As you’ll see in the game recap in the Week 11 rundown below, there’s an asterisk on Cory’s Week 11 Hue Jackson Award, the eighth of his career. His decision to ignore FleaFlicker and add Greg Zuerlein instead of Greg Joseph as his starting kicker cost him 8.40 points, would have put him in the lead after Sunday Night Football.

What the formula does not take into consideration is that after his win was assured, Alex benched Isiah Pacheco for Monday night, subbing in a running back on bye, to avoid a possible catastrophe.

The formula is the formula, so it saved a more deserving manager from earning the award, but we’ll still recognize him later in the writeup. Regardless, the goose egg Cory received from Zuerlein caused him to fall below Brandon as the worst kicker coach in the league this season with just 74.10 points from the position.

Meanwhile, Alex sacrificed an opportunity to score 100 points, extending his drought to two games, but he won his third consecutive Peyton Manning Award, the seventh of his career, and remains tied for the best record in the AFL.

This is only the second time in AFL history a manager has played in a game of the week after winning the previous two Peyton Manning Awards. The last manager to get the opportunity was Eric Meyer back in 2015 when he won the first three Peyton Manning Awards of the season.

Alex is now 4-0 in games of the week this season and has improved his career record to 7-8 while dropping Cory to 16-12.

Josh Allen and Gus Edwards were major contributors to Alex’s victory as the only two players in the matchup to eclipse 20 points.

They helped Alex overcome a positional leader on Cory’s roster. George Kittle’s 19.25 points helped him repeat as the AFL’s TE1, though he did so on Andrew Perez’s roster in Week 10.

This was a second straight lucky win for Alex, who now has three of them on the year. He does have one unlucky loss from when he faced Andrew in Week 8, but he is the luckiest manager in the AFL when taking both Top 6 performances and breakdown into consideration.

Alex will become the first manager in AFL history to play in four consecutive games of the week when he faces the other 8-3 AFL manager, Stephen April, in Week 12.

Brandon had been struggling lately. He had finished among the bottom four scorers each of the previous three weeks, including a very lucky Week 8 victory over Sean Kennedy when he finished 11th in scoring.

He bounced back in a big way in Week 11, securing his second Tom Brady Award of the year and the seventh of his career, tying William Battle and Danny Hatcher and sitting one behind Stephen April.

Entering Week 11, Alex was the only manager in the AFL with neither a lucky win nor an unlucky loss. Unfortunately that cherry was broken by the latter this week as he finished fifth in scoring.

It’s an unfortunate result for a manager of a wildly inconsistent team. His weekly scoring rankings this season are as follows:

9th - 3rd - 4th - 10th – 12th - 10th - 1st - 10th - 1st - 10th - 5th

Not only did a Top 6 scoring performance from his team go to waste, Alex’s squad also wasted Saquon Barkley’s first week as the AFL’s RB1 since last year’s season opener.

While he didn’t have any #1 positional performers of his own, Brandon was able to overcome that performance by his favorite NFL team’s running back thanks to a league-best five Top 5 positional performers.

The 15th edition of the Battle Bowl saw the younger brother extend his series lead and become the 15th manager with nine or more wins against a single opponent in AFL history. It also saw William snap his five-game stretch without a 100-point game a week after setting a new career long.

The two brothers had the top two scoring defenses in the AFL this week, and while the Cowboys defense did enough to keep Anthony atop the race for the defensive coach of the year award (his 182.58 points are well ahead of Evan Ash’s second place total of 133.25), it was the Buffalo Bills who gave William the Week 11 Chuck Noll Award.

The Bills scored 18.54 points and helped William extend his record for defensive coach of the week awards to 20, three ahead of Sean Kennedy and Will Massimini in second place.

Where Alex Mayo has been the luckiest manager in the AFL this season when taking both luck metrics into consideration, Anthony has been on the opposite end of the spectrum. He is one of three managers with two fewer wins than would be expected based on Top 6 performances and he is 1.5 wins below expected based on breakdown, slightly unluckier than Cory Puffett.

Stephen just keeps rolling. Will might kick himself a little bit over leaving Week 11’s RB2 on his bench, but that’s only because Jaylen Warren is a Steeler. His 23.42 points would not have nearly made up the gap in this matchup.

Despite remaining in last place in defensive scoring with 80.38 points from the position, Stephen still has yet to fall below 100 points in any week this season. Cory Puffett made it through the first 11 games in 2020 and Alex Mayo made it through 11 games in 2021.

If Stephen can reach triple digits in Week 12, he’ll only be chasing Eric’s 14-game streak through the 2018 regular season and Sean’s 16-game streak through the entirety of his 2019 campaign. It also will mark just the eighth streak of 12 or more consecutive games with 100 points in AFL history, including those that bridged multiple seasons. The all-time record is Eric’s 23-game streak from Week 11 in 2017 through Week 5 in 2019.

While it did not win up making a difference in the outcome of the game, Will did save himself from a second sub-70 and third sub-80 performance of the season with a solid coaching decision.

By ignoring FleaFlicker and starting DJ Moore at wide receiver instead of Garrett Wilson, who wound up with negative points, Will earned a league-high 20.45 points to earn his 11th career Chuck Knox Award and his second of the season. He now has the fourth most coach of the week awards in AFL history.

Eric just might be the hottest manager in the AFL right now. He owns the longest active winning streak in the league and just may have made the best trade of the year back in Week 6, just before his winning streak began, and he didn’t even get a player who will appear in his lineup this season!

Calvin Ridley was a big help for Eric this week as his 29.13 points made him the AFL’s WR1 for the week. Eric owns the second longest active 100-point streak at four games.

For Sean’s part, he can be happy with Brock Purdy’s performance. He was the top starting quarterback in the AFL this week and it was the fourth time this season he’s turned in a Top 5 starting quarterback performance for Sean.

Unfortunately for him, that’s the only thing he can hang his hat on this week. For the 15th time in his career and the fourth time this season, Sean’s team registered the lowest score in the AFL, earning him the David Carr Award for Week 11. He ties Evan Ash for the second most in league history, just one behind Brandon Saunders.

This was Sean’s sixth consecutive game without scoring 100 points. There have only ever been four such droughts in AFL history and Sean owns two of them, the other coming in the same six weeks of the 2019 season. He’ll set a new AFL record if he can’t find a way to score 100 points in Week 12.

Leave it to Evan to have the true QB1 of the week on his bench and not need him.

Trevor Lawrence turned in a very strong 34.52-point performance this week, and Andrew couldn’t take advantage of Evan getting none of it.

I alluded to this all the way up at the start of our game-by-game breakdown, but Andrew earns honorable mention for the Hue Jackson Award thanks to his five coaching risks in Week 11, costing him a league-high 17.81 points.

While he earned 7.78 points by starting the Kansas City Chiefs at defense instead of the Los Angeles Chargers, he created three coaching risks by trading away Joe Mixon, Deebo Samuel, and George Kittle to acquire and start Jerome Ford, Raheem Mostert, and Michael Mayer, and then took another risk by starting Gabe Davis instead of Jerry Jeudy.

While Mostert outscore Samuel by 4.03 points, giving him a second successful coaching risk, his other three risks all failed. Mixon outscored Ford by 7.97 points on Cory’s roster, Kittle outscored Mayer by 13.75 points on Cory’s roster, and Davis took his second donut of the past three weeks while Jeudy scored 7.90 points on Andrew’s bench.

Part of the reason those coaching decisions didn’t cost him a win and earn him the Hue Jackson Award over Cory was because Evan got another strong performance from Jason Myers this week.

The Seattle kicker scored 15.90 points, and while it represented a 7-point reduction in scoring from Week 10, it was enough to earn Evan his second straight Scott O’Brien Award as the kicker coach of the week. It’s the 14th of his career, tying him with Anthony Battle and Sean Kennedy for the fourth most all-time, and it makes him the AFL’s first repeat winner since Alex Mayo in Week 10 and 11 of the 2022 season.

Evan remains in the lead for the 2023 kicker coach of the year award. He currently has 131.30 points from the position, putting him 14.20 points ahead of Alex Kincaid in second.