The Sportsballers

Our first set of divisional matchups are in the books, now we go back outside of the division for Week 4, our second to last week before bye weeks begin wreaking havoc on weekly lineups. We only have one matchup this week between managers with winning records, and it’ll be our game of the week. Let’s get into our game-by-game previews!   Game of the Week: Cory Puffett (2-1) vs Evan Ash (2-1) [Evan leads all-time series 7-6] Cory is second in the AFL in scoring this season and has one of the strongest rosters in the AFL through three weeks. Evan is coming off back-to-back weeks as the league’s #3 scorer in his AFL title defense.   An unlucky Week 3 loss balanced a lucky Week 1 win for Evan. He made a wise decision last week starting Geno Smith in Carson Wentz’s place. Will he do it again?   Cory has some injuries to keep an eye on entering Week4. Christian McCaffrey and Miles Sanders are both questionable with lower body injuries and Jaylen Waddle is expected to play but i...

If this is your first time checking out one of our picks posts this season, where have you been? It’s Week 4 already people! We’ve changed things up a bit for 2022. Every week we’ll check the Bet MGM lines at approximately 5pm on Wednesday and make our picks live on our podcast against those lines. You can compete against us, too!  Email us at  thesportsballers@gmail.com  or DM us on  Facebook  or  Twitter  with your email address and we’ll enter you in our fan contest.  You’ll receive a ballot every week after our Wednesday live show so you can submit your picks against the same spread as us before the Thursday night game. Play against us week-by-week or across the whole season!   Eric won our Week 3 picks contest, at least among the hosts, to pull into a tie with Cory for the season-long lead.   Congratulations to  James Dailey , again,  who got 11 games correct in Week 3 to blow our hosts out of the water and to equal Cory a...

Week 3 was a historically low-scoring week in fantasy football and particularly in our league. You expect a few of these each season, but usually not before the bye weeks set in. Our 12 managers totaled just 1,216.80 points, barely more than 100 points per manager. It’s the fourth lowest scoring week we’ve had since we expanded rosters from eight starters to nine in 2016.   Congratulations to Alex Mayo, who leads our power rankings for the second week in a row. All 12 active managers have now led the AFL power rankings at least twice in their careers.   This week we added our consistency metric to the power ranking equation. For our purposes, a team’s consistency is calculated by taking its average score per week, subtracting from it the league average score per team per game for the season, and dividing that difference by the standard deviation of the team’s scores.   A high consistency score usually means the team is consistently above league average, a score deep into ...