Awards and notable teams of the week.
Strongest Living Team: This season is shaping up quite differently from last year, probably because of injuries and the lower scoring overall. After week 6 last year, we still had two teams averaging over 200 points per week. This year, we have only one over 190. Reggie Dunlop (#100017) is the strongest living team to date, averaging 191.41 ppw.
Strongest Dead Team: House (#101917) is averaging an impressive 180.94 points per week, which will gain them nothing as they were eliminated last week. Theirs is the only eliminated roster in the top 68 overall.
Keep Your Day Job Award: Scoring is really compressed this year: there are no teams averaging under 90 ppw. Usually, this category is dominated by gimmick teams (25 kickers, that sort of thing), but not this year! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a “serious” entry claiming the top (er, bottom) spot in scoring, but that’s what we have right now. Entry #111371 has a very normal-looking roster distribution (2QB-6RB-5WR-2TE-1K-2D), and yet is averaging only 90.54 ppw. The team looks disastrous in hindsight, headlined by McCaffrey, Tua and Tyreek, but wouldn’t have stood out as a problem before the season started.
Safest Team: Another example of how different this season is than last. At this point last year, we still had a team that had always cleared the cutline by at least 60 points. This year, the safest team is Entry #108835, with a minimum clearance of only 46.70.
Just Skating By Award: Flamingo (#104424) loves living on the edge: their best performance cleared the line by 15.05 points, and that was in week 1. Since then, they’ve only managed to clear by even 10 points once.
By the way, there are 16 living teams that finished exactly at the cutline once. That's a lot more than I would have thought. Nobody's done it twice, which is not surprising as that seems astronomically unlikely.
Steady Eddie Award: Two ways to look at this. Feral Hogs (#109761) has always scored between 153.55 and 161.25, for a miniscule standard deviation of 2.99, lowest in the contest. More impressive though (I think) is battlestallion (#101511), who has cleared the cutline by between 36.15 and 44.00 points, for a standard deviation of 2.32. The living team with the next-lowest clearance SD is at 3.30, almost a full point higher. A shoutout here to Daring Knaves (#100685), who has always come within 1.20 and 9.55 points of the cutline…but always on the wrong side of it. Ouch.
Crazy Eddie Award: Usually, teams with really high variance are dead by now. Through week 6 last year, though, the team with the highest standard deviation was still alive, which was kind of incredible. The natural order has reasserted itself this year, though: of the 200 rosters with the highest standard deviation, only one is still alive. Zors Outlaws (#102162) sits in 194th with a SD of 36.91, driven largely by the 242.15 score they put up in week 4.
Icarus Award: Entry #102188 was riding high with the 20th-highest average score among living teams until it all came crashing down this week. Looking at the roster, I wouldn’t have guessed it: not an excessive number of byes or injuries, and Goff, Jayden Reed and the Lions D certainly pulled their weight. Just too many mediocre performances apart from those.
Woulda Coulda Shoulda Award: Poor Entry #104954. If we ignore week 1, they’re the 25th-highest scoring team in the contest, but that’s all dead man scoring, as they were eliminated right out of the gate. I hear they thought week 1 was a practice week.
Notable Teams:
QBs: Taking lots of QBs is a terrible idea, people. All of the teams with 8 or more QBs (including #111642, who had 14) are dead. Of the 17 teams with 7 QBs, only 2 are still alive (a 12% survival rate compared to 37% overall). Those two are Entry #107291 and Entry #110545. I wouldn’t bet on them living much longer.
RBs: Nothing wrong with taking lots of RBs, though! Yes, the 18- and 16-RB teams are gone, but Entry #107216, with 13 RBs, is still with us. And 2 of the 6 12-RB teams are still around, which is basically the overall survival rate.
WRs: Entry #111450 rostered 15 WRs…and 4 RBs, and only 1 QB, TE, K and D. And they’re still alive! One of the two 13-WR teams (Entry #110201) is also still kicking.
TEs: The four teams with 8+ TEs are all gone. But 7 of the 15 teams with 6 TEs are still alive, a very good survival rate!
PKs: There are always a bunch of gimmick teams with a ridiculous number of kickers. This year, we had Entry #107503 taking 23 of them. That’s gone about as well as you’d expect: they’ve never sniffed the cutline. But we do still have one surviving (out of 6) 10-kicker team, Entry #110996, which is pretty amazing: last year, we were down to 7-K teams at this point. In fact, there are two 8-K teams still alive this year, despite the fact that the three 9-K teams, the other ten 8-K teams, all 14 7-K teams, and all 25 6-K teams have been eliminated. Strange stuff.
DEFs: Entry #110500, with 10 defenses, is still hanging in there. No other team with more than 6 has survived.
And me, you ask? I’m still alive, trying to make the finals for the 3rd straight year. Nothing spectacular so far, but no particularly close scrapes either. I’ve lost Rashee Rice, but so has everyone else.
