Week #15

The high-flying BeaudoinBrothers finished in the top 3 for the fifth consecutive week and the competition at the top has now dropped from a 3-team race to a 2-team race between Beaud and Wax.  It was a bit messy for Beaud this week with an error-prone start at the beginning of the 1pm games including 2 INTs from Hurts, 1 fumble lost from M Sanders, 1 missed extra-point from Butker (who then later also missed a FG), and DL D Lawrence who was nowhere to be found and only scored a single point because his game went into OT otherwise he was laying an egg.  With the projections stuck into a tight range with Wax and several other teams before 4pm everything was wide open but the Bros pulled away with strong defense during the 4pm games, notably the Broncos were lucky to face the Cards at the time they did, because K Murray (Adm) was unavailable so the Broncos neutralized the Cards and intercepted 3 passes from their backup QB.  Kyle Dugger had a pick-6 against David Carr for 17 pts, and the best of the lot was Logan Wilson who scored exactly 19 pts for the second straight week.  He was on the bench in week #14 but the coach did not repeat that mistake in week #15.  D Henry capped off the Bros’ final burst at 4pm with a short TD and 163 total yards for 17 pts.  The Bros might have to play the last few weeks without their QB Hurts who got injured which will have a double-impact on AJ Brown so things might get exciting at the finish line between Beaud and Wax.

WaxOnWaxOff came out on top of a tight pack in 2nd-4th place for a rare time this season as Wax has often been on the losing end of such tight matchups this season.  By doing so Wax managed to keep their head above water and dropped to 5 rank-points behind Beaud and no more, which is still manageable with 3 weeks left.  On SNF Barkley had to come up big to save Wax from pain and he delivered with 1 TD and 120 yds from scrimmage in the Giants’ key road win in Washington.  Similar to Beaud, things had started slow for Wax on Saturday.  Ju Jefferson + TJ Hockenson + H Smith were a disaster like the rest of the Vikings in the first half against the Colts, and Okereke was equally poor so the total score of these 4 guys at the half was predicting doom for Wax.  However in the historic Vikings comeback and also playing the full 10 minutes of OT (Okereke racked 4 tackles in OT alone – matching the difference between Wax 147 pts and Old 143 pts in 4th place) meant that Wax came back from the dead and avoided a catastrophic week to finish second.  In fact Wax was a huge beneficiary of OT this week as more than half their lineup (7/13) played in OT, and if kicker Tyler Bass had missed his FG as time expired, perversely Wax would have possibly benefited despite the negative missed FG points because it would have put not only Bass into OT but Josh Allen as well who was already having a monster game with 35.75 pts so Wax came close to having 9 starters playing in OT. 

The Decepticons had their highest finish since their week #11 win with third place.  On MNF the beleaguered Rams D had low projections against the Packers because they overall suck, but they did just enough with 2 turnovers and 3 sacks to edge Old by 2.75 pts but fell short of Wax by 1.25 pts so they needed to do better than the 24 pts and 345 total yards allowed.  The leader of the week was by far Mahomes with 32.75 pts and he’s now only 0.2 pt per week on average behind Hurts and with Hurts looking to miss time it seems Mahomes has a good shot at finishing 2022 as the top scoring player which was not expected back in August given the loss of Ty Hill.  An unexpected contributor this week was David Montgomery who scored 2 TDs for 18.5 pts but with backup Herbert (Bas) coming back from injury soon it might have been Montgomery’s last hurrah.  Co-RB N Harris also had a decent game with 86 yds rushing and a TD, while it was more rough at WR with Lockett scoring 10.25 pts but he broke a finger and Hopkins suffering from the loss of his QB so he was limited to 10 pts.  At rookie Dec fell into the same trap as so many other PQBFL teams in the last couple of years with the lure of juicy scoring from rookie QBs who end up doing far worse than other positions.  D Ridder got his first start so Dec put him in the lineup but he could not ever reach 100 passing yards so he ended the game with 6 pts while rookie LB C Harris was all over the field with 18 pts on the bench. 

OldNo7 gained three rank-points on FE this week and moved closer to 4th place in the standings but time is running out.  Old has been helped by a late season push by T Lawrence.  Since week #10 Lawrence only scored below 20 pts one time whereas from week 1-9 he only scored above 20 pts twice in 9 weeks.  Week #15 was the second straight week that Lawrence scored more than 30 pts and this time it was against a fairly tough Dallas defense which he took apart with a comeback after being down 27-10 with 4 minutes remaining in the 3rd quarter.  He then threw 3 TD passes in the span of 9 minutes to send the game into OT and finished with 31.25 pts.  CMC also had a good game with 16.5 pts to climb his way back towards the top of the RB rankings, this week he jumped ahead of Chubb (Adm) and CMC now ranks RB3 behind Jacobs (Bas) and D Henry (Beaud).  Old’s WRs both had good games this week with 17 pts from Godwin and 19.25 pts from Ty Hill, but the main reason why Old could not finish higher than 4th was the continued weak performance of Mark Andrews when playing without Lamar Jackson who is injured.  In the three games without Jackson, Andrews has scored 6.5 pts, 2.75 pts, and this week 4.5 pts.  Andrews has not had a double-digit game since week #6 and fell to TE4 in the league.  Rookie Pacheco can also be blamed for Old’s mediocre result because he lost a fumble and did not score a TD so it cancelled his otherwise decent yardage (97 yds from scrimmage).

The Ballers retook possession of 8th place over Prof after losing it last week by finishing 5th this week.  Similar to Wax, the Ballers benefited from overtime to score extra points this week notably D Cook and Kendricks who ended 70 minutes of play with 20.75 pts and 19 pts, respectively.  Kendricks was the top scorer on Ball’s defense but he was not the only outperformer this week.  Justin Simmons had 2 INTs for 14 pts and Shaq Thompson was busy on the tackle front for 13 pts.  On MNF the Packers made the Rams offense look small with only 156 total yards and the Packers sacked the sorry ass of Mayfield 5 times.  This more than made up for the goose egg from DL Chris Jones who came up empty and leaving 12 pts from DL Golden on the bench.  With tight standings this week, just the change in DL would have made the difference between 5th and 2nd place this week.  On offense Ball had a lukewarm week, Goff led the Lions to victory but it was not a pretty affair; his lone TD came with less than 2 minutes to play.  C Patterson scored but had so-so stats and did not crack double digits, Diggs could not do better than 7.75 pts despite the high-scoring affair against the Dolphins, while Higgins was marginally better with a TD but only 33 receiving yards. 

The Admirals lost some ground against the Decepticons and will probably finish 7th this season unless there is a surprising turnaround due to their 6th place finish this week.  Not having Kyler Murray available will sting for the rest of the season and the coach still does not trust D Watson who stayed on the bench.  Starter Tannehill was far from impressive with only 7.5 pts while Watson was modestly better with 12 pts.  It will be nearly impossible for Adm to have any kind of success until the end of the season with this kind of QB production.  Rookie C Watson was on bye last week and it made him turn cold.  After an explosive 4-week period from week 10-13 when he averaged 21.4 pts per game, this week he could only post a 4-46-0 stat line for 6.25 pts.  Offense was led by Waddle who scored 16.5 pts but most of it came from his 67-yard TD; he only caught 3 passes during the entire game so other than his TD he was fairly uninvolved.  D Knox was the bigger outperformer with 6-98-1 for 15.75 pts which was surprisingly better than teammate Diggs (Ball).  This week was far from perfect from Adm, even reliable kicker Tucker went 1/3 on FGs which is so uncharacteristic of him.  From 2016 until last week, Tucker had missed in each season 1, 3, 4, 1, 3, 2, 3 FGs for an average of less than 2.5 missed FGs per season so missing two in the same game is out of the ordinary.  That now gives him 5 missed FGs this season and he’s K2 behind Bass (Wax) so no longer the top kicker in the league.  Defense was mediocre this week for Adm but the weird result was the Colts scoring 20 pts which might be the first time ever that a defense scores 20+ despite allowing almost 40 pts to the opposing offense and more than 500 total yards.  The Colts scored 2 TDs, had one blocked kick, 7 sacks, and 3 turnovers which helped their final score.

FlyingElvis finished in 7th place this week which was not good, but nonetheless beat Bas by 2 so they continue to still have a chance to finish 3rd.  Lamar Jackson should come back to health next week which will help because B Mayfield has been useless with only 4 pts this week.  However FE might see their QB problem fixed only to have a RB problem pop up at the same time because it looks like the Colts might park J Taylor for the rest of the year due to an injury.  Taylor left the high-scoring Colts game early after only catching a single pass for 13 yds.  At least it seems JK Dobbins has been warming up, we’ll see if he remains as productive as he’s been on the FE bench while L-Jax was sidelined.  Since coming back from his own injury, Dobbins scored 15 and 10.5 pts so perhaps he can do a suitable job with Taylor down.  At WR FE made the odd move of benching CD Lamb in favor of Thielen.  The latter did score and reached double digits, but Lamb outscored him by a little with 13.25 pts on the bench and since the rankings were close this week, Thielen finishing only 2.25 pts below Lamb was the difference between 6th and 7th place for FE this week so the call was costly.  The team leader this week for FE was Kittle who has had a moderately disappointing season but part of the problem has been his lack of QB, not his own fault.  This week it did not matter who the QB was and Kittle scored 2 TDs for 23.5 pts – his best effort of the season.  On defense FE caught a gift from heaven with Chandler Jones looking like a stellar WR with not only receiving skills but an effective stiff-arm to avoid being tackled and then running like a gazelle to the end zone for the game-winning TD as time expired.  Jones scored 16.5 pts in that game which was his third straight double-digit game after not scoring more than 5 pts in weeks 1-12 and he was not even injured during that time span. 

ProfessorMJ played musical chairs with the Ballers and is back in the basement of the standings with 119 pts and 8th place this week.  It was not entirely bad for Prof, in fact there were several good performances in the starting lineup including Burrow scoring 27 pts in a come from behind win, and Dionte Johnson scoring 15 pts when M Evans was (finally) left on the bench which turned out to be the right call to make.  T Etienne had 127 yds from scrimmage for 10.5 pts which is quite good in this season of low rookie scoring.  However the main problem was team defense with the coach starting the Bills which were unimpressive and nearly lost the game against the Dolphins: 2 sacks, no turnover, 400+ yds and 29 pts allowed for a single point.  On the bench the Browns scored 20 pts when they held the Jackson-less Ravens to a single FG and no TD.  That call alone was the difference between 6th and 8th place for Prof.  The rest of the starting defense was not up to standards either, normally Prof has productive LBs but this week Brooks and Mosley combined for only 13 pts and the bench Hicks + Bolton was better but both were into the single digits too.  Also it’s hard to compete with an incomplete lineup; DB McKinney is still not back from his freak ATV accident so Prof got a zero at the DB position again.

Boom-bust is the perfect description for the GloriousBastards who were booming from weeks 10-14 with 5 straight finishes in the top 3 but crashed to last place in week #15.  This was amazingly the third time that Bas finished last this season which competes with Adm (3), Prof (3) and Ball (4).  How can such a powerful team, almost as high scoring as Wax through 14 weeks (2113.75 vs 2062.75), can finish with less than 100 pts, again?  This week could not have been a worse nightmare with Beaud and Wax finishing 1st and 2nd so now Bas is completely out of contention for 2nd, let alone 1st.  All Bas needs to focus on is hold on to third with FE 7 rank-points behind.  It did not help that rookie Pickett was injured and replacement Olave scored only 5 pts but realistically Bas got blown out by Prof by 25.5 pts so Pickett would have had to score 30+ simply to finish 8th so his absence was not even an excuse.  Perhaps Pickett’s injury had more of an impact on Freiermuth who scored a goose egg.  Most TE can score a few points with any kind of QB (unlike WRs), but apparently not Freiermuth.  Ju Herbert was a disaster with 2 INTs and no TD despite the Chargers winning.  D Adams was a huge let down with only 5.25 pts and Jacobs hardly better with 9 pts.  J Chase scored and he was a rare starter to exceed his projection but Bas was frustrated nonetheless after watching just about any other Bengals receiver take away TDs from Chase: Higgins, Boyd, and even Wilcox!  A Jones also scored on MNF in a futile game but he also lost a fumble to cap a perfect comedy of errors and watched Dillon scored 2 TDs.  Even kicker Elliott missed a makeable 38-yd FG.  In this week to forget, star DB M Fitzpatrick scored 2.5 pts in part because the Panthers hardly ever had the ball because they sucked so much.





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