Week 2 Power Rankings — The Worst League

Sep 19

Sep 19 Week 2 Power Rankings

As long as I’ve been doing these, I feel like Week 2 is always the injury week.

You might recall that Nick Chubb went down last year at this time. And four years ago, we wrote extensively about the day that six ACLs were torn in one day, including Saquon Barkley’s. Maybe I’m just reaching for something to talk about, but it seems like there’s just something about Week 2 that wreaks havoc on fantasy rosters.

This year, the list of elite players impacted by injuries includes:

Christian McCaffrey (Chelsie)
Tyreek Hill via Tua Tagovailoa (Gray)
Amon-Ra St. Brown (Geoff)
Justin Jefferson (Beth Ann)
A.J. Brown (Alex)
Puka Nacua (Greco)
Isiah Pacheco (Geoff)
Cooper Kupp (Gray)
Kenneth Walker III (Alex)
Deebo Samuel (Brandon)
Joe Mixon (Brandon)
Jaylen Waddle via Tua Tagovailoa (Alex)
Evan Engram (Josh)

Miraculously, no one has been lost for the season (knock on wood), but that’s over a fourth of the players selected in the first four rounds. ESPN’s Field Yates also noticed a disturbing trend for the first overall pick in most fantasy drafts over the last five years—it’s been a disaster.

In the Worst League, those players didn’t all go #1. In 2022, Alex zagged (as he’s oft to remind me) and selected Christian McCaffrey first overall, narrowly avoiding the Jonathan Taylor disaster that befell Jess at #2. Also, Josh might have done the same thing this year, opting for CeeDee Lamb instead of McCaffrey—a wise decision in retrospect.

But the team owners who picked the players listed above in Field’s list finished a combined 16-39 with only Nick in 2021 rebounding to make the playoffs. And that’s only because he traded away McCaffrey to Gray for Austin Ekeler just before his season-ending injury. Maybe there’s a reason that no team owner with the first or second pick has ever won the Worst League.

Unfortunately, injuries are a part of the game. And no one is likely to emerge from this season unscathed. Just ask Field Yates who dislocated his shoulder during a pre-draft fantasy event in the Bahamas. As fantasy guru Matthew Berry has been known to say, “we’re all day to day.”

Alright, let’s get to the Power Rankings…

Jess surges to the top of the Power Rankings with her first weekly prize since 2020.

Live, laugh, demolish your opponents in fantasy.

That’s what Jess has been up to this year. This week, she won her first weekly prize in nearly four years. And were it not for Jake Moody’s prolific right foot, it would have been two weekly prizes in a row. It’s early but she’s averaging 143.6 ppg with a TW% of .955.

Quick aside! For Kelly who’s new to the league, I probably should have clarified what these Power Rankings are and how they work. Here’s an explainer from a past writeup:

“Every week, we post our Power Rankings here based on a metric we invented called True Winning Percentage (or TW%). In short, TW% is the percentage of games your team would have won if it had played every team, every week. So in a 12-team league, rather than go 0-1 or 1-0 in a given week, TW% imagines you played all 11 other team owners. You could go 9-2 or 6-5 or 3-8. Maybe you lost, but you had the second-highest score in the league that week. (We’ve all been there.) The truth is your team’s strength is really 10-1, not 0-1.

TW% is much more nuanced and gives a fuller picture of your team’s performance relative to the league. Because wins alone as a metric is just so damn binary. Yes, you won or lost and that’s reflected in the actual standings. But it doesn’t really tell us how good your team is. That’s what TW% is for. As a result, you’ll see TW% featured in a lot of our analysis. It’s the basis for the weekly Power Rankings and the bedrock for things like playoff odds, which will come later in the season.”

Back to Jess, it appears a seemingly dormant force in the Worst League might have just been awakened from its Poop Bowl slumber. Yes, it’s been a couple of tough years for Jess who went 4-10 in back-to-back seasons with two Poop Bowl losses. 💩💩

But before that, Jess was one of the more consistent top-performers in the league. For an eight-year period from 2014-2021, Jess ranked fourth in the league in TW% and third in total wins, trailing only Gray and Brandon. That included five playoff appearances, four top-3 finishes, three title games and her 2014 championship. She still ranks fourth in career playoff wins and is second in playoff win percentage, trailing only Brandon.

Now, that Jess might be back. It’s early, but this year’s team has three top-20 RBs. Currently, she leads the league in RB scoring with 59.1 ppg from Saquon Barkley, Rhamondre Stevenson and Aaron Jones. Nico Collins is the current WR2 in fantasy and Chris Olave is on a surprisingly explosive Saints offense. Yes, she lost Jordan Love. But Baker Mayfield is (checks notes) currently QB1.

Does this mean Jess is a lock to win the whole thing? Of course not. Only two former Week 2 Power Rankings leaders went on to win the championship (Greco in 2012 and Alex in 2015). But I do think, if it’s not her, she’ll have something to say about whoever does end up on top.

Now let’s get to some news and notes around the league:

Are we in the upside-down? Samantha, who has started 0-2 all six years of her career, is now 2-0 for the first time ever. And that’s despite injuries to Tee Higgins and Jake Ferguson.
Speaking of Samantha, congratulations are in order as she officially scored her 10,000th career point in Week 2, making her the ninth active team owner to reach that milestone.
Joining Jess and Samantha at 2-0 is Brandon. Historically, 74% of 2-0 teams go on to make the playoffs. All three are in the top-three of the Power Rankings but league history suggests that only two of them will make it to the postseason.
Beth Ann catapults four spots up the rankings thanks to Alvin Kamara’s season-high 44-point performance. Only six players had higher scores last year than Kamara’s Week 2 total.
If Kamara leading Beth Ann to victory sounds familiar, that’s because it is. The avowed Saints fan has drafted Kamara three times in the last four years. Not only that but she appears to be getting the band back together. Four of her first five picks from her 2021 championship season are back on the roster this year—Justin Jefferson, Alvin Kamara, Mark Andrews and Diontae Johnson.
No Christian McCaffrey? No problem. Really nice bounce-back week for Chelsie who came up just short of the weekly prize thanks to 64.0 points from her WRs—Davante Adams, Drake London and DeVonta Smith. She now ranks second in WR scoring and is tied for the lead league in receptions with 26.0 per game.
The injury bug giveth. And the injury bug taketh away. Alex may have gotten “a top-5 RB for 4-5 weeks” in Jordan Mason as he noted in the group text. But he lost Kenneth Walker and A.J. Brown while Jaylen Waddle takes a dip with Tua Tagovailoa out. As a result, last week’s Power Rankings leader tumbles back to the middle of the pack.
Geoff spent only one of his first seven picks on RB. That pick? Isiah Pacheco. And now he’s out for the next six-to-eight weeks. 😬
Despite finishing fifth this week in scoring, Greco picked up an “unlucky loss” to Samantha and is now 0-2. The good news? Malik Nabers and James Cook both looked great, each finishing in the top-10 in scoring in all of fantasy last week.
Joining Greco at 0-2 is…Gray?! If I seem surprised, that’s because in 13 previous seasons, Gray has literally NEVER started 0-2. The chances of avoiding an 0-2 start through 13 seasons is just 2.4%.
Lucky for Gray, the chances of an 0-2 team making the playoffs are historically 32%. That means that one of our 0-2 team owners (Greco, Gray, Kelly) is still likely to rebound to make the playoffs.
Josh failed to score more than 105 points for the second week in a row, but this time he was not lucky enough to get the win. The injury to Evan Engram has not helped, neither has the fact that despite being the fourth team owner to draft a TE, Josh ranks dead last in TE scoring, having scored just 3.0 points total in two weeks.
On the plus side, like Samantha, Josh also hit a milestone this week, becoming the eighth active team owner to score 15,000 career points. The current career leader in points is Gray with 20,832.96 points…and counting.
Yes, Erik, our reigning champ ranks 11th in our Power Rankings. But at least he looked much improved this week, picking up a win over Gray. That being said, he’ll be tested in the next three weeks with games against Samantha, Beth Ann and Chelsie—all top-five in this week’s rankings and the toughest schedule in the league over the next three weeks.
Finally, we come to Kelly who had the lowest score in the league for the second week in a row, making her true record 0-22. Oof! She has yet to top 85 points in a game this season. And Jess actually scored more points in Week 2 than Kelly has scored in two games so far this season. But she can’t go winless forever. Right? Right?!