Brandon took care of business this week and extended his series lead over Will. After this week, with Eric and Brandon both beating their opponents, there are 14 head-to-head matchups in our league’s history where one manager has nine wins against the other.

I’ll cover some of the details of their matchup in my blurb above this week’s power rankings, but it wasn’t a particularly close matchup. Brandon jumped out to a 17.5-point lead on Thursday night thanks to a strong performance by Travis Kelce who didn’t even need a touchdown to finish as the TE1 on the week.

Will was a 3-point favorite entering the week, but the game only got further away from Will over the final two days of the matchup as Brandon outscored him by 3 points with his remaining 8 players vs Will’s full 9-man squad.

The score could have been more lopsided than it was. Brandon left the week’s #4 defense on his bench as the New York Jets stifled Jalen Hurts and the Eagles; their unit scored 16.30 fantasy points this week.

In the end, Brandon earned his 12th career Peyton Manning Award and his third this season. He is now 12-17 when he appears in the game of the week while Will drops to 8-10 in his appearances.

After 5-week roller coaster that would put any ride Eric and Evan have ridden over the past two years to shame, Cory finally got off it this week. He had finished 2nd in scoring in Weeks 1, 3, and 5 and 12th in scoring in the weeks between.

After bracing for another putrid performance, he was one of the few managers who was not affected by the low-scoring week around the NFL. He had great performances from Amon-Ra St. Brown and Travis Etienne, but his top scorer for the second time this season was Raheem Mostert, who has 11 touchdowns through six weeks, one of just four running backs to do this since 2000.

Mostert’s 35.71 points was the highest score for any player this week by almost 10 points and ranks 69th (nice) all-time among starting AFL running backs.

Both Cory and Anthony left strong tight end performances on their benches this week. Kyle Pitts, on Anthony’s bench, was the week’s TE3 with 12.75 points. Right behind him with 12.05 points was Jonnu Smith at TE4. Cory picked up Smith last week and stashed him on his IR as a hold for Dallas Goedert’s Week 10 bye.

Cory was one of two managers with five Top 5 positional performers this week, helping him claim his 13th career Tom Brady Award and his first since the final week of the 2022 regular season. He ties Will Massimini for the fourth most Brady Awards in AFL history.

Cory has been the unluckiest manager this season based on his all-play (breakdown) record. Only one manager has been more unlucky based on finishes versus the weekly median.

For his part, though the Saints defense was not particularly good this week, Anthony does maintain his lead in defensive scoring on the season with 107.84 points from the position.

In a rematch of Sabol Bowl VIII, which Stephen won in 2020, Evan drew to just one-game under .500 in their head-to-head series.

Evan’s top performer of the week, at least based on historical performances at their position, was Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, who scored 18.70 points on Thursday night, which is tied for the 29th highest kicker score in league history. Only the Jaguars defense was a higher scorer on Evan’s roster in Week 6.

While he only would’ve given Stephen another four points, he did leave the week’s QB2 on his bench. Jared Goff is the QB6 on the season in our scoring and he finished this week with 23.56 points backing up Justin Herbert.

Stephen’s top scorer was Tyreek Hill, who scored 25.30 points to lead all wide receivers in Week 6 despite missing some time in the middle of the game due to cramping.

Despite losing his second game in three weeks, Stephen continued his streak of 100-point games, which now stands at six. And because he (barely) finished sixth in scoring this week, this counts as his second unlucky loss of the season. Considering he’s 4-2, that’s pretty rough.

While his defense actually performed pretty well (the Lions scored more than 10 points), Stephen fell below Andrew to the bottom of the AFL in defensive scoring. He’s earned only 37.57 points from the position this season, so the Lions accounted for more than a quarter of his total through six weeks.

On the flip side, looking at the kicker position, Evan overtook Cory this week and is up to 70.00 points from his kickers in 2023. Considering our league has averaged a touch under 8.50 points per game from kickers since 2018, the 11.67 per game Evan is getting so far this season is really strong. We’ll see if Butker can keep it up or if Evan does any streaming as the season progresses.

After finishing 11th in scoring for three straight weeks and then 7th in scoring in Week 5, it must have felt nice for Eric to return to his Week 1 finish as the AFL’s #3 scorer.

Led by the week’s QB1, Dak Prescott and his 25.97 points, Eric snapped a 4-game losing streak. It’s the third time in the last four seasons that Eric has had a losing streak this long (fourth if you include the 2 games to end 2021 and the 2 games to begin 2022. A fifth straight loss would have tied the longest losing streak of his career from all the way back in our inaugural 2013 campaign.

Instead, he joined Cory with five Top 5 positional performers, including Daniel Carlson. The Raiders kicker scored 13.70 points, which was good enough for the fifth highest score among starting kickers in the AFL this week, but it wasn’t enough to pull Eric out of the cellar. He still has the fewest points from the position this year with just 38.40 points, about two fewer points per game than our league’s average over the past six seasons.

It would take me a little more time than I care to spend to gather the exact numbers, but historically Eric has been one of, if not the, most risk-averse managers in the AFL when it comes to going against host site projections. Whatever the reason, it means it’s pretty rare for him to get either of our two weekly coaching awards, whether for good or bad coaching.

This week, though, as mentioned in the preamble, he did take a coaching risk. In fact, he took two risks, starting Chris Olave at FLEX after trading away Austin Ekeler mid-week and starting Darren Waller at tight end while keeping Sam LaPorta on his TAXI squad.

Both risks worked in his favor, with the former earning him 6.03 points and the latter earning him 1.45 points. Not only were those 7.48 cumulative coaching points the most any manager earned this week, they gave him the only positive coaching score in the AFL in Week 6!

As a result, Eric earned just his fourth career Chuck Knox Award. Of 19 managers in AFL history, eight have fewer than he has, but six of those eight are no longer in the league, just to give an idea of how infrequent it has been for Eric to earn this award.

Andrew could do nothing as he watched the Kansas City Chiefs defensive performance on Thursday night go to waste. He did try to do something; he tried to put them in his starting lineup just before kickoff, but because he had placed the unit on his IR last week, they aren’t eligible to be activated until after his Week 7 game ends. Their 16.22 points were the fifth most among defensive units in Week 6.

While it didn’t make a difference in his game, it all worked for Andrew on the defensive front anyway. Because several other managers passed on the Minnesota Vikings defense, a decision that cost a lot of coaching points and inflated (or deflated?) that league-wide coaching score for Week 6, Andrew wound up with an upgrade at the position.

The Vikings scored 22.52 points for Andrew, giving him his 6th career Chuck Noll Award as the defensive coach of the week.

It didn’t stop there. Jaguars kicker Brandon McManus scored 18.80 points, good for 28th on the AFL’s all-time list, to give Andrew his 10th career Scott O’Brien Award. He is the ninth manager to claim 10 kicker coach of the week awards.

This is the 15th time in AFL history a manager has had at least a share of both the Chuck Noll Award and the Scott O’Brien Award, and the 11th time a manager has been the sole winner of both. Will Massimini was the last to do it just a few weeks ago in Week 2.

In a lower-scoring matchup, Alex Mayo took the series lead in the Battle of the Alexes and extended his 100-point streak to four games, the second longest active streak in the AFL.

Mayo’s biggest contributor, and the only player on his roster to score more points than his margin of victory this week, was Ravens kicker Justin Tucker. He put on a show for London’s soccer fans on Sunday morning, scoring 18.70 points. Along with Harrison Butker, he tied the 29th highest kicker score in league history.

Kincaid had a rough week. Nine of our managers cost their teams points with coaching decisions, but Alex was the worst of them. He took two coaching risks and failed on both of them, costing his team a league high 21.40 points, more than his 17.07-point margin of defeat.

The smaller error was his decision to start Jonathan Taylor at FLEX instead of Jerome Ford. Ford outscored Taylor by 2.02 points. Of more significance was his decision to pick up the Indianapolis Colts to start at defense instead of the Minnesota Vikings. That decision cost him 19.38 points.

This is Kincaid’s sixth career Hue Jackson Award, which ties him with Stephen April, Anthony Battle, and Will Massimini.

Thanks to that coaching performance, he failed to reach the 100-point mark for the third straight game. He’s now one game shy of tying the longest drought of his career.

With this being the 15th meeting between William and Sean, only two matchups have had more editions than this one in AFL history. Anthony Battle and Brandon Saunders have faced off 16 times and are tied 8-8 (they will face off in Week 12 this season) and William has faced Brandon a record 20 times and leads the series 14-6 (they’ve played twice already this year).

William took the series win in a very low-scoring affair. Interestingly, Sean’s kicker, Brett Maher, scored 15.80 points which just barely put him on the AFL’s all-time kicker leaderboard in the 100th spot, while William left the week’s QB3 on his bench as Tua Tagovailoa scored 23.03 points and Justin Fields left early with a dislocated thumb.

As the lowest scorer of the week, Sean earned his 12th career David Carr Award. The once perennially weak manager has done a great job avoiding these recently. He hadn’t done quite as well as Cory, who hadn’t claimed a David Carr Award since Week 11 of the 2019 season when he took it home in Week 2, Sean’s last David Carr Award came exactly a year after that in Week 11 of the 2020 season.

William’s season is objectively bizarre/hilarious. He had a really poor first two weeks, finishing 11th and 8th in scoring, respectively. But then in Weeks 3 and Week 4, he was a Top 6 scorer but lost both games. He’s finished 8th in scoring each of the past two weeks and now has a two-game winning streak.

So, William went from no luck after Week 2 to 2 wins below expected after Week 4 right back to no luck after Week 6. He is one of three managers without any luck versus league median through six weeks, but the other two (Eric Meyer and Alex Kincaid) have not had any lucky wins or unlucky losses this season.