Thanks to three underperforming Monday night players for Andrew and a crazy night from his kicker, Alex improved to 2-1 and prevented Andrew from knotting up their all-time series.

It was a big week for Alex, so let’s run through everything that went right for him, starting with that Monday night performance from Cincinnati Bengals kicker Evan McPherson. He missed one of his five field goal attempts, but all five attempts were 48 yards or longer. His 21.40 points is tied for the 8th highest single-game performance by a kicker in league history!

Thanks to McPherson’s performance, Alex earned his 8th career Scott O’Brien kicker coach of the week award, which brings him into a tie with Brandon Saunders on the all-time list.

In all, Alex had four players finish the week among the Top 5 scorers at their respective positions, the most in the league.

One of those players was Carolina Panthers wide receiver Adam Thielen, who helped Alex win this Chuck Knox Award as the week’s top coach. Thielen outscored FleaFlicker’s recommended starter, DeAndre Hopkins, by 20.60 points and Alex earned an additional 1.14 points by starting the Atlanta Falcons defense after dropping Tamp Bay’s defense.

In all, Alex earned 21.74 coaching points more than his margin of victory, to claim his fourth career coach of the week award, passing Eric Meyer on our all-time leaderboard. His last Chuck Knox Award came in Week 8 of last season.

Thanks to all those players, Alex earned his third career Peyton Manning Award and his first since 2021 when he won the award in Week 10. He is now 3-7 all-time in game of the week appearances while Andrew falls to 6-16.

Andrew still hasn’t recovered fully from the Seattle Seahawks poor defensive performance against the Rams in Week 1. He has closed the gap a bit on the field but still has the fewest points from defenses in the AFL with 20.25 points.

While it wouldn’t have cut his deficit by nearly enough to give him the victory, Andrew had one player on his bench (sort of) that would have brought him from 12th to 10th in defensive scoring. Back in Week 1, after drafting the Patriots defense in the 13th round, he picked up the Seahawks defense and placed the Patriots on his IR.

The unit wasn’t eligible to return until after Week 3 concluded, so he had no option to activate and start them, but the 18.72 points they scored while sitting on his IR were the third most by any defensive unit in Week 3.

The highlight of the week for Andrew was Keenan Allen, who had a monster day on Sunday. He hauled in 18 of his 20 targets for over 200 yards and tossed in a passing touchdown for good measure. His 35.23 points ranked 39th on the AFL’s all-time single game wide receiver performance list and was just a point and a half off the high score at the position for the week.

We’ll start back in paragraph 5 of this write-up where I mentioned three prime time wide receiver studs appeared in this game. Will Massimini had A.J. Brown who had his biggest game of the year, but both Adams and Chase outscored him.

Davante Adams was magnificent on Sunday night, recording 36.75 fantasy points for Sean, the 23rd highest wide receiver score in league history. He was the second highest scoring starter at any position in the AFL this week.

Along with his exceptional receivers, Sean got solid production from Brock Purdy on Thursday night, the Eagles defense on Monday night, and both Tony Pollard and Alexander Mattison on Sunday afternoon. His 154.17-point total ranks 58th in league history and earned him the top score of the week.

It was Sean’s first Tom Brady Award in exactly a year; his most recent had come in Week 3 of the 2022 season. It’s the 12th time Sean has led the AFL in scoring, tying him with Cory Puffett and Will Massimini for the fourth most Tom Brady Award all-time.

A big difference maker in the game was Sean’s lack of busts in his lineup this week. Only Tyler Allgeier failed to hit double digits for him while Will had three such players, including a donut from Denver Broncos tight end Adam Trautman.

Will has had a lot of bad luck in his career. In 10 career seasons, he’s had a negative luck rating in six of them. There’s still plenty of time for things to balance out this season, but he was the unluckiest of our two unlucky losers this week, falling to 1-2 despite having the third highest total in the league. His 135.45 points represent the 11th most points scored in a losing performance in league history.

It took a pair of superhuman efforts from Sean’s prime time wide receivers to prevent Cory from capturing his first Tom Brady Award of the campaign. Instead he has to settle for the #2 score of the week for the second time with a David Carr Award sandwiched between the two.

Cory’s 147.88 points ranks 89th in AFL history. League Legacy gave Cory the “Most Dominating” superlative for Week 3; his 60.04-point margin of victory is the largest of the season so far.

A big part of Cory’s dominating week was Raheem Mostert, the highest scoring starter in our league this week. His 42.02 points rank 19th all-time among starting AFL running backs.

Despite claiming no Scott O’Brien Awards thus far, Cory now holds the lead in the race for the Mark Moseley Award. He passed Stephen April this week and now leads the AFL with 37.40 points from the kicker position. This week, Taylor Bass scored 16.20 points which ties the 77th highest single-game kicker score in league history.

Eric has been very disappointing since his Top 3 scoring week to open the season. He now has back-to-back weeks as the #11 scorer and he owns the only active multi-week drought of 100-point games in the league. He also fell behand Brandon Saunders to last place in the aforementioned Mark Moseley Award race. He’s earned just 14.70 points from kickers this year.

It’s been 31 regular season weeks since Eric last claimed a Tom Brady Award. The second longest active drought among active members in the league is 13 weeks for Alex Mayo. The longest drought any former member ended their tenure on was 25 weeks for Saswat Misra. It’s been a long stretch of futility for a manager who once claimed three 12-win seasons in a four-year span.

Eric now has an interesting decision to make. The TE1 for Week 3 was Sam LaPorta with 17.65 points on his bench. The Lions rookie tight end looks like the real deal. He could be worth starting if Eric thinks he can salvage this season. But he may elect to keep him on his taxi squad and keep the option open to use his 16th round pick to keep him in 2024 in addition to his traditional keeper.

Eric faces three sub-.500 teams plus this week’s David Carr Award winner over the next five weeks.

In stark contrast to Cory’s blowout victory, Stephen claimed the narrowest margin of victory with his 4.27-point win this week, knocking the defending Sabol Bowl champion to 0-3 to begin the campaign.

This game came down to the final half of the late Monday night game, turning on Joe Mixon’s touchdown run. He is one of just two managers who has scored 100 points in every game this season.

While this week wasn’t as dominating as his first two weeks, Stephen did have the top quarterback of the week in the form of Justin Herbert, who had 32.05 points despite one of his wide receivers throwing for a touchdown.

William, for his part, was a Top 6 scorer this week. He joins Will Massimini, his brother Anthony from last week, and Cory Puffett from Week 1 on the unlucky loser train.

Adding insult to injury, William should have won this game. In fact, he would have if he hadn’t sabotaged himself with a pair of poor coaching decisions; reversing either of the two would have flipped the game. He ignored FleaFlicker projections by starting Jayden Reed instead of Tank Dell, costing himself 16.70 points and then he ignored the site again by starting Tony Jones instead of Dameon Pierce, resulting in another 6.13-point coaching penalty.

It's the 7th time William has claimed the Hue Jackson Award and the first time since late in the 2021 season. He passes Stephen, Anthony Battle, Will Massimini, and Cory Puffett for the 4th most Hue Jackson Awards of all-time.

There was a little bit of good to come from this game for William, though. First, the Buffalo Bills had a day against Sam Howell and the Mmanderz, earning William the Chuck Noll Award with their 29.43 points. It is William’s 19th career defensive coach of the week honor, extending his record for the most in league history.

Additionally, his playoff odds may have actually increased with this loss. Over our 10-year history, managers who begin 1-2 make the playoffs 14.0% of the time and win the Sabol Bowl at a rate of 2.3%. But those who begin 0-3 see those numbers jump to 16.7% and 5.6%, respectively. As the league’s only 0-3 team, we’ll see if William can follow that trend and be as successful as the best of our 1-2 starters.

Entering this week, Anthony was one of three managers who had scored at least 100 points in each of the first two weeks of the season. After failing to hit that mark in Week 3, he saw his league-leading active streak of 100-point games end at six.

Anthony will be kicking himself just a bit over his decision to start the Dallas Cowboys defense. It was the “right” move based on FleaFlicker’s projections, but if he had started the New Orleans Saints defense, he would have finished the game with 111.00 points and captured a narrow victory.

The Saints scored 20.90 points as the week’s #2 defense. The Cowboys defense couldn’t seem to do anything right in Arizona on Sunday and cost Anthony 2.08 points. Even so, Anthony still holds the lead in the race for the AFL’s Buddy Ryan defensive coach of the year award with 53.26 points from the defensive position this season.

Alex Mayo, meanwhile, had his own nuclear performance on his bench. De’Von Achane (pronounced A-Chan, unfortunately similar to the website famous for hosting a certain conspiracy theory closely related to the January 6th insurrection), went nuts Sunday against the Denver Broncos.

If you thought Cory was happy with Raheem Mostert’s performance, imagine finding out that a player who shares his position on the same team scored ten more points! Achane, sitting on Alex’s taxi squad, had 52.09 points on Sunday! It would have been the #5 single-game running back performance in AFL history had he been in the starting lineup.

Alex was one of two lucky winners this week. He would have beaten just four of the eleven other managers in the AFL this week; lucky for him, he was facing one of those four.

Brandon was the luckiest manager this week. He was matched up with the lowest scorer of the week but had just a 3-8 breakdown.

Even so, with Anthony falling below triple digits, Brandon takes over as the active leader in consecutive games with at least 100 points. His streak runs back to the final week of the 2022 season.

He was assisted by the top scoring tight end of the week, at least of those in starting lineups. Taylor Swift may have been the only person more excited than Brandon for Travis Kelce’s performance. His 16.00 points were nearly double his Week 2 output and so essentially tripled his season total after he missed Week 1.

As the lowest scoring manager of the week, Evan earned his 15th career David Carr Award, tying Brandon for the most in league history. His last David Carr Award came in Week 7 of the 2022 campaign.