Depending on who you ask, this weekend was fortunate or unfortunate, to be all chalk with no major upsets or changes to the wildcard race. Rob won and crushed Kyle, Skyler, and Tyler's dreams of making the playoffs. Kyle was the only one who had a shot as he won his game (and was the highest-scoring team of the week), and even outscored Rob this week by 22 points. Unfortunately for Kyle, it was too little as Rob still beat him by 36 points in the tiebreaker, which is less than 2.6 points per week on average.
In the top half of the bracket, Kyle's win over TJ put Jordan in contention to win and secure the 1 seed, which he did by sneaking past Tyler with a 4-point win. TJ's loss dropped him to the 3 seed and put Matt at the 1 seed, with Jordan taking the 2 seed. Brady and Trevor were essentially locked into the 4/5 matchup, so their games were irrelevant.
Game Recaps
Skyler vs Brady: After a blip the last 2 weeks where Skyler maybe looked like a real team, he was back to his old ways of scoring under 100 points (4 of the last 6 weeks). Skyler had only one person go over 20+ with Mooney, while Brady 'only' had two of them. I put only in quotes because one of those people was Josh Allen, who scored 57 points -- and that was without throwing a TD to himself. They both had 4 players score in the single digits.
Kyle vs TJ: Six teams this week scored 148+ points -- this was the only game to feature two of them, and made this the clear Bonanza. It was mentioned above that Kyle won, but it is worth calling out that he led wire to wire over TJ, but did not do enough to take the title from TJ of highest-scoring single game. Kyle had four people score 20+ while TJ had two. In a 32 point win, there is no 'one player' who lost TJ the game, but getting a negative from his defense this week certainly did him no favors. We shall see how long Kyle and the Vikings can keep this up.
Tyler vs Jordan: We go from Bonanza to ineptitude as this was the matchup of the 9th and 10th highest scoring teams in the league, or 3rd and 4th lowest, whatever you want to call them. This game was close for a while, but Tyler played the Bills DST, who ended up scoring -5, which was the difference in the game as this was also the weekly and nightly nail-biter. Tyler had one players score 20+ points and Jordan had two. I mentioned Tyler's DST scoring -5, and when paired with Deebo Samuel, they combined for 0.5, which was 0.5 more than Jordan's starting TE got. This was an ugly game all around, but Jordan doesn't care since it got him the bye week.
Scott vs Tommy: Scott broke a 3-game streak of being sub-100 by putting up 159.62 this week, and was the 3rd highest scorer. This loss means Tommy sits tied at the bottom of the list with the fewest wins in a season. Scott had five people score 20+, which appears to be the high this week, while Tommy only had one. Scott had two people score in the single digits, while Tommy had four.
Rob vs Brandon: Raise your hand if you had Sam Darnold having the best day of his career (44.58) on the day of playoff-clinching before the start of the season? If your hand is up, put it down you liar. In his best year, Darnold had his best day, making sure Rob didn't lose his spot to Kyle. Though the two biggest reasons Kyle had a chance to steal the spot is because he had two of Darnold's wide receivers -- so maybe it wouldn't have mattered? Anyway, in this match, Rob beat Brandon by a solid 45 points. Most of that was Darnold, but Williams and Jennings also joined the 20+ points club. Brandon had three people score 20+ as well. Unfortunately for him, he was let down by having 5 players in single digits, while Rob only had 3.
Matt vs Trevor: This game was mostly played for pride as Matt secured the division and the bye week last week. After a couple of mediocre weeks, Matt got back to putting up big points, while Trevor stayed in his sweet spot of 105-120. Matt only had three people score 20+, but one of them was Ja'Marr Chase, who went for 45. Trevor had no players score 20+. Amazingly, Trevor only had two players score in single digits while Matt had four.
Award Season
MVP: Darnold, Addison, and Jefferson all went off this week together and got their two teams big points.
LVP: Only one game was close enough where an LVP could even be possible. The Bills DST could have got 0 points and Tyler would have won, but their -5 saw him lose this week.
Luckiest Team of the Week: Jordan would have lost to 8 other teams and would have lost the bye, but instead he played a bottom-three team, won the week, and secured the division and the bye.
Unluckiest Team of the Week: TJ would have beaten 7 other teams this week and would have won the bye week and the division, but instead he played the highest-scoring team of the week and has to square off against Rob.
Highest Scoring Team of the Week: Kyle
Lowest Scoring Team of the Week: Skyler
King of the Court: Kyle wins it from TJ, but is eliminated from the playoffs. I made the executive decision that the King of the Court will stay with Kyle until week 1 next year. I don't talk about the consolation in the blog, and bringing up King of the Court would require me to talk about the consolation bracket. Any losses in the consolation will not lose Kyle his crown, but neither will any wins add to the total number of weeks of holding the crown.
Game Previews
Programming Note -- There are two Monday Night Football games this week. Don't forget to optimize your lineups accordingly.
Brady (4) vs Trevor (5): Brady has 0 players on Thursday and 0 players in primetime. Trevor has 1 player on Thursday and 0 players in primetime. If there aren't any drastic lineup changes, this one will be decided by the end of the Sunday afternoon games. The one time they played head-to-head this year, Trevor won 169-147. If they played each other every game this season, Brady would be winning 8-6, and would be on a 3-game win streak. The last time they met in the playoffs was in the first round in 2022, where Brady won 146.74 to 104.28. Brady also beat him in the championship in 2020 143.8 to 106.34. Those are the only two times they have met in the playoffs.
TJ (3) vs Rob (6): TJ has 1 player on Thursday and 3 players in primetime. Rob has 2 players on Thursday and 1 player in primetime. It looks like they will have to sweat out this game as 3 players play on Monday night, including Darnold (Rob), London (TJ), and Bowers (TJ). It should make for an intense night. The one time they played head-to-head this year, TJ won 119-112. If they played each other every game this season, TJ would be winning 9-5. but Rob would be on a 1 game win streak and would have won 4 of the last 7. They have never met in the playoffs.
Some Regular Season in Review Notes
I put in everyone's information for each week to find their quartile information and then any outliers. If you remember the phrases boxplot, box and whisker diagram, or a Tukey plot, that is what I did with our data. Based on that methodology, Tommy had one positive outlier (week 12), Brandon had two positive outliers (weeks 6 and 9), Trevor had two positive outliers (weeks 6 and 11), TJ had 1 positive outlier (week 5), and Kyle had one negative outlier (week 7), and one positive outlier (week 14). This may be of some concern for Trevor as his highest games are mathematical outliers. Of all the playoff teams, if you look at the amount of times they scored 130+, Trevor has the least at 3. Matt has 5, Brady, Rob, and TJ have 6, and Rob leads the group with 7. If we move the cut-off to 150+ points, Brady has the least at 1, Rob, Trevor, and TJ have 2, Jordan has 3, and Matt has 4.
From a season-total perspective, TJ finished as the highest-scoring team. Compared to the other highest-scoring teams at season end, he finishes in last all time (out of 4) for the 14-game schedule. If we take a points-per-game average so we can better compare team totals across shorter schedules, he finishes at 132.4 per game, which is 10th all time out of 15. The record high for the high points per game is still Stephen Lorenzo Quinn from the 2014 season (145.6 per game), and the record low for the season high is Rob in 2010 at 124.3 points per game
Skyler finished as the lowest-scoring team. Compared to the other lowest-scoring teams at seasons end, he finishes in second all time (out of 4) for the 14-game schedule. If we take a points per game average so we can better compare team totals across shorter schedules, he finished at 109.4 points per game, which is 5th all time out of 15. The record high for the low points per game is Travis James Morrison for the 2018 season (116.5 per game), and the record low for the season low is TJ in 2019 at 95.2 points per game.
Some interesting data I found was when I calculated averages and medians for everyone. Usually, an average is higher than a median. For example, if you take the average net worth of Americans, the billionaires skew the data high, but if you take the median net worth of Americans, it finds the person in the middle of the 330+ million people in the US, and that number will be lower than the average of the same data set. When comparing the average and median of everyone in the league, Skyler, Tommy, and Kyle all had a lower median score than an average score. The other 9 people had averages higher than their medians. The overall league score when looking at every score of every week has an average that is 2.5 points higher than the median. Matt, Scott, and Jordan have the highest positive difference between average and median, with the lowest difference of the 3 being 9.75, and the highest being 10.58. I'm not sure that's cause for concern for Matt and Jordan in the playoffs, but it's an interesting note.
As a late note, congratulations to Matt back in week 11. According to my records, that win over Brady made him a centurion. The all-time regular season wins count is now Skyler 113, Jordan 108, Brady and Rob 106, Matt 102, Kyle 95, Tyler 94, Trevor and Chad 93, TJ 68, Ren 66, Geoff 44, Tommy 38, Brandon 32, Konner 29, and Scott 9.
Lastly (for this post anyway), congrats to Brady on being only the second person to 3-peat as a division champ. The only other person to do it was Ren from 2012 to 2014. His division championship gives him 5 all time. Matt won his 4th division championship this year. Not to be outdone, Jordan has won his 7th division championship, which is tied for most all time with Skyler.
Good luck to none of you this week.
