Yoohoo! One week until the playoffs!

Crazy week!  In a weird timing of matchups, the six highest scoring teams ended up matched up with each other across three games, while the bottom four teams faced off in the other two games.  This resulted in two winning teams with point totals of just 79 and 75 points.  Meanwhile, Joe’s Pats lost after scoring 98, Attack of Mahomes lost with 102 points and sprouts lost in spite of scoring 111!  In the last two weeks, sprouts has lost with scores of 100 and 111… brutal!  Scoring over 100 points has normally carried with it a fairly certain victory, but not so this season.  This year currently sports the lowest winning percentage for teams scoring over 100 points since 2007 (the first year I started tracking this).  Factoring in all years, including 2018, teams scoring over 100 have won 87.3% of the time.  (Coming into 2018, the winning percentage was 88.6%).  The best year was 2008 which saw 100% of teams scoring over 100 win, and the previous worst season was 2012, which had only 83.3% of 100-pt teams win.  This season, though, the win percentage for teams scoring over 100 is currently at only 76.7%!  Nearly 25% of teams scoring over 100 points have lost their game this year.  That is just crazy!!   The official record this season is 33-10, which ties 2011 for the most scores in excess of 100 in a season (43). 

Scoring has been huge this season, as we are on pace to destroy the record for most points scored in a season.  2011 holds the record as the highest scoring season when there were 14,166 points scored.  This works out to a weekly average of 885.4 points.  This season, through 12 weeks we have scored 10,937 points for a weekly average of 911.4 points!  At our current rate, we are on track to score 14,582 total points!  The lowest scoring season was 2009 which only saw 11,066 points scored… we’ll pass that milestone by the upcoming Thursday night game.

Speaking of big scores, the big congratulations this week go to Young Guns, who countered a pathetic 1-point performance from Jordan Howard by having 3 players score over 26 points!  Saquon Barkley (26 pts), JuJu Smith-Schuster (27 pts) and Deshaun Watson (29 pts) came through big time and led the Young Guns to an impressive 129 points!  This is the 2^nd highest single week score this season, and is John’s second Weekly High Score Prize!  Well done sir!

 In the playoff race, two more items became known…

1) American BadAss is in, joining Attack of Mahomes and Joe’s Pats.  

2) Big Sack is out, joining the Coors Light Drunk Guys.  WHAT DO YOU KNOW?! 

The remaining five teams are still alive.  Team IR & Holdout, Longshanks, Vandelay Industries and Young Guns are all in control of their own fate—win in Week 13 and they will make it in.  sprouts needs to win and have losses from Team IR & Holdout or Young Guns to force some tie-breakers.

Now, there are two scenarios where we could end up with the 5^th, 6^th, 7^th & 8^th ranked teams with records of 6-7.  (In Scenario A teams tied at 6-7 would be Team IR, sprouts, Vandelay and Young Guns, and in Scenario B teams tied at 6-7 would be Team IR, spouts, Longshanks and Young Guns).  This would trigger a whole series of tie-breakers to figure out who gets in.  I honestly started working on figuring it all out, and yeah, let’s just say we will cross that bridge if we get there.

As a reminder, here are the tie-breakers we will use:

Divisional standing ranking

Overall record

Division record

Head-to-head record

Points scored

Coin flip

Wildcard standing ranking/tiebreakers

Overall record

Head-to-head record

Points scored

Coin flip

Yahoo! doesn’t exactly follow these tie-breakers, so I will send out an email on Monday night with the official playoff seeding.  Good luck to everyone!

BEST BENCH

No week is complete without awarding the Best Bench, and this week we have a good one!  Not good in the sense of the point improvement but in the sense of the number of players involved.  This week’s winner could’ve swapped five (yes FIVE!) players to improve their point total by 37 points.  Collecting his second Best Bench this season, Week 12 goes to… Big Sack!  Here is the laundry list of player swaps:  S. Michel for M. Ingram +14, M. Mariota for A. Rodgers +11, D. Cook for J. White +5, J. Reed for A. Hooper +4 and D. Thomas for D. Adams +3.

Are we seriously only one week away from the playoffs?!  Let’s do this!!