Week 3: Alvin and the Nick Chubbs

Week 3 gave us the first real glimpse into what teams are real, and what teams just have an easy schedule. The Chiefs, Seahawks, and Bills look like they’re here to stay. While the Raiders, Saints, and Cowboys may have been exposed. An easy way to tell if your team is “real” is if they play in the NFC West. An easy way to tell if your team is not “real” is if they play in the NFC East. I’ve included a flow chart below to explain this further.

Games of the Week

Keeper league

• Trader Joey (180.3) v. Dead Inside (169.2)

This was a tough fought battle between two contenders and in the end, the win came from the unlikeliest of places. Kyler, Chubb, Conner, and Kupp all put up great weeks for Trader Joey, but they were pretty evenly matched by Josh Allen, Ekeler, and James Robinson. The 169.2 point effort by Dead inside was third highest in the league this week, but it wasn’t enough to overcome an onslaught of double-digit points (almost) all the way down the roster for Trader Joey. I mentioned earlier that this match-up was tilted from the unlikeliest of places, and well that’s because the 15 point differential between the Kickers and D/ST ‘s for each team ended up being the tipping point.

Dynasty league

• RIP Platt and Tautkus (211.6) v. Too Many Cooks (134.2)

Patrick Mahomes is very good at football. Sometimes I wonder if we will ever see someone who is better at football. On a related note, the Jets are very bad at football and sometimes I wonder if we will ever see another coach who is worse at football than Adam Gase. Both Mahomes’ goodness and Gase’s badness led to a dominant victory for Matt C. in dynasty this week as Mahomes and the Colts D/ST put up a combined 67 points. While Rob is in a rebuilding phase, this week has to be concerning as 10 of his bench players scored 0 points this week.

Dictator league

• MTautkus (211.84) v. MCampbell23 (153.56)

Football analytics twitter, and by extension Matt T., have been taking a victory lap this year as both the Bills and Seahawks have decided to scrap their years-long efforts to establish the run, and instead have decided to let their QBs “cook”. This week Russell Wilson and Josh Allen sizzled to a tune of 68.04 combined points and led Matt T to another game of the week performance.

Trivia:

According to Next Gen Stats, this player’s TD run had a 93.2% TD probability from the moment of the handoff. The highest TD probability of any TD run outside the 15-yard line since 2018.