Week #14

The red hot Admirals won for the second time in three weeks.  Since week 9 they are by far the best team of the league with 44 rank-points, well ahead of ProfMJ at 39 during that same period.  It’s incredible that after languishing in 8th place in the standings for several weeks in the first half of the season, Adm is now the PQBFL’s highest scoring team with 146.9 pts per week on average and also has the highest strength of starters.  Adm is still very much in the race although only three weeks remain, so it will not be easy.  This week was more fireworks from league-leading Josh Allen with 42 pts and also extra fireworks from RB Gibbs who could end up RB1 (still behind J Taylor).  Gibbs scored 29 pts to propel Adm to first place.  There is one cloud on the horizon however.  Tee Higgins had a great game with 2 TDs and 24.5 pts but he had concussion symptoms after the game so it’s unclear what will happen next week and Adm does not have good backup WRs.

The BeaudoinBrothers finished second for the second straight week and due to the woeful week of Old and Bas, Beaud now surprisingly find themselves atop the standings by 5 rank-points.  Beaud has only scored 3.5% above average (144.5 pts per week versus league average 139.6) which is normally nowhere near sufficient to be in first place. Last year Beaud finished third in the year with 8.9% above average so 3.5% would normally be more like 4th place not 1st place.  But as 2025 is a year where no team is dominant and so many first place teams take it on the chin and drop back, we end up with such results as now.  Let’s see if Beaud suffers from the same fate as others in the upcoming weeks.  It has already partially happened for Beaud earlier this season when Beaud were in first place after 9 weeks but finished 7th-6th-6th in weeks 10-11-12 to drop significantly.  This week Beaud got contribution for everybody in the lineup with scores of 9+ by each player except DB Fitzpatrick with only 4 pts.  The rest was at least average if not quite good, even rookie McCarthy had 3 TDs no turnover for 23 pts and Beaud got a nice boost from kicker Aubrey who scored 18 pts which is rare for kickers.

As mentioned above Prof has been fairly competitive as of late and that continued with week with 151.75 pts and third place.  Prof find themselves in a triple-tie in 2nd to 4th place with Old and Bas but Prof has modestly outscored them so Prof owns the tiebreaker at this point.  If Prof had a viable rookie early in the season they might be in first place by now but at least currently they are being powered by T Shough who scored 20.25 pts, the best score for Prof this week.  Even backup S Sanders scored 34.75 pts on the bench so Prof went from zero viable rookies to two very good ones.  Prof fell short of first and second because the duo Prescott-Lamb was not up to standards with 1 TD 2 INTs from Prescott and no TD from Lamb although his stats were allright with 6-121.

The Ballers had their best score of the season 148.25 pts and also best finish of the season with 4th place.  Nacua who had slowed down recently, came back on track with 7-167-2 to crush the Cards.  Second best for the Ballers’ starters were the Vikes defense who shut out the Commanders in addition to 3 turnovers for 22 pts.  L-Jax did not have a great game and lost against the Steelers, but at least he was not as dreadful as recently with 18.5 pts.  Also rookie Loveland contributed with a short TD.  The Ballers could have beat Prof if not for James Cook having two fumbles, one lost, and one not lost.

FlyingElvis finished in 5th place and remains on the outside looking compared to the tight pack of teams in 2nd to 6th place.  FE is only 7 rank points behind second place so it’s still doable if the next three weeks are very strong.  But FE has not finished in the blue since weeks 3-6 when FE did it 4 times in a row so it seems unlikely the light will switch on suddenly when FE has been underperforming for so many consecutive weeks (7-14).  FE was in good posture this week to finish 3rd so it would have broken the bad streak, but Hurts was a catastrophe of epic proportions on MNF with 4 INTs and 1 fumble lost, heck even 2 of those turnovers happened on the same play which is mind boggling.  And of course, no TD.  So Hurts finished the game with minus 4.75 pts which is a week killer.  The other problem is that D Adams only scored 5.25 pts in the offensive explosion of the Rams who scored 45 pts on the Cards, because Adams was in the shadow of Nacua.  While offense was terrible for FE, it was a very strong week on defense with 23 pts from the Seahawks who limited the Falcons to 3 FGs no TD and even blocked one FG attempt.  Also FE’s four individual defenders scored double digits, led by Wagner with 19 pts.

WaxOnWaxOff finished 6th and is now 5 rank points behind FE in 7th place so it’s a distinct possibility that Wax will end the season 8th despite scoring not too bad, only 3.8% points below league average with 134.4 pts per week.  The season started well with week 1 win but there has been little to celebrate since.  Wax was projecting to finish 8th this week before MNF but Barkley salvaged things with a long TD for 20 pts to edge Old and Dec.  Barkley’s output was Wax’s top score of the week because Mayfield had a so-so outing with 12 pts and lost to the Saints at home which was a bit embarrassing.  His connection to Egbuka was not working with only 2 receptions for 15 yards.  The lone good performer in that Bucs game was B Irving who scored 15 pts which helped Wax.  TE Kittle was on bye and backup Jonnu Smith was useless with a goose egg.

OldNo7 stumbled for a second straight bottom 3 finish, with 7th place this week.  And it could have been worse, Old barely beat Dec thanks to COL Jeremiah Smith who scored 3.75 pts while Dec did not have a college player; it is quite surprising that in the entire PQBFL, only J Smith was active as college player, so Old had a leg up on everybody else and it paid off for one extra rank.  Other than that, things were bleak for Old.  Because T Warren has been elevated from rookie to TE earlier this year, Old had no rookie to start with T Henderson on bye and Warren himself only scored 2.75 pts as a TE while backup TE Njoku scored 6 pts on the bench which would have been enough to beat Wax if Njoku had started as TE and if Warren had started as rookie which was not doable.  JSN was the team leader with 22 pts but he was not joined by Amon-Ra this week as Old’s coach was worried about his injury.  The concerns were well founded because StBrown only scored 10.5 pts which is below his norm, but putting Olave in the starting lineup did not work because he only scored 4.5 pts which is another reason why Old fell short of beating Wax.

The Decepticons finished in the bottom 3 for the third time in 4 weeks and have been the worst team in the league during that period.  Dec dropped to 6th place in the standings, it was not long ago that Dec was in first place, leading the league by 5 after weeks 8 and again by 5 after week 10.  This is a distant memory.  Dec is not far from second place (only 3 rank points) but considering the way things are going recently, the arrow is pointing down, not up.  The QB-WR duo Mahomes-Rice was terrible against the Chargers with a combined score of 6.5 pts when their projection was 34.5 pts.  It sounds like the Chiefs will be packing it in early this year.  Dec also had an incomplete lineup because they only drafted one kicker and got caught pants down, finishing only 5 pts behind Wax in 6th, and 2.5 pts behind Old in 7th place.  A random kicker would probably score 5.25+ pts more often than not considering that the non-injured PQBFL kickers average 6.7 pts per week this season so missing a kicker probably cost Dec two ranks.  The top contributors this week were LBs Jack Campbell 19 pts and Devin Lloyd 15 pts who filled in nicely for Spillane on bye.  The Dec coach usually starts Spillane but anyway Lloyd ranks higher (LB15 vs LB20) so Spillane’s bye was possibly a positive.

Last place went to the previously league-leading GloriousBastards in a shocking turn of events, again.  But this was not any plain vanilla last place.  It was a shitty beyond belief last place by any first place team, with only 82.5 pts which was the worst score of the entire PQBFL all year.  Even in 2024 nobody had such a dismal score all season long.  Except for Cam Ward scoring 12 pts, all other starters had a single-digit score, the least bad was 9.5 pts from LB Henley on SNF when it was already a lost cause anyway.  The coach made the last minute decision to bench Nix (13.5 pts) for J Daniels (1 pt) which was also not helping but the rest of the lineup was so poor that this coaching blunder had no impact.  Bijan being limited to 6.25 pts against the tough Seahawks defense could be understood and excused.  But how can J Chase only score 7.5 pts in a high scoring affair 39-34 against the Bills?  And Pickens only 5.25 pts when Dallas scored 30.  Bas now has their work cut out for them to go back to first place.




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