not only was he a Bottom 6 scorer but he also left twoTop 5 positional performances on his bench this week.
He decided to start the Dolphins defense against the Jets instead of the Patriots against the Falcons on Thursday night football and instantly regretted that decision. The Patriots were the week’s top defense with 24.42 points! He also left the #5 quarterback performance on his bench in the form of Kirk Cousins and his 26.14 points, about two and a half times more than Patrick Mahomes scored.
Still, Cory did see a few solid performances in his lineup, including 16.2 points by Patriots kicker Nick Folk, the most by any starting kicker in the AFL this week. That brings Cory’s season total to 115.9 kicker points, which lifts him past Alex Mayo for the league lead. Only four managers have reached triple digits from the position after 11 weeks.
Will Massimini (3-9 all-time H2H) vs Anthony Battle
Will Massimini (3-9 all-time H2H) vs Anthony Battle
Now let’s get to our other 100-point performance.
Will had looked like he was working things out until he slipped out of the Top 6 in scoring two weeks ago and then fell all the way to 11th last week. This week he just did hop back into the Top 6 and hopes he can use this to keep his hopes alive for the playoffs, or at least to avoid the Sacko bracket of the consolation ladder.
A bit part of Will’s struggles this season have been coaching related, but he’s now the coach of the week in back-to-back recaps!
This week he took two coaching risks, and though he was only successful on one of them he still earned a league-high 25.22 points and the victory because of it.
His coaching failure came on the decision to start Pat Freiermuth at tight end instead of Dallas Goedert, but it’s almost cruel to count it as a fail because Goedert only outscored Freiermuth by 0.2 points.
Regardless, the more consequential risk was his decision to start Jalen Hurts instead of Derek Carr, which earned him 25.42 points. Will’s margin of victory over Ant was less than 20 points, so if he had gone with FleaFlicker suggestions in this case, he would have lost.
Eric Meyer vs Stephen April (4-3 all-time H2H)
Eric Meyer vs Stephen April (4-3 all-time H2H)
The luckiest win of the week belongs to Stephen, who entered this week on a six-game losing streak and managed to snap it despite being the #9 scorer in Week 11.
As usual, there isn’t a whole lot to say about this final game. Eric left Elijah Moore on his bench, whose 25.42 points ranked third among wide receivers for the week. He also remains last in kicker scoring with just 65.4 points from the position this year.
The most notable thing about this week for Stephen was the trade he made before the trade deadline hit. I covered that in the intro. Moving on.
This terrible team was better than yours
The following lineup of players who are not on any roster in our league, all of whom are available in at least half of FleaFlicker leagues, would have beaten all of our teams this week except our Tom Brady Award winner:
QB – Colt McCoy, Ari (11% owned) 24.64
RB – Dontrell Hilliard, Ten (2% owned) 12.14
WR – Marquez Valdes-Scantling, GB (25% owned) 20.20
WR – Marquise Goodwin, Chi (2% owned) 18.30
TE – Adam Trautman, NO (33% owned) 14.30
FLEX – Mack Hollins, Mia (2% owned) 14.40
FLEX – Nick Westbrook-Ikhine, Ten (7% owned) 13.40
K – Evan McPherson, Cin (15% owned) 21.50
DEF – Houston Texans (7% owned) 21.86
Team Total: 160.74 vs Evan Ash [165.44]
Here is the recap of Week 11 and this week’s power rankings:
Game of the Week: Alex Mayo at Evan Ash
For a third straight week, the game of the week winner led the league in scoring. This time, Evan enjoyed 30-point games from Aaron Rodgers and Justin Jefferson and a 20-point game from Davante Adams to pull within a game of his division lead.
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