Anddddd we’re back! Kicking the season off with a brand new podcast covering it all: League Updates, Draft Overviews, Power Rankings, Mailbags, we’ve got it all.
Also for future reference, our podcast feed is now located at https://ec2-3-101-17-211.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com/feed/podcast/
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Please vote on how you RANK each bench option choice. Use 1 for what you like the most and 5 for the least (Ie: If i wanna keep benches the same I would put a ONE for “Keep Benches the same”. Only select each rank once. Don’t pick two different options at number two. When you’re done you should have one option at each rank. THANKS.
So you wanna add IDP players…
This season we’ll be adding three FLEX IDP(any defensive position) slots and dropping out D/ST spot. No more random D/ST scoring, no more negative scores, no more fluky 3 kick off return for TD games. Only the pure skill of picking your favorite three defensive players. Imagine the thrill of a linebacker stripping the ball from a running back – oh wait, that’s your opponent’s running back! And your defensive player! Now you can stick it to your opponents in a whole new way. Stream defensive players going against your opponent’s offensive players for the ultimate thrill.
First of all the auction. These players will be added to the auction like any other offensive player. You’ll have to bid on them using the same allocated $200 and figure out just how much you want to spend on these guys. Maybe you want to go hard on IDP and punt RB/WR. Maybe you want to punt the new IDP spots cause you have no idea what you’re doing. The choice is yours.
Second is the scoring. The proposed scoring looks like this:
| Sacks | 4 |
| INT Return TD | 6 |
| Fum Return TD | 6 |
| Blocked Punt/Kick off TD | 6 |
| Blocked Kick | 6 |
| Interception | 6 |
| Fumble Recovery | 4 |
| Fumble Forced | 4 |
| Safety | 10 |
| Assisted Tackle | 0.75 |
| Solo Tackle | 1.5 |
| Stuff (Tackle for a loss) | 2 |
| Pass Defended | 1.5 |
So what does that look like? Here’s the top ten scorers from last year and how they would have ranked overall:
| PLAYER, TEAM POS | POS | PRK | PTS | AVG | Overall |
| Bobby Wagner, Sea LB Q | LB | 1 | 245.5 | 15.3 | 22 |
| C.J. Mosley, Bal LB | LB | 1 | 245.5 | 15.3 | 23 |
| Blake Martinez, GB LB | LB | 3 | 235 | 14.7 | 27 |
| Deion Jones, Atl LB | LB | 4 | 231.8 | 14.5 | 28 |
| Reshad Jones, Mia S | S | 1 | 222.5 | 13.9 | 32 |
| Demario Davis, NO LB | LB | 5 | 221.5 | 13.8 | 33 |
| Luke Kuechly, Car LB | LB | 6 | 220.3 | 13.8 | 35 |
| Joe Schobert, Cle LB | LB | 7 | 219.3 | 13.7 | 36 |
| Wesley Woodyard, Ten LB | LB | 8 | 218.5 | 13.7 | 37 |
| Christian Kirksey, Cle LB | LB | 9 | 217.5 | 13.6 | 38 |
Almost all linebackers which is pretty typical given the position’s impact on the game. Just outside of the top 10 you’ll see a good mix of safeties and cornerbacks, and just outside the top 20 you’ll start to see some defensive ends. I looked at the top 100 scoring players and heres the breakdown by position:
| Position | Count of Players |
Average Points Per Season
|
| CB | 2 | 186.95 |
| DE | 4 | 180.08 |
| LB | 20 | 204.69 |
| QB | 26 | 243.20 |
| RB | 17 | 229.45 |
| S | 8 | 186.96 |
| TE | 3 | 185.43 |
| WR | 20 | 202.69 |
A pretty healthy mix of running back, quarterback, wide receiver, and linebacker, all the premier positions. We even see a handful of safeties, cornerbacks, defensive ends, and tight ends cracking the top 100.
Most of the top linebackers are scoring between 10-15 points per week with a couple of 20-22 point ceilings sprinkled in. Feel free to check out the players tab and look through all the defensive scoring that happened last year.
But this is too much to handle. How am I supposed to do research on all these DEFENSIVE players? Great question. Here’s some resources:
There’s way more but these should get you started.
It’s been a long hard season, but we finally made it. Two of the top scoring teams of the last weeks of the regular season are meeting in what will hopefully be an epic showdown. The Nibblonians snuck out a win over the Pumaskulls last week, winning by only a third of a point. In the other matchup, the Surfers put on a clinic – outscoring not only their opponent but everyone else in the league. Now these two teams will meet for the third time this season, and the Nibblonians will hope to do what they couldn’t this year – beat the Surfers.
The Nibblonians have outscored the Surfers four out of the last six weeks, but now will be without their star player Antonio Brown. We’ve talked a lot about the splits with Brown in and out of the line-up and the Steelers playing away/home. Not including last week with the injury, the Nibblonians have scored an average of 165 points when the Steelers play at home and 109 when they play on the road (since the Steelers week 9 bye). They’ve collected an average of 63 points from the Big Ben / AB stack in the those games.
There’s a pretty clear distinction between the QB/WR stack that the Nibblonians have benefited from and the much more balanced Surfers roster. The Surfers killed it last week with their running backs – the 88.8 points the trio scored would have been enough to beat four teams on their own. Nibblonians certainly have decent talent at the running back position, but one of her top scorers, Jamaal Williams, had been averaging 25 points a game the last three weeks before putting up a stinker against the Pumaskulls. Now he faces one of the toughest run defenses in the league.
Both teams will struggle to pick who they’re starting at wide receiver – Nibblonians trying to fill in for Antonio Brown, and the Surfers trying to figure out how to put up more than the 15 total points they scored from receivers last week. Surfers have to be happy about a prime match-up for the Ravens D/ST – defenses facing the Colts are averaging 12 points a game.
Just like last week (not really), Surfers will have to sit by and hope that their score holds up as Nibblonians have both Zach Ertz and Marshawn Lynch playing in the Monday night game.
Final Prediction:
FINAL EPISODE. Austin couldn’t make it this week so the recently eliminated CHAMP is here to talk about the crazy second round of playoffs, what next years draft might look like, and what’s going to go down in the BO BOWL this week.
[podbean type=audio-square resource=”episode=hpziw-803776″ skin=”1″ auto=”0″ height=315 ]
Time to get serious. The Dreadmetal Pumaskulls have not played a meaningful game in weeks, and now they go against one of the hottest teams in the league, fresh off another smackdown. The Nibblonians are averaging 135.7 points over their last six weeks. The Pumaskulls can only dream of putting up scores like the Nibblonians – their max score of 118.8 has been beaten four times in the last five weeks by the Nibblonians. Like we mentioned last week, the Nibblonians have been fairly volatile this season compared to the Pumaskulls, and the Pumaskulls high floor/average of 100 points is hardly inspiring.
Despite losing David Johnson and Dalvin Cook, the Pumaskulls have still scored the majority of their points from drafted players, although they rank only behind Nibblonians in average points from free agents. Pumaskulls have benefited from all kinds of great waiver wire performances from Jamison Crowder, Robby Anderson, Buck Allen, and Duke Johnson, almost all previously owned by other teams.
This matchup favors Nibblonians at nearly every position but quarterback, where Russell Wilson has dominated for the Pumaskulls. Once a sore spot for the Nibblonians, Jamaal Williams has averaged 25 points over his last three games, and Marshawn Lynch and Dion Lewis have both provided excellent floor plays. Pumaskulls will have to decide between their stable of ten point running backs and if they want to rely on newly acquired Mike Davis. It’ll be a blood bath at wide receiver, where Antonio Brown has averaged 30 points over the last four weeks while the Pumaskulls have struggled to even get ten from his receivers. Cooper Kupp and ex-Pumaskull Marquise Goodwin have both filled in nicely for the Nibblonian’s other injured receivers. Once a bright spot for the Pumaskulls, Robby Anderson lost his quarterback this last week, and now faces a pretty tough schedule. Nibblonians will have to keep an eye on the injury report to see if #3 tight end Zack Ertz will play this week.
Neither team has any Monday night players (for now) so we should have some early closure on this match-up.
Final Prediction:
The top two scoring teams are duking it out for their Bo Bowl spot. These teams just met three weeks ago and both exploded for 173 and 142 points. The teams seem to ebb and flow together, and it’s hard to say if one team has more momentum than the other. While the Shittysauruses have to feel good about the 129 points they scored last week, it’s still less than the Surfers 131 points in a week where they weren’t even really trying.
Both of these teams are projected to outscore the other two contenders, and all projection systems have this match-up at a dead even 50/50 split with nearly identical point ceilings and floors. This match-up features opposite groups with the Surfers rocking the #1 and #2 running backs, while Shittysauruses feature the #2, #3, and #6 wide receivers. While Shittysauruses has made some of the more savvy free agent pickups this season (JuJu Smith-Schuster, Alex Collins), no team has scored more points from free agency than Butthole Surfers, who has accumulated an average of 41 points per week from the waiver wire. The Surfers led the team in trades this season with seven, and collected 20% of their production from traded players. Shittysauruses didn’t make a trade all season, but did get the most production from their drafted players – hitting on a ton of mid and late-round picks (DeAndre Hopkins – $21, Keenan Allen – $18, Alvin Kamara – $4, Dak Prescott – $3).
The Shittysauruses has been rocking Dak Prescott at QB all season, and while he’s had a few down weeks, has averaged 20 points over his last two games and has a soft match-up. Surfers have been successfully streaming the QB position for most of the season, averaging a respectable 17 points from the position over the last three weeks. Surfers one-two punch of Le’Veon Bell and Todd Gurley is unmatched in the league, although Shittysauruses’ Alvin Kamara is ranked third at the position on the season (if he plays), and Alex Collins is averaging 18 points over his last four games.
Surfers will have some tough decisions at wide-receiver while hoping for big games from Doug Baldwin and Marvin Jones Jr. Shittysauruses will need to take some risks at the tight end position – they’ve produced the third worst average for the position on the season. Both teams have had found success at the D/ST position, Shittysauruses seemingly making magic happen at the position each week, while Surfers have the #2 D/ST with a tasty match-up against the Browns.
With Dak Prescott playing Sunday night and Julio Jones on MNF, Surfers will have to sit by and hope that they can hold their lead (if they have one at all).
Final Prediction:
Round one of the playoffs are OVER and Austin and Justin are back to talk about the next round. We rehash everything that happened in the first round, look at the teams potentially heading to the toilet bowl, and spend some time talking about what we’ll do differently next season. The rest of the podcast is dedicated to how Austin is doomed in his match-up and how The Shittysauruses and Butthole Surfers might be the most explosive matchup of the season.
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It’s playoff time and Austin and Justin are here to speculate about who could end up where and the strengths and weaknesses of each of the team. If you make it that far we’ve got a couple mailbag questions for you, along with some PWR mailbag to spice things up.
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The first matchup of round one, the #4 and #5 seeds duking it out for world domination. This is the first time that these two teams have ever faced off and it couldn’t have happened at a more exciting time. The teams are almost polar opposites in point production and how each team is scoring their points. The Nibblonians are the leagues most volatile by far, scoring between 60 and 185 points this season. The Shenanihads have been much more stable, and while they don’t have as high of a ceiling as some of the other teams, they have a relatively high floor of 79 points (That Nibblonians have failed to meet three times this season). Nibblonians definitely have momentum in their favor, winning three of their last four games while scoring the most points in the league over the same period.
Outside of QB’s and D/ST’s the teams have also had opposite success with the waiver wire. The Nibblonians have started players off the waiver wire eighteen times this season and produced a best-in-league 11.8 points on average. The Shenanihads have started waiver wire players five times this season and produced worst-in-league 1.34 points on average, including two goose eggs from Torrey Smith. To add insult to injury with pickups and drops, Shenanihads drafted and dropped (twice) Robby Anderson, who’s now the #11 receiver.
It’s hard to know which players each of these teams will start, but as we get closer and closer to game time, the gap between the teams gets smaller and smaller. Projections favor Shenanihads 55-45, with the difference maker coming from the tight end position. The player projections for every other spot are within 2-4 points of each other, but Travis Kelce is a significant upgrade over Ertz (who may not play) or Jason Witten. The Nibblonians will have tough line-up decisions to make with the Steelers back at home, but facing one of the toughest defenses in the NFL.
This will be another long drawn out match-up with the Saints/Falcons playing on Thursday, and the Patriots on Monday night.
Final Prediction:
The Domestic Bowl! These two have faced each other ten times (although never in playoffs) with the Shittysauruses winning seven of the contests. In each of these matchups, the Shittysauruses have scored a robust 117 points on average over Giant Ocotpus’ 97.5. Shittysauruses domination over Giant Octopus continued into this season when she crushed the ‘Pus back in week seven. The Shittysauruses are second in points over the last four weeks and have outscored Giant Octopus five times over the last seven weeks. While Giant Octopus had a nice bounce-back week, they also only scored four more points than their competitor, and have scored as low as 54 only five weeks ago.
Shittysauruses hold the highest projection of the week and are heavily favored 65-35 to crush Giant Octopus. Shittysauruses have outscored Giant Octopus at nearly every position this season, aside from tight end. The Shittysauruses have started eight different tight ends this season for an average of 5.1 points. The tight end discrepancy may not matter this week as Giant Octopus will be missing the #2 tight end Gronkowski due to an unimaginably stupid late hit suspension.
This match-up will also feature two of the draft-darling running backs, Kareem Hunt and Alvin Kamara. While Hunt came out of the gate roaring, his usage and production has slowly dropped over the season while Kamara has seen an increase in both, earning him the #2 running back spot – only four points behind Todd Gurley and ahead of Le’Veon Bell. This match-up also features the two teams strongest at wide receiver – Six of the top ten receivers are on these two teams.
Both teams have been streaming defenses over the course of the season, and while The Shittysauruses may regret dropping the Jaguars D/ST after week two, they can feel confident in their ability to pick streamers – they’ve scored 11.5 points per game, good for third in the league and only behind the Jaguars and Ravens D/ST. Giant Octopus on the other hand has produced the fourth fewest points from the position.
This match-up also features players Thursday through Monday, so don’t expect any quick conclusion.
Final Prediction:
It’s the final week and Austin and Justin are hashing out all the scenarios and what teams they think have a shot.
The one game that could determine Giant Octopus’ playoff run. If you read the Playoff Madness post, you know that Giant Octopus needs to beat TGIF this week to even have a shot at playoffs. A loss for the Big Puss here means that no other game matters (besides seeding).
These teams have met thirteen times in the past, with TGIF taking a slight lead 7-6. Earlier this season Giant Octopus put a 20 point beat down on TGIF (back when Giant Octopus was still good). Since then each team has had mixed success, although not a lot in the win department. Giant Octopus enters this contest on a two game losing streak, and tenth in points over the last three weeks. TGIF has been fifth over that same time period, and while they were able to crush any hopes the Atoms or Boomers had at making playoffs they couldn’t beat the Pumaskulls (smh).
Both PWR and the player projections agree for once, giving a 60-40 edge to Giant Octopus despite the teams complete inability to score any amount of meaningful points. TGIF’s strength all season has come from the quarterback position, and this week he’ll have a tough decision between Cam Newton and Carson Wentz. Giant Octopus will also have some tough decisions at the QB position, mostly how to fix the 9 point average they’ve gotten from the position over the last 2 weeks (2nd worst in the league – Dak Prescott says hi). Once a position of strength, Giant Octopus will hope for a Kareem Hunt bounce back while facing off against former Octopus star Adrian Peterson and waiver wire darling Samaje Perine. One thing Giant Octopus will be able to count on is his strength at the wide receiver position where he’s rostered three of the top 10 scoring players. The flex positions will be a puzzle for both teams, as well as uncertainty from the D/ST position where both teams are averaging 5-6 points over the last two weeks. Giant Octopus has almost his entire roster playing at 10AM on Sunday, although AJ Green playing on Monday night may be the difference maker.
Final Prediction:
Who do you think will win? Make sure to leave a comment and vote on the game.
Ok everyone, it’s time for the best post of the season – THE PLAYOFF SCENARIO RUNDOWN. Let’s start with the locked teams first:
So here’s a simple flowchart for how things can go down this week:
So let’s start with the one match-up that might determine everything:
If Giant Octopus loses here then nothing else will matter. All the 7-5 teams will head safely to playoffs. Right now this match-up is about 65-35 in favor of Giant Octopus, but TGIF has outscored or matched Octo the last 4 weeks. If Giant Octopus wins, a lot of other things still need to go right for them to make playoffs. They’ll have their eyes on this next game:
If Giant Octopus wins and Bunnies can’t beat Mega Shark, Bunnies will drop to the bottom of the pile and be eliminated. This game is projected to be closer than it looks, even with Mega Shark’s dud last week. The Bunnies will need to bounce back after dropping points for three straight weeks.
If Giant Octopus and Fluffy Bunnies both win, we’ll be looking at the Shittysauruses, Nibblonians, and Shenanihads games. If they do a clean sweep and all win, Giant Octopus will still be eliminated. If anyone one of them loses, they’ll be looking at point tie breakers against Octo.
Shittysauruses currently have a 110 point lead over Giant Octopus and are a theoretical lock for playoffs even with a loss.
If The Nibblonians lose, they would still need to score ~55 less than Giant Octopus and/or ~35 less than Shenanihads to be eliminated.
If Shenanihads lose, they would need to score ~20 less than Giant Octopus to be eliminated.
Ok stfu nerd, what are my playoff chances? Probably pretty good unless you’re me: UPDATED PLAYOFF ODDS ARE BELOW
Later today I’ll have a post up with seeding odds.
UPDATE:
The PLAYOFF MACHINE has been fixed and updated and can now provide SEEDING ODDS.
| Team | Avg Final Score | Avg Final Wins | #1 Seed | #2 Seed | #3 Seed | #4 Seed | #5 Seed | #6 Seed | Total Playoff Odds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dreadmetal Pumaskulls | 1351.438 | 10.6171 | 100.00% | 100.00% | |||||
| Butthole Surfers | 1535.428 | 8.5921 | 98.91% | 1.09% | 100.00% | ||||
| Shelbyville Shittysauruses | 1452.945 | 7.7654 | 1.02% | 73.35% | 3.77% | 15.49% | 6.35% | 99.98% | |
| The Nibblonians | 1394.437 | 7.4079 | 0.07% | 13.09% | 0.38% | 49.18% | 33.43% | 96.15% | |
| Philadelphia Shenanihads | 1355.206 | 7.74 | 10.61% | 80.44% | 0.24% | 3.79% | 95.08% | ||
| The Fluffy Bunnies | 1203.908 | 7.5945 | 1.86% | 6.46% | 32.50% | 34.36% | 75.18% | ||
| Giant Octopus | 1334.588 | 6.6008 | 8.95% | 2.59% | 22.07% | 33.61% |