WEEK 2 REVIEW
WEEK 2 STATS
Injuries continue to run rampant through the NFL, causing some teams to field practice players as starters by Week 2. The trickle down effect into fantasy cannot be far off, so banking victories in the early stages of the season is critical. Let's see how our featured matchups shook out in Week 2:
SD3 88–84.26 Fighting Cocks
We lead off our review of Week 2 with the tightly contested 0-1 matchup between SD3 and Fighting Cocks. Despite some underperformance from key WRs and another middling Big Ben game, SD3's boys were able to do just enough to scrape past the Fighting Cocks, as one of the breakout players of the season, DET TE TJ Hockenson, proved to be the difference with his 8-66-1 Monday Night performance. Getting excellent production from a shallow position group has proved important across the league and SD3 will surely be happy that Hockenson appears to have pushed himself into the top tier of TEs and is capable of putting up big weeks consistently. Big Ben is still Big Ben and will likely be the ceiling on SD3's team this season, but if the rest of his team continues to step up week to week, SD3 may just be able to squeak out enough victories to see himself in the playoffs.
On the other hand, the Fighting Cocks of Appalachia are struggling to meet expectations. Another average week from Josh Allen sees him relatively languishing as the QB18 through 2 weeks, not nearly enough production to justify being the 27th overall selection in the draft. And though Mark Andrews had a better performance on SNF than he did in week 1, he has yet to hit 80 receiving yards on the season and his combined Weeks 1 & 2 are 5 points shy of what Hockenson put up just this week. The Cocks have to feel they wasted a great shot to get back into the thick of things this week and might come to rue missing out on a victory in a week where he got really good production from a lot of his guys. Hopefully Josh Allen can show that 2020 was not a statistical aberration and that he truly is an elite fantasy QB, but time moves fast in the NFL and the Cocks could wake up in Week 7 already out of the running for a playoff spot.
Pitt County Pinfish 76.66–65.72 JManslow
The rookie continues to show he's the real deal. In Week 1, TripleDeac put up a monster performance on his way to a first victory as a member of the Pit Fantasy League. In Week 2, he showed he could handle adversity. With Cleveland leaning more heavily on Nick Chubb and the Ravens deciding from opening kickoff that it wasn't going to be Tyreek Hill who beat them, the Pinfish had two players who put up less than a quarter of the points combined they did in Week 1. Luckily for TripleDeac, the other Pinfish rose up to take on the scoring burden and push toward a win. A better performance and a first TD of the season for Justin Jefferson will be a relief and his QB, Kirk Cousins, has shown through two weeks that he can at worst be a dependable, consistent scoring QB moving forward. Similar to Hockenson for SD3, TripleDeac will be heartened by two solid performances from his own 2nd year TE, Noah Fant. It won't be easy to keep this momentum up and there is a element of luck involved that TripleDeac faced off against the lowest scoring team in Week 2 when he himself had a bottom-half score, but you have to beat who is in front of you. A win counts as a win, whether you score the most points that week or the 19th most, and Triple will certainly be happy to start 2-0 and be on the right track towards the playoffs.
Such feelings of being on the right track seem pretty far away from his Week 2 opponent, JMan. A tough Week 1 improved very little in Week 2 and JMan will be wondering what he has to do to get his guys to produce. George Kittle still is yet to crack 100 yards on the season, Chase Edmonds appears to be the 4th choice option for a surging Arizona offense, and Stefon Diggs is playing well but suffering from Josh Allen's malaise to really be the top echelon WR that we know he can be. And unfortunately, there seems to be little that JMan can do to halt the fall. Limited bench depth was compounded by Rhamondre Stevenson being sent to the Belichick Zone after his Week 1 fumble, and any waiver wire pickup will be hotly contested going into Week 3. Something is going to have to change quickly for JMan to salvage his 2021 season.
Young Buck 69.02–68.2 Lazy-Eyed Psychos
A huge upset this week came from this matchup between the Young Bucks and Sleepy's Lazy-Eyed Psychos. The saying goes, "Offense wins games, defense wins championships," but Young Buck can definitively claim that defenses also win games after his Buccaneers DST led the way in scoring for him in Week 2. The win didn't come without a little bit of sweating as the Packers DST had an opportunity to steal victory for Sleepy on MNF, but they were not able to keep Detroit out of the endzone enough to get the 7 points they needed to win in Week 2. Young Buck won't enjoy having many more weeks such as this as it's hard to ask any defense to score 10+ points in a given week, let alone almost 20. But like the Pinfish, you have to beat who is in front of you and Young Buck will be elated to get that first mark in the win column, no matter how it came about.
As elated as Young Buck will feel in eking out victory, Sleepy will likely feel equally as crushed. One 4 yard catch, two more carries for 9 yards, anything from his skill guys in that ballpark would have been enough, but the scoring just wasn't there this week. Darren Waller fell back to earth with a more humanlike 5-65-0 performance against a tough Steelers defense, and the Monday Night heroics couldn't come through for a second consecutive week as the Packers just didn't have the horses to really stonewall Detroit. Any week where you don't get the absolute maximum from your stars will be a tough one and the Psychos didn't approach their ceiling against Young Buck, but Sleepy will hope that this week was a blip and that he isn't feast or famine week by week as the season progresses. After a 2020 season where he missed the playoffs by a whisker, weeks like these may weigh heavily on Sleepy and his Psychos and Sleepy will have to hope that they all have the mental fortitude to push on and perform.
FAMILY CORNER
Barça 99–86.14 Mrs. I/O Deac
We complete our first run through of the I/O Deacs by unfortunately reviewing another loss as Mrs. I/O Deac couldn't quite stay with the buzzsaw that is Barça. It's hard to be too critical of Mrs. I/O Deac as she was the highest scoring team to not win this week and against much of the league, she would have walked to victory. Her reliance on using rookie QBs Mac Jones and Trevor Lawrence was always going to be risky and it bit her this week as neither was able to crack even 9 total fantasy points. Still, Mrs. I/O Deac's team looks solid and in the weeks where the rookies show why they were entrusted to start in Week 1, she will run high at the top of the standings. But it just didn't work out this week and despite getting great performances from pretty much all other positions, it wasn't enough to keep up with the best of the best.
Barça continued to show why he is the early favorite to win the league in 2021 with another huge performance in Week 2. QB 1, RB2, and WR4 as your first three draft selections will do you a lot of good, and he looks to have also gotten a steal with Ja'Marr Chase. There's not a lot of analysis to do for Barça, it turns out that scoring a lot of points will do pretty well for you in fantasy. I hesitate to declare a full weekly Barça Watch, but if he can put up a few more performances like this in the coming weeks, I may have no choice.
WEEK 2 AWARDS
- MVP: The Week 2 MVP Award goes for a second straight week to Kyler Murray, putting up 35.1 points to help power the Barça machine.
- Superstar: Week 2's Superstar Derrick Henry set a new high scoring game of the season with 182 yards and 3 TDs on 35 carries supplemented by 6 catches for 55 yards. I don't know if any NFL players could consistently handle 40+ touches in a game but if there was one player, I think it would be Henry. Stud performance.
- Put Me In, Coach: A lot of great bench performers this week made this a hotly contested award, but the winner ended up being Daniel Jones and his 29.46 performance on TNF, a score that would have helped change the Week 2 for the Psychos. Put him in, Sleepy.
- Nice: The Nice award makes its first appearance in 2021, courtesy of Young Buck's 69.02 against the Psychos. A couple of close nice calls from Sleepy himself at 68.2 and Mr. I/O Deac at 68.42 as well.
- Close Call: A lot of Sleepy in this week's review as he also earns the Close Call award after losing to Young Buck by just 0.82 points. Really tough week, hopefully he finds $20 on the ground or something to make the week a bit better.
GOONER'S GALLANT GUESSES
Another middling week as I still try to get a handle on how teams are performing. Hoping I can stay above .500 on the year so 5-5 weekly will do the trick.
Congrats to all of our Week 2 victors, see you all on Thursday as we preview Week 3!