WRBL Week 7, 2020

 Wisconsin Rapids Bro League

Week Seven

Our Sixth Official Season of blaming Cole Walters for Killer Mike never going platinum.

Current Standings (with regular season won-loss streaks & [Seasonal Point Totals]) 

Steven Nett Division

Colieveland 96ers (Cole Walters) 5-2 W2 [923.88]

Team ChowHounds (Darrin Aschebrook) 4-3 L2 [988.62]

Rise From The Asch3s (Scott Aschebrook) 1-5-1 L5 [814.58]

Shooter McGavin Division

The Golladay Inn (Ryan Dougherty) 4-3 W1 [959.72]

Tax Paying Homeowner (Alec Swanson) 4-3 W2 [930.70]

Christy Fichtner All-Stars (Andy Todd) 4-3 L1 [895.76]

Tanner Glaza Division

Team Hoefs (Nathaniel Hoefs) 4-3 W3 [923.50]

Free Chiquita (Nick Zurawski) 4-3 W1 [907.76]

SNEEN MACHINE (Tyler Sneen) 2-5 L1 [842.24]

Week Seven Final Scores

COLE defeats DARRIN 161.4-159.2

ALEC defeats ANDY 147.52-123.8

NICK defeats SNEEN 126.76-116.92

RYAN defeats SCOTT 113.12-88.12

HOEFS defeats BYE 137.06-0

Heroes of the Week: WR Tyler Lockett (53.0), WR Davante Adams (44.6), QB Kyler Murray (37.1)

Norm Hall/Getty Images

Hero of the Week: WR Tyler Lockett (Tax Paying Homeowner)

Waiver Wonders: QB Justin Herbert (38.48), RB Jeff Wilson Jr. (32.0), QB Baker Mayfield (29.78)

Hans Gutknecht/Los Angeles Daily News

Waiver Wonder: QB Justin Herbert (347 yards & 3 TDs passing, 66 yards & 1 TD rushing)

What-if of the Week: If Alec would have started Joe Burrow (33.64) over Ben Roethlisberger (12.62), he would have finished with 168.54 and been the first owner in WRBL history to lead the league in scoring for a week with an incomplete lineup (Miles Sanders was inactive on Thursday night).

Upcoming Week 8 Match-ups

NOTE: NFL Schedule subject to change due to ongoing COVID-19 cases rising and possible postponements. Look it up on your own time.
Andy v. Nick

Alec v. Ryan

Hoefs v. Sneen

Scott v. Darrin

Cole v. BYE

Bro...

Of the many differences in rules and format for the 2020 WRBL season, the greatest addition so far has been the splicing of the league into three separate divisions. Now, I'm sure my referencing of the evenly balanced divisions and overall competitive fantasy football field of play has jinxed the remainder of the season to predictable outcomes and blowouts but, we're coming off the most highly competitive week of the 2020 season and those standings are more tightly knit than a sweater made by grandma. Sure, Scott and Sneen are falling out of favor fast and Scott is acting like the spoiled only child of wealthy parents that didn't get to wake up in a new Bugatti on his sweet 16 but, there's still plenty of season left and their rosters aren't vomit-inducing. It is becoming more and more difficult to gauge just how much a future draft pick is worth in this league when the future of literally everything is so uncertain and it's made me stick close to my current players and sticking to player-for-player deals for the time being. Of course, Scott's ready to move on to 2021 and is looking for picks, prospects and pity. I don't think anybody's going to bite on any of those three offers but hey, eight of nine of us didn't attend an Ivy League school so anything is fair game still.

Michael Conroy, AP

A trio of long-term injuries to QB Dak Prescott, RB Christian McCaffrey and now, WR Odell Beckham Jr. (Torn ACL, out for season) have put Scott in dire straits nearing midseason.

That's the bigger picture for the Bro League right now, Scott & Sneen playing victims, Nick vs. Hoefs in the Tanner Glaza Division, a complete free-for-all in the Shooter McGavin Division and the #1 rivalry in all of sports, Cole vs. Darrin for the Steven Nett Division. The smaller picture is week 7's wackiness that has set us up for an exciting second half. The Beckham injury combined with choosing the wrong 49er running back for a second time held Scott below triple digits (the only team to do so in week 7) as he now looks to get some type of rebound headed by emerging players in fantasy relevancy like RB Chase Edmonds, TE Robert Tonyan and the newest Tampa Bay Buccaneer, WR Antonio "former WRBL MVP" Brown. Ryan won despite scoring the second-fewest points this week and lost his lead in the ever-changing hypothetical standings at the bottom of the weekly WRBL post. Hypothetically speaking, I SHOULD be 2-4 but.... I don't know, I kind of like my Christy Fichtner All-Stars a lot right now. The problem is they're all just super hot-and-cold and the borderline starters I always make the wrong choice on at the very last moment (see: benching Joe Mixon his one good NFL game all season for not Joe Mixon and this week, benching Diontae Johnson because of his back when he went off for 29 points while only Mike Davis ended up underperforming but who in their right mind is benching Davis with the run he WAS on?). Also, a majority of fantasy football continues to be luck. Even though I was feeling optimistic about an inactive Miles Sanders being left in Alec's Thursday night lineup, it turns out the IRS isn't the only one Alec is paying as Russell Wilson only has eyes for two people, Ciara and Tyler Lockett. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if he had a golden, heart-shaped locket that previously held a photo of his wife and children but now contains a photo of Tyler and him torching any one of the NFC West's defenses. Lockett went off for 53 points (a WRBL season-high) and the Chiefs defense showed Drew Lock the door pretty quickly in a 2-TD performance to help Alec complete a comeback win over my team that really just made the wrong choices for bye week kicker and defense (Koo & New England combined for 1 total point). 

Dustin Bradford/Getty Images

The Chiefs' defense held Denver QB Drew Lock to zero touchdowns as their own QB, Patrick Mahomes only scored one with the whole team performing at their strongest so far in the 2020 NFL season. 

This clearly isn't Nathaniel Hoefs' first fantasy football league (though we don't count any of his other leagues so, he's still a rookie in our books) as he took the bye week seriously with an easy W. His win gives Nate a 15.74-point tiebreaker advantage over Free Chiquita. Nick and the mighty fightin' Chiquitas went through a rough patch this week and still came out on top over Sneen and the lowly depressing Machines. The key difference in Z's ten-point (rounded up) victory was Nick claiming Carson Wentz off waivers while Tyler sat through another average Matt Ryan week. Wentz is a poor man's Jameis Winston this season with boatloads of turnovers that assist his fantasy performances with the need to always come from behind padding his stats. Unlike Alec, Nick set his lineup Thursday night and ultimately, both WRBL owners finished with the same week seven results proving that there's no one way to win in fantasy. Countering that theory, Cole giving enormous head-starts to Darrin's ChowHounds seems to work pretty damn well every time. Going into Sunday night's Seahawk-Cardinal game, Darrin led Cole 140.9-100.00 with two players remaining from each fantasy team. Darrin's two? DK Metcalf, who somehow scored just 4.3 points in a game that went five quarters in which Russell Wilson threw the ball 50 times AND Chris Carson left with an injury and the Rams defense who did their part with a solid 14 against Nick Foles and the sucky Bears offense. Cole? Needless to say he's enjoying the Kyler Murray-DeAndre Hopkins union as they combined to drop a 61.4 Sunday night hammer on our league's most-common event host. Murray should be garnering some sleeper WRBL MVP hype now with 7 RUSHING touchdowns over 7 NFL games and between the chaotic Cardinal and Cole's other QB Josh Allen, 189.78 points have been scored, second only to Ryan's 195.42 at the position.

Week 8 is officially the halfway point of our season, with the playoffs just about a month away. Next week's highlighted match should be between two desperate non-leaders in 4-3 Free Chiquita and 4-3 Christy Fichtner's All-Stars. With the Football Team, Cardinals, Jaguars and Texans on bye, that could spell trouble for Cole accumulating enough points for a bye week W as DeVante Parker and Josh Allen have played well but not quite Kyler-and-Hopkins well for a few weeks. All Scott feels like doing is causing chaos for the higher ups if his team can't gain enough momentum for a playoff push and one way to ruin an otherwise jam-packed top six in the standings is to knock the ChowHounds down a peg with an upset, sending the eldest Aschebrook tumbling to .500 and potentially giving Cole a two-game advantage in their division. It will also be interesting to see how Nathaniel does with QB DeShaun Watson on BYE against SNEEN MACHINE with Dalvin Cook possibly returning to cook the Green Bay defense like he always does. He certainly misses Nick Chubb too but, Dalvin Cook's injury put Sneen's team spiraling downward and he's just looking to piece together a respectable effort the rest of the way and make some other wildcard contenders sweat for a minute AT LEAST. The only guarantee for Week 8's final standings is that the Shooter McGavin division's deadlocked standings will not... stand. Ryan vs. Alec will bring at least one of us three owners down to the bottom of the McGavin barrel. If the Le'Veon Bell revenge game is just a push for content and not an actual result of things to come this Sunday, I'll likely fall to Nick and might leave the winner of Alec-Ryan alone at the top. At least we can agree on one thing (Nick and I), excitement is at an all-time high... FOR TUA TIME!

Peter Joneleit/AP

The absence of breakout rookie RB James Robinson has me admittedly nervous for the week ahead.

2020 WRBL Scoring Leaders

QB

Russell Wilson 177.30 (Ryan)

Patrick Mahomes 170.46 (Andy)

DeShaun Watson 154.50 (Hoefs)

Matt Ryan 132.34 (Sneen)

Lamar Jackson 126.00 (Nick)

Kyler Murray 119.86 (Cole)

Tom Brady 99.60 (Darrin)

Dak Prescott 95.84 (Scott)

Joe Burrow 76.34 (Alec)

Josh Allen 69.92 (Cole)

Aaron Rodgers 50.32 (Scott)

Ben Roethlisberger 44.96 (Alec)

Matthew Stafford 30.72 (Darrin)

Carson Wentz 27.76 (Nick)

Gardner Minshew 18.12 (Ryan)

RB

Alvin Kamara 170.4 (Darrin)

Ezekiel Elliott 129.8 (Alec)

Derrick Henry 126.4 (Cole)

Aaron Jones 115.0 (Ryan)

Dalvin Cook 113.3 (Sneen)

Todd Gurley 111.2 (Darrin)

Chris Carson 105.0 (Ryan)

Clyde Edwards-Helaire 108.5 (Scott)

James Robinson 102.6 (Andy)

Josh Jacobs 97.6 (Scott)

James Conner 95.3 (Hoefs)

Ronald Jones 81.7 (Hoefs)

David Johnson 79.4 (Nick)

Melvin Gordon 77.6 (Darrin)

Mike Davis 72.1 (Andy)

Austin Ekeler 64.2 (Andy)

Myles Gaskin 60.4 (Cole)

Miles Sanders 60.4 (Alec)

Nick Chubb 60.2 (Sneen)

Kareem Hunt 59.6 (Nick)

Joe Mixon 57.5 (Andy/Ryan)

Jonathan Taylor 56.0 (Alec)

Christian McCaffrey 53.2 (Scott)

David Montgomery 44.5 (Sneen)

Jerick McKinnon 41.8 (Hoefs/Scott)

Kenyan Drake 38.4 (Nick)

Antonio Gibson 38.4 (Andy)

Darrell Henderson 31.0 (Darrin)

Raheem Mostert 24.5 (Nick)

Jamaal Williams 21.4 (Cole)

Giovani Bernard 20.6 (Ryan)

Saquon Barkley 15.4 (Nick)

J.D. McKissic 14.4 (Scott)

Adrian Peterson 12.8 (Darrin)

Malcolm Brown 10.6 (Cole)

Justin Jackson 10.5 (Nick)

Joshua Kelley 10.3 (Sneen)

James White 8.2 (Hoefs)

Boston Scott 7.4 (Cole)

J.K. Dobbins 7.1 (Cole)

Le'Veon Bell 6.6 (Andy)

Alexander Mattison 4.0 (Sneen)

Jeff Wilson Jr. 2.9 (Scott)

WR

DeAndre Hopkins 144.1 (Cole)

Tyler Lockett 141.2 (Alec)

Calvin Ridley 140.9 (Nick)

Adam Thielen 119.0 (Darrin)

Tyreek Hill 116.3 (Hoefs)

Allen Robinson 110.3 (Alec)

Amari Cooper 107.5 (Scott)

D.J. Moore 105.7 (Hoefs)

Davante Adams 104.9 (Darrin)

Keenan Allen 102.1 (Andy)

Stefon Diggs 97.0 (Sneen)

Julio Jones 87.7 (Sneen)

Mike Evans 85.6 (Ryan)

Robby Anderson 80.4 (Cole/Sneen)

Will Fuller 75.4 (Nick)

Robert Woods 74.3 (Nick)

Cooper Kupp 68.5 (Andy)

DK Metcalf 65.2 (Darrin)

Chris Godwin 64.9 (Cole)

Jamison Crowder 61.9 (Ryan)

JuJu Smith-Schuster 53.0 (Sneen)

DeVante Parker 52.4 (Cole)

A.J. Brown 49.9 (Andy)

Kenny Golladay 48.1 (Ryan)

Odell Beckham Jr. 45.42 (Scott)

Justin Jefferson 39.6 (Alec)

Terry McLaurin 38.7 (Alec)

Darius Slayton 35.0 (Ryan)

Diontae Johnson 34.6 (Ryan/Andy)

Marvin Jones 31.8 (Hoefs)

Allen Lazard 25.7 (Cole)

CeeDee Lamb 25.0 (Scott)

Tyler Boyd 24.6 (Scott)

Cole Beasley 23.5 (Cole)

Brandin Cooks 21.8 (Hoefs)

Tee Higgins 18.8 (Cole)

Marquise Brown 18.5 (Alec)

Travis Fulgham 12.3 (Hoefs)

Jerry Jeudy 10.5 (Ryan)

Tre'Quan Smith 9.4 (Ryan)

T.Y. Hilton 9.3 (Scott)

A.J. Green 5.9 (Andy)

Michael Thomas 4.7 (Ryan)

Julian Edelman 4.2 (Sneen)

Emmanuel Sanders 2.8 (Sneen)

Chase Claypool 0.8 (Scott)

TE

Travis Kelce 118.1 (Hoefs)

George Kittle 92.2 (Nick)

Darren Waller 90.5 (Ryan)

Mark Andrews 74.3 (Darrin)

Hayden Hurst 72.5 (Alec)

Jonnu Smith 60.7 (Andy)

Noah Fant 44.0 (Cole)

Zach Ertz 42.5 (Scott)

Tyler Higbee 36.4 (Nick)

Hunter Henry 33.5 (Sneen)

Evan Engram 29.9 (Sneen)

T.J. Hockenson 27.1 (Cole/Darrin)

Robert Tonyan 10.7 (Scott)

Greg Olsen 3.0 (Cole)

Eric Ebron 2.9 (Ryan)

Blake Jarwin 2.2 (Andy)

Chris Herndon 2.1 (Andy)

K

Justin Tucker 67 (Scott)

Rodrigo Blankenship 66 (Andy)

Harrison Butker 62 (Sneen)

Wil Lutz 60 (Hoefs)

Chris Boswell 49 (Nick/Alec)

Greg Zuerlein 47 (Darrin)

Mason Crosby 43 (Cole)

Jake Elliott 32 (Ryan)

Matt Prater 30 (Alec)

Randy Bullock 13 (Cole/Scott)

Graham Gano 11 (Ryan)

Daniel Carlson 9 (Nick)

Robbie Gould 7 (Nick)

Jason Sanders 6 (Nick)

Stephen Gostkowski 2 (Hoefs)

Younghoe Koo 2 (Andy)

Ka'imi Fairbairn 1 (Cole)

DF

Baltimore Ravens 65 (Alec)

Indianapolis Colts 54 (Andy/Ryan)

Tampa Bay Buccaneers 48 (Andy/Ryan)

San Francisco 49ers 44 (Sneen)

Chicago Bears 42 (Scott)

Pittsburgh Steelers 40 (Hoefs)

Los Angeles Rams 39 (Hoefs/Nick/Darrin)

Arizona Cardinals 31 (Nick/Cole)

Buffalo Bills 30 (Darrin/Hoefs)

Kansas City Chiefs 20 (Cole/Alec)

New England Patriots 19 (Ryan/Andy)

Los Angeles Chargers 16 (Cole/Scott)

Philadelphia Eagles 14 (Nick)

Cleveland Browns 13 (Nick)

Miami Dolphins 12 (Nick)

New York Jets 8 (Nick)

Denver Broncos 6 (Cole)

Washington Football Team 6 (Hoefs)

New Orleans Saints 5 (Ryan/Darrin)

Atlanta Falcons 2 (Cole)

Dallas Cowboys 1 (Nick)

Hypothetical Standings (Top 4 scorers win, bottom 4 lose, 5th = BYE)

Team ChowHounds 5-2

The Golladay Inn 4-2

Free Chiquita 4-2

Tax Paying Homeowner 3-2

Colieveland 96ers 4-3

Team Hoefs 3-3

Christy Fichtner All-Stars 2-4

Rise From The Asch3s 2-4

SNEEN MACHINE 1-6