Week 7 Power Rankings
This week, I thought I’d try something new and do a mailbag post, answering the specific questions you have about your team and the league. I got a couple of takers, so this week we’ll do a deep dive on those queries. I enjoyed answering your questions, so if successful, we might do another of one of these before the year is up. Alright, let’s get to it.
I’m interested to know if I’ve ever had a hot start like 6-1 before (and how those teams might have fared). Also, has anyone won the league without completing a trade?
—Gray
Hmm…I sense a humblebrag in the answer to this question. Just kidding. But yes, 6-1 is definitely familiar territory for Gray. In the history of this league, we’ve never had a 7-0 team. But we have had nine 6-1 teams. Of those nine, four belong to Gray, including this year. That’s pretty elite stuff.
How did those teams finish?
Gray ’11: 11-2, 2nd
Gray ’13: 9-4, 1st
Gray ’15: 8-5, 3rd
Pretty good. All three finished in the money, two in the championship final, and one won the whole thing. Though it should be noted the last time Gray started 6-1, he lost four of his last six games. So it doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll cruise through the remaining schedule.
As for the other 6-1 teams in league history…
Brandon ’11: 9-4, 1st
Jess ’15: 8-5, 2nd
Nick ’18: 10-3, 4th
Brandon ’19: 9-3-1, 3rd
Josh ’19: 10-3, 2nd
…they all made the playoffs. And all but one finished in the money. That’s a good sign for Gray. Though interestingly, there’s only one other champion in the group. And if we look at which of these other 6-1 teams Gray’s current team most closely resembles, I’d have to say either 2018 Nick or 2019 Brandon. Both were overachievers with a TW% in the .500s and scoring outside the top tier. Both won more games than they lost down the stretch, but both also fell short in the playoffs. At least for right now, this dog’s bark is bigger than its bite.
As for the second half of that question, yes, two team owners have won championships without making a trade—Greco in 2012 and Geoff in 2016. In fact, Greco’s set-it-and-forget-it roster from 2012 sealed the deal with only five free agency acquisitions the entire season. You might recall that was the year Adrian Peterson slipped all the way to the 27th pick in his comeback MVP season. I guess you don’t have to make a lot of moves when you get a steal like that in the draft.
But for the most part, champions make at least one or two trades with the most trades ever for a championship roster being the four Brandon made in 2017. The record for most trades in a single season also belongs to Brandon with an astounding seven in 2015. Think I might have been rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic that year as I did not make the playoffs.
Still wondering how I’ve lost 4 games when my team can go off for as many as it has so many times. Still think there has to be bad luck involved. 😂
—Josh
Ah, yes… bad luck. Looking at posts from previous seasons, we always seem to come around it at this point of the season. So let’s talk about it. Has Josh’s team been unlucky?
By the traditional definition, yes.
Remember, the way we measure luck is to compare a team owner’s true win percentage (TW%) with that of their observed win percentage (W%). For example, Alex’s true record this season is 33-44, which equates to a TW% of .429. By comparison, his actual record is 3-4, which means his W% is also exactly .429. That means that through seven weeks, Alex’s team has performed exactly as we’d expect given his true record. He’s been neither lucky nor unlucky (at least in terms of the schedule; the injuries to Michael Thomas and Austin Ekeler are another story). But that’s not the case for Josh or other owners in the league.
Here’s a list of team owners sorted by the difference between their W% and their TW%. The more positive your number, the luckier you’ve been. The more negative, the more unlucky.
1. Gray: +.325 (.857 W% vs .532 TW%)
2. Jess: +.078 (.571 W% vs .494 TW%)
3. Whitney: +.078 (.429 W% vs .351 TW%)
4. Beth Ann: +.052 (.714 W% vs .662 TW%)
5. Greco: +.052 (.429 W% vs .377 TW%)
6. Erik: +.013 (.571 W% vs .558 TW%)
7. Brandon: +.013 (.571 W% vs .558 TW%)
8. Alex: .000 (.429 W% vs .429 TW%)
9. Samantha: -.065 (.571 W% vs .636 TW%)
10. Nick: -.130 (.143 W% vs .273 TW%)
11. Geoff: -.195 (.286 W% vs .481 TW%)
12. Josh: -.221 (.429 W% vs .649 TW%)
There’s Josh. All the way at the bottom—so far, the unluckiest team owner in the league. Coincidentally, you might have also noticed Gray’s name at the top, the other team owner to ask a mailbag question this week.
In fact, if we gave Josh’s schedule to Gray and Gray’s schedule to Josh, they’d be in vastly different positions. Josh would have picked up three more wins in Weeks 1, 4 and 6. Meanwhile, Gray would have lost Week 1 plus would be riding a current three-game losing streak that would have included a loss by 0.10 points to Alex in Week 6. Add up the wins and losses, and suddenly Josh’s team is 6-1 and Gray’s team is 2-5—just by swapping the schedules. Crazy.
To get a better sense of their luck visually, let’s go to the chart for some historical context.
If Gray’s luck continues, he would be the second-luckiest team of all time.
Each dot above represents an individual season from league history. Gray dots are teams from past years. Orange dots are from this year. It’s a simple scatterplot of TW% vs. W%. The way the chart works is that if your team is above the dotted line, it’s lucky. And if it’s below the dotted line, it’s unlucky.
As you can see, the general trend of the scatter is to follow that dotted line. For the most part, good teams (teams with high TW%) are good (high W%) and bad teams (low TW%) are bad (low W%).
But over the years, there have been a few outliers. Most noteworthy among them are Terryn in 2013 and Alex in 2014. The former finished last in the final Power Rankings with a TW% of .287 and yet made the playoffs as a 4-seed with an 8-5 record. She won eight games despite never scoring more than 92 points in a single week (this was pre-PPR) and won three times with point totals in the 70s. On the other end of the spectrum, Alex in 2014 had an average team with a TW% of exactly .500, but finished 2-10-1. That season, teams averaged 99.7 ppg against him, fourth most all-time.
So where do this year’s teams fit in? For the most part, almost everybody’s gotten exactly what they deserve. We’re all hugging the dotted line. On the lucky end, there’s really only Gray, whose team should be 4-3 at best. If his current pace holds, he’d be the second-luckiest team of all time behind Terryn. And on the unlucky end, there’s Nick, Geoff and Josh, who all deserve to be 1.0-1.5 games better than their current records. Josh is similarly on pace for the second-unluckiest season of all-time behind Alex.
But if history is any indication, we would expect these two teams to revert to the mean. It feels like every year at this point, I’m talking about some team owner whose dot has veered way off course, but by the end of the season, they’ve returned to the fold. Last year that was me. After starting 6-1 with a TW% barely above .500, I went 3-2-1 down the stretch.
It’s like the dotted line has some sort of gravitational pull. You will be sucked in. So lucky teams, prepare for a bumpier road ahead. And unlucky teams, it will get better.
One last thing before I close the mailbag, remember that I said up top that Josh’s team has been unlucky by the “traditional definition.” In the aggregate, that’s true. But if we actually look at the box scores, we see a slightly different story.
Josh has won three games in which he absolutely crushed his opponents with over 176 points in each game. And then he’s lost four in which he scored fewer than the league average of 121.9 points. So in many ways, his record accurately reflects his performance. He’s won the three games he should have won and lost the four games he shouldn’t have.
You want to talk about bad luck? Ask the people who play Josh. Team owners like Beth Ann, Geoff and now Whitney have all lost to Josh despite scoring 137.92, 144.7 and 166.66 points. Geoff, in fact, holds two losses with scores of 130+ and Nick has three losses with above average scoring, the most in the league.
So what I think is really going on here is not necessarily bad luck. But a team with a wide range of outcomes. Certainly, there have been explosive teams like this in the past, but PPR has only exaggerated this effect.
Prior to this season, teams averaged 87.0 ppg with a standard deviation of 21.3 points. If you remember high school statistics (STAY WITH ME HERE!), 68% of all scores fall within one standard deviation of the mean and 95% are within two. So that means previously, “most” scores were between 65.7-108.3 points and “nearly all” were between 44.4-129.6 points.
But seven weeks into our new PPR landscape, teams are averaging 121.9 ppg with a standard deviation of 25.6 points. That means most scores are between 96.3-147.5 points with the more exceptional scores falling in the 70.7-173.1 point range.
Bottom line: that’s a much bigger range. It’d be one thing if PPR was just shifting the curve. But it’s also stretched it. Think about it in practical terms. If your team sucks on Sunday and your players aren’t catching passes, their scoring is nearly as bad as before. But if they play well, they do much better than they used to because they’re racking up all those points for receptions.
Look no further than Josh’s Week 7 stud, Tyler Lockett. Three weeks ago he had a bad week. The effect of PPR scoring (plus decimals) takes his score from a mediocre 3 points to a still-pedestrian 5.9. But on a good week like this one, his score rockets from an impressive 38 points (pre-PPR) to a league-record 53. Now multiply that across the six major skill positions and you see how a team’s scoring can expand and contract like an accordion.
Speaking of volatile rosters, Josh’s has the largest standard deviation in the league (36.8 points). Not far behind are Whitney (36.6) and Geoff (36.2). So far Whitney has both the lowest and fifth-highest scores this season. And Geoff has either scored over 133 points or less than 93 in all seven games. That’s a not-so-average Geoff, for you.
As for the consistent teams? Look no further than Samantha (who has a standard deviation of 11.4 points), Gray (12.9) or Brandon (14.2). Neither Samantha nor Gray have ever scored less than 110 points or more than 140. And Brandon is not far off.
All of which helps explain the wild Week 7 we just had where a team like Whitney’s, which was last in the Power Rankings, averaging just 98.6 ppg, can explode for 166.66 points and yet still get beat. That’s the wild and crazy world of PPR. Hey, you voted for it. Now we all have to live with the consequences. Hmm… that sounds familiar.
The Scoreboard
Josh and Whitney crushed the record for most combined points in a single game with 350.54.
In the interest of getting this post out before game time, I’m going to skip the usual recaps and just go with the highlights.
Josh defeated Whitney in the highest-scoring game in league history, crushing the previous record set back in Week 3, this time with a final score totaling 350.54 combined points. In so doing, Josh also set a new league record with 183.88 points (139 pre-PPR). You might have noticed that’s two points higher than it was on Tuesday morning due to stat corrections for the Patriots D/ST. Josh also broke the record for most receptions in a single game with 41. This is Josh’s third weekly prize, breaking a tie with Beth Ann and Geoff for most this year.
But Whitney was no slouch herself with 166.66 points (131 pre-PPR), fifth-most on the season. This was a topsy-turvy game in which it seemed Whitney was destined for a surprising upset after big games from her entire receiving corps, including Diontae Johnson (29.0 points), DJ Moore (25.3), Keenan Allen (22.5) and Rob Gronkowski (17.2), not to mention a season-high 36.86 points from Tom Brady. She led Josh by 30.68 points entering Sunday night. With only Chris Carson and Tyler Lockett left to play, Josh needed Lockett to outscore Carson by 31 points—a seemingly impossible task.
But an injury to Carson opened the door. And this week’s cover boy did just that, scoring 53.0 points on 15 receptions for 200 yards with 3 TDs. That’s the most points ever by an individual player in league history, eclipsing the record previously held by Alex and Doug Martin in 2012 with 51 points. Granted, he did it in a PPR world. Still, Lockett’s 38 pre-PPR points would have ranked 20th most all time.
For Whitney, it’s easily the most points ever in a loss. Even pre-PPR, her adjusted total of 131 points would have still been more points in a loss than any other team in league history, breaking the record set by Alex last year when he lost to Samantha despite scoring 126 points. Tough break for a team owner who has already had the misfortune of losing Saquon Barkley for the season.
As for the other games, Samantha upset Beth Ann to pull within a game of her in the standings. Erik knocked off Jess who played without a TE due to a snafu in which her roster locked after Sterling Shepard was activated and played a game Thursday while in her IR slot. Unable to pick up a TE, she lost despite 44.6 points from Davante Adams. Brandon defeated Alex despite a late surge from Chase Edmonds. Gray narrowly defeated Greco thanks to the Rams D/ST outscoring David Montgomery on Monday Night Football. And Nick got his first win of the season due in part to 22.0 points from his guy—Terry McLaurin. Meanwhile, the hits keep coming for Geoff who lost Odell Beckham Jr. for the season to a torn ACL.
Power Rankings
It’s neck and neck at the top with Beth Ann, Josh and Samantha all bunched together.
Beth Ann maintains her hold on the top spot of the Power Rankings, now for the fourth time in seven weeks this season. But not far behind are Josh—this season’s other Power Rankings leader—and Samantha who has quietly hovered inside the top-3 since Week 4.
But our biggest mover of the week is Erik who jumps three spots into a tie with Brandon for fourth place, following his second-straight game of 140+ points. Meanwhile, Geoff tumbles to eighth place after his worst game of the season, scoring 70 points (45 pre-PPR). It’s his second-straight week having the worst or second-worst score in the league. With Mike Davis set to evaporate following Christian McCaffrey’s imminent return, plus injuries to Miles Sanders, Raheem Mostert and Odell Beckham, things are looking a little bleak. Still this is a team with a TW% near .500. Can Geoff scrap and claw his way to the playoffs? I wouldn’t count him out yet.
Finally, Whitney climbs out of the basement following her best score of the season and is now within striking distance of Greco for 10th place. Nick falls to last place, but more importantly gets his first win of the season and is now 1-6.
Playoff Picture
Josh is predicted to catch Jess for the sixth and final playoff spot.
Seven weeks are in the books, which means, according to the rules adopted at the beginning of the season, we have enough games in the books that if the season were to be cancelled at any point, the team owner with the most points would be awarded the championship. Right now, that’s Josh who has a narrow 11.7-point margin over Beth Ann for most points scored.
Of course, despite all the wrenches COVID-19 has thrown our way, it seems unlikely at this point that we won’t get through the remainder of the season. The NFL seems just too determined to finish things out. Given that, let’s take a look at the Playoff Picture.
The same six teams from last week’s Playoff Picture are once again projected to make the playoffs. This week, they’ve only strengthened their hold on their places in the postseason with all six increasing their odds of making the playoffs with the lone exception of Beth Ann whose odds dropped ever-so-sightly after the Week 7 loss. Still she’s a near-lock to make it.
Erik’s and Samantha’s odds in particular jumped the most, by 26.2% and 22.1%, respectively. Despite the fact that Samantha leads Erik in points and would be the 3-seed if the playoffs started today, the computer actually likes Erik a little bit more given the fact that Samantha has one of the toughest schedules remaining down the stretch. Both she and Jess must face four of the top-5 teams in the Power Rankings in Beth Ann, Josh, Erik and Brandon.
If the playoffs were to start today, Jess would still get the 6-seed due to her 4-3 record. But as has been predicted all season, Josh is closing the gap and is currently predicted to beat her out for the sixth and final spot.
Also on the outside looking in joining Jess are Alex, Greco, Geoff, Whitney and Nick. Those first three still have around a 10% chance. Meanwhile, Whitney and Nick are the real long shots. But perhaps the comeback starts now for Nick. After getting his first win in Week 7, Nick is now 1-6. And lest you forget, Nick was 1-6 in 2016 but won his last six games to finish 7-6 and would have made a six-team playoff had it existed back then. You can do it!
Lastly, a note on injuries—these odds do not take them into account. They assume your team will continue being just as good as your TW% suggests. Of course, we know that not necessarily to be the case, especially for teams with injured players. Team owners that most stand to benefit—Josh, Alex and Nick. For Josh, there’s a chance Nick Chubb might return after the Browns’ Week 9 bye, which would help him get back to a winning record and claim his rightful place in the playoffs. Alex could get his first two draft picks back in Austin Ekeler and Michael Thomas. He’s been mostly left for dead by the computer this season, but those two are potential game-changers for a team that’s currently only a game back of the final playoff spot. And Nick could get Christian McCaffrey back as soon as next week, which might make his unlikely comeback possible.
Looking Ahead to Week 8
The matchup of the week is Jess (4-3) vs. Josh (3-4). Remember, these are the two teams the computer currently thinks will battle it out for the final playoff spot. Deshaun Watson will sit for Jess. Meanwhile, Antonio Gibson’s bye means Josh has plucked Damien Harris off the waiver wire to start at RB. Jess is most definitely Josh’s kryptonite. She and Greco are the only team owners with winning records against Josh. But Jess is especially dominant. She is 6-1 against him all-time including a win in the 2018 playoffs. Josh’s only victory came last season when he broke through with a 105-80 win, his first and only win against Jess.
Another key matchup I like this week is Gray (6-1) vs. Erik (4-3). Erik is climbing up the rankings with two-straight games of 140+ points. If anyone can put an end to Gray’s four-game winning streak, perhaps it’s Erik. To do it, he’ll need Leonard Fournette and D’Andre Swift to step up for an injured Chris Godwin who will miss this game. Also out are Zach Ertz, who remains on IR for Erik and Gardner Minshew for Gray who is on bye. Derek Carr will play in relief. Gray is 10-6 against Erik all time, though Erik has won three of their last four meetings.
Beth Ann (5-2) will face Alex (3-4). This may be another challenging matchup for Alex who will be without James Robinson and Will Fuller on bye. Plus, no Michael Thomas (yet again) and no Austin Ekeler, who will miss a third game with a hamstring injury. Beth Ann will be without Kenyan Drake, but should welcome back Dalvin Cook. It helps Alex that Calvin Ridley was injured in his Thursday night game and scored just 7.2 points for Beth Ann, but he’ll be facing an uphill battle. A win would be key for an owner hoping to climb back into the Playoff Picture. Alex won their only meeting last season 115-104.
Brandon (4-3) will take on Whitney (3-4). Neither team has players on bye, though both will likely be without top RBs in Aaron Jones and Chris Carson. After scoring 46.56 points one week and 166.66 the next, I honestly have no idea what to expect from Whitney. This one may come down to whose pass-catchers are hotter on Sunday. This is Brandon and Whitney’s first career meeting.
Samantha (4-3) will take on Geoff (2-5), and he’s catching her at just the right time. In Week 8, the Cardinals are one of four teams on bye, which means Samantha will be without Kyler Murray and DeAndre Hopkins not to mention David Johnson and Keelan Cole, also on bye. Also, Joe Mixon will miss a second game with a foot injury. That’s good news for Geoff who ironically owns Giovani Bernard. But Samantha’s depth will be surely tested. As will Geoff’s who is facing a litany of injuries including a knee injury for Miles Sanders and high ankle sprain for Raheem Mostert. Lots of guys plucked off the waiver wire in this one. It’s a battle of attrition and center stage will be DeVante Parker who Samantha acquired in a deal with Geoff last week. Geoff desperately needs the win and the matchup is right. Can he pull it off? Or will Samantha hold on? Samantha is 1-1 against Geoff with a 119-98 victory the last time they met.
Finally, Greco (3-4) will play Nick (1-6). Nick will be down Terry McLaurin with Christian McCaffrey still absent whereas Greco’s team has a clean bill of health with only Christian Kirk on bye. Remember, Greco was an early favorite to make the playoffs after starting 3-1 but has lost three straight. A win against Nick would get her back on the right track. Meanwhile, Nick obviously needs to win almost every game from here on out. Greco is 6-3 against Nick for their careers, though Nick has had Greco’s number in recent years, winning three of the last four. Can he make it four of the last five?
That’s it for the Week 7 Power Rankings. Good luck to all in Week 8 and if you haven’t done so already, don’t forget to vote on Tuesday!
