Our game of the week might not have been the most popular option with both managers entering Week 3 with 0-2 records, but it wound up being a terrific game.

Alex pulled out the win by a narrow margin, less than three quarters of a point! Additionally, they finished second and third in scoring for the week, so Andrew suffered an unlucky loss. With a final score of 123.60-122.92, this was the fifth-highest scoring game in league history among those decided by one point or less.

As rough as this is for Andrew, it would have been objectively even rougher if the result flipped since it would have been Alex’s second loss as a top six scorer this season.

Of course, maybe I shouldn’t speak that into existence considering we’ve already seen some stat corrections move scores by as much as a point and a half this season. Traditionally we see fewer and fewer of those swings as we get further into the season and stat keepers get better at getting it right live, but this result should still be treated as very much unofficial.

As it stands right now, though, this is Alex’s first career Peyton Manning Award in his third career game of the week appearance. Andrew’s career GOTW record falls to 6-15.

Alex got quite a bit of help from Justin Herbert this week. The second-year quarterback contributed 33.70 points to Alex’s team, which ranks #93 on our league’s quarterback list.

Andrew left the #4 wide receiver performance on his bench, with Emmanuel Sanders going off against Washington for 24.4 points, as well as the #5 tight end performance, with Zach Ertz scoring 13.2 points on Monday night.

Andrew is also the co-winner of the Hue Jackson “Award” this week, though neither of those missed opportunities contributed to his coaching penalty. Andrew had the New York Giants defense on his roster entering the week and decided to drop them and spend $10 of his FAAB on the Kansas City Chiefs defense despite the Giants being projected for at least a point more than the Chiefs. If he really wanted to grab a different defense, the recommendation was the Atlanta Falcons, who had the highest projection among waiver defenses.

With either of those two options, he not only would have earned more points but he would have won his game and by enough that stat corrections would have next to no chance of overturning the result.

With all that said, Andrew has been the unluckiest manager so far this year with 1.3 wins below expected using our breakdown metric. Though he is currently last in defensive scoring with just 7.10 points for his defenses through Week 3, he has 38.6 points from the kicker position, the most in the AFL. More than half of that came this week from Justin Tucker, whose game-winning, NFL-record 66-yard field goal brought his total to 19.6 points, the most among starting kickers in our league.

The other game that finished with a narrow margin of victory, and that we’ll need to keep an eye on stat corrections for, was Alex close call against Stephen, as Amari Cooper’s 3.9-point performance on Monday night left Stephen disappointed.

Neither manager deserved a win this week as they finished 9th and 10th in scoring, giving Alex his second lucky win of the season already. He’s also the luckiest manager by our breakdown metric at 1.6 wins above expected through three weeks.

Stephen owns the second half of this week’s Hue Jackson Award since, like Andrew, he also cost his team a win by failing on his lone coaching risk. Fleaflicker suggested starting Jakobi Meyers in the FLEX instead of Rondale Moore, but Stephen, albeit understandably, left Moore in after his stellar Week 2 performance. Moore did not score more than Meyers and the 7.5-point difference between the two receivers made all the difference in this game.

To be fair, Alex also had a rough coaching week and if stat corrections don’t go his way, he’ll wind up as the sole owner of the Hue Jackson Award because of just how brutal of a week he had with coaching decisions.

He took three risks and failed on all of them. First, he traded away Marvin Jones for Juwan Johnson; Jones should have been in his lineup at wide receiver and he had to use Agholor instead, costing his team 5.9 points. Then he dropped Mike Gesicki to start Johnson at tight end. Gesicki wound up scoring 12.1 points, exactly 12.1 more than Johnson scored. And finally, Alex picked up the Raiders defense instead of the Falcons and cost his team an additional 0.6 points. That all adds up to a league-high 18.6 points Alex cost his team this week.

Coming out of this abysmal performance, each manager does have one positive to fall back on. For Stephen, it’s been his defensive coaching. He leads the AFL in points from the position with 51.32 after three weeks.

For Alex, the positive is that he’s 3-0. Considering he’s in the bottom half of the league in scoring, I can’t say he’s not in danger of becoming the third manager in AFL history to miss the playoffs after starting 3-0. But if Alex can make the right in-season moves, he’s got a significant head start over the rest of his division. Playoff Computer puts his odds of winning the division at 53.6% and his odds of making the playoffs at 64.7% with a fifth of the season in the books.

Moving to a matchup that could have been much closer than it wound up being, Sean finished sixth in the league in scoring this week but was unlucky enough to be matched up against the league’s top scorer.

Evan takes home his 15th career Tom Brady Award, the third most of all-time and just two behind Anthony and Eric who, in order, claimed the first two of this season.

Evan’s 146.00 points ranks in our Top 100 team scores at #81, and his star player was Mike Williams. Evan left Williams out of his lineup the first two weeks and got dragged last week as the Hue Jackson Award winner for it. He didn’t make that mistake this week and Williams rewarded him with 29.9 points, which ranks exactly 100th on the AFL’s wide receiver list.

Amazingly, Williams was far from the only successful receiver in Evan’s lineup this week. Four of the five highest wide receiver scores this week, and the four highest starting receiver scores were in Evan’s lineup, with Cooper Kupp, Davante Adams, and Justin Jefferson complementing Williams.

To give an idea of how strong these two managers’ roster are, they had the two highest optimum scores of the week by far. While Evan won the game by more than 40 points, if they had both stared their perfect lineups, Evan would have won by less than 8 points with both teams scoring more than 170.

Evan left the #5 running back performance of the week on his bench as Alexander Mattison scored 22.22 points in Dalvin Cook’s absence.

Sean, meanwhile, left the #5 quarterback and the #4 running back of the week out of his lineup. Kirk Cousins went off for 27.54 points and James Robinson scored 22.90 in Jacksonville’s loss to Arizona.

Despite Robinson’s excellent performance, Sean still earns praise as this week’s best defensive coach with the Arizona Cardinals scoring 24.24 points.

That said, Sean also earns mention for a coaching blunder. He was one of only two managers to make a successful coaching risk, but his one failed coaching risk outweighed it by a lot. He earned 1.12 points by starting Chase Edmonds at FLEX instead of Marvin Jones, who he got from Alex Kincaid in the aforementioned trade. But he also lost 18.98 points by starting Damien Harris at FLEX instead of Ja’Marr Chase, who has enjoyed the most successful start to a rookie season of any wide receiver in recent memory.

Since we had two unlucky losers, Andrew and Sean, we need another lucky winner to join Alex Kincaid, and that would be Eric. His 104.16 points were the seventh most of the week, but Brandon was this week’s lowest scorer so that was not a problem.

Brandon was one of two managers without a single top 5 starter at any position. He could have had the #1 defense but he left the Saints and their 24.98 points on his bench.

Eric extends his AFL-leading active streak of 100-point games to seven. On the flip side, Brandon has now gone three straight games without 100 points, which is tied for his worst stretch with Weeks 5 through 7 of 2013, when he failed to reach 88.9 points for three straight games. Another such game this week would tie him for the sixth longest drought in AFL history.

Eric’s win moves him to 3-0, with Playoff Computer giving him a 53.6% chance of winning his division and a 64.8% chance of making the postseason.

After going from first to worst, Anthony bounced back nicely in the first of two regular season matchups with his younger brother and moved their all-time head-to-head series back to .500 in the process.

Josh Allen absolutely lit up the Washington Football Team and contributed 41.34 points, or just shy of 36% of Anthony’s total score. That was enough to put Allen on our all-time quarterback leaderboard at lucky number 13!

William made a critical mistake by leaving Tee Higgins in his lineup on Sunday despite the wide receiver being out with a shoulder injury. While it only cost him 7.16 point as far as coaching goes, because Kenyan Drake was Fleaflicker’s suggested start, if William had started James Conner, who had been in his lineup each of the first two weeks of the season, he would have gotten an additional 20.12 points, more than enough to topple his big brother.

One weakness Anthony will need to shore up is kicker. He currently is in last place in the AFL with just 14.6 points from the position.

William joined Brandon as the only two managers without a single top 5 starter at any position this week.

In the final game we need to talk about, Cory fell to Will in a game that looked like it could flip on Monday night but actually saw Will pull farther away.

Cory joined William and Brandon as the only managers without any top 5 offensive starters. Cory’s one bright spot was the Denver Broncos defense.

Beyond that, the most notable thing about this matchup was that Cory actually wound up with the coach of the week award because he was the only manager to earn points from a coaching risk, earning 3.6 points by starting Javonte Williams at running back instead of Mike Davis; a truly hollow victory for our commissioner.

Will overcame a disastrous start by A.J. Brown that saw him leave with a hamstring injury after receiving one carry for three yards thanks to 20-point outings by DK Metcalf and the Cleveland Browns defense and a near-20-point performance by Saquon Barkley.