Subjects. It is Monday morning and I have been standing in front of the board since roughly four.
Here is the finding, and it is a real one. Both undefeated teams in this league are losing.
Jesse is 2-0 and trailing. Chenell is 2-0 and trailing. Between them they have the two best records and the two best point totals in the building, and tonight they are both being held under water by teams that have no business doing it — one of them by a manager who has not won a game all year.
Three matchups are still alive. Everything that decides them happens tonight at Soldier Field, Eagles at Bears, 8:15. Six of you have a player in that game. Two of you have a season in it.
THE BOARD, AS OF THIS MORNING
Nothing below is final. Read every number as a thing that is still happening.
THE MIRACLE: Evan Needs Jalen Hurts To Be Held Under 3.3 Points
Burrow My Burden leads Bree’s Badass Boys by 3.3 points. Evan’s roster is finished. Every man he owns has played, showered, and gone home. He cannot score another point this week if he sets fire to the building.
Bree has Jalen Hurts.
Hurts is projected for 23.6. He has thrown five touchdowns in two games. Bree needs 3.4 of those 23.6 to win the matchup, which is to say she needs Jalen Hurts to complete roughly one pass to a man who is running forwards.
So let us be precise about what Evan is praying for tonight, because it deserves to be said out loud. He needs a healthy starting quarterback, on a 2-0 team, in prime time, to finish an entire football game with under three and a half fantasy points. That is not a bad game. That is a filing error. That is the quarterback getting on the wrong bus.
Evan, I want you to know that the laboratory is with you. The laboratory is also aware of the odds, and the laboratory has seen you check ESPN four times since you read this sentence.
THE UPSET: The Winless Team Is Beating The Best Team In The League
Keshia is 0-2. Keshia has the fourth-most points in this league and absolutely nothing to show for it, which I described a fortnight ago as the most unfair record in the building and have not been given any reason to revise.
Keshia leads Mr. Anderson by 13.2.
Jesse is 2-0. Jesse has scored 337.8 points, more than anybody. Jesse is the man I called the most dangerous roster in the league and its second-most dangerous manager, a description that has aged like a fine wine and is about to be poured over his head.
Because here is what Jesse has left: the Philadelphia Eagles defense. That is the entire remaining inventory. One defense, projected for 9.8.
And here is what Keshia has left: Saquon Barkley, projected 16.1, who rushed for over a thousand yards last season and who was a full participant on Friday and said he was good to go.
Read those two sentences again and appreciate the shape of the thing. Jesse’s only surviving asset plays for the same team as Keshia’s. He needs the Eagles to be magnificent and the Eagles’ best offensive player to be invisible. He needs Philadelphia to win the game entirely with takeaways, ideally three of them, ideally returned for scores, while Saquon Barkley gains somewhere between four and nine yards over sixty minutes.
Run the arithmetic and it is worse than it sounds. If Barkley simply hits his projection, Jesse needs roughly twenty-nine points from a defense. Twenty-nine. That is not a good night for a defense, that is a defense having the night people still talk about in that city thirty years later.
The Bears, for their part, lead the NFL in rushing at 212.5 yards a game and are starting a third-string quarterback, Caleb Williams being out with a hamstring. Philadelphia has given up more than 120 on the ground in each of its first two games. I am not saying that is good news for Jesse. I am saying that if Chicago runs it forty times, nothing good happens for anybody holding an Eagles defense.
THE KNIFE EDGE: James Is Five Points Up With Two Men Standing
Soft Tissue Issues leads Da Reigning Champ 112.5 to 107.5, and this is the only matchup tonight where both managers still have a pulse and a player.
Chenell has DeVonta Smith, projected 12.7, who caught ten balls for a hundred and seventeen yards and a touchdown eight days ago. That is one asset and it is a very good one.
James has two: Dontayvion Wicks and Colston Loveland. Sixteen points of projection between them — a fourth receiver and a rookie tight end — and one of those two is a Chicago Bear on a night Chicago is starting its third quarterback of the season.
So Chenell is holding the best receiver on the field, and James is holding two men who are on the field. Sixteen against twelve point seven, with a five-point head start. That is a lead measured in a single busted coverage.
And now the part that is going to hurt, because it has already happened and nobody can do anything about it.
On Sunday, with Jacksonville leading New England 28-6 and eight minutes left, Trevor Lawrence reached the one-yard line and took a knee. Declined the touchdown. New England called a timeout, and on the very next play Bhayshul Tuten walked in and scored it instead.
Trevor Lawrence is James’s quarterback. Bhayshul Tuten is in Tyler’s flex.
That is not a bad beat. That is a wire transfer. Six points lifted out of one manager’s account and deposited into another’s by a professional athlete demonstrating good sportsmanship, which is the most expensive thing anybody can do to you in this hobby. Asked about it afterwards, Lawrence said he probably should have just scored, and then joked that he was trying to support the Bhayshul Tuten fantasy people.
He was. Tyler is up 62.8 and did not need a single one of those points. James is up 5.0 and needs all of them. If this matchup ends inside a touchdown tonight, the difference will be a man being gracious in a game that was already over, and I want that entered into the record before we find out.
James, in fairness, is the man who ran a mathematically perfect lineup in week 2 and won The Mastermind for it. He does not guess. He also does not control who is throwing to Colston Loveland tonight, and of those two facts only one of them is going to matter.
THE FORMALITIES
Jay has beaten Doug 136.5 to 101.7 and both rosters are empty, so that one is over in everything but the database. Colin has put 143.3 on Mike and won by 51.1, which is Colin’s second demolition in three weeks and a genuinely confusing development for a man who spent all of September benching Stefon Diggs.
And Tyler leads Justin 169.0 to 106.2 with D’Andre Swift still to play. Justin is 0-2 going on 0-3 and has now been beaten by 69.5, then 12.9, now this. Tyler does not need Swift. Tyler is going to get Swift anyway. There is no mercy rule in this laboratory and I have checked twice.
WHAT I THINK HAPPENS
With the confidence of a man who will be held to this in roughly thirty hours:
Bree wins. Jalen Hurts is not going to score three points, and Evan is going to spend the evening watching a football game he has no rooting interest in except catastrophe. It is the cruellest position on the board and it is also, I am sorry to say, the funniest.
Keshia wins, and the league leader takes his first loss to the team with no wins, which is the single best thing that could happen to this season for reasons that are entirely selfish on my part.
And James holds on, narrowly, by less than a touchdown, which means Chenell loses. That matters to me personally: I went on the record in week 1 saying Chenell does not lose in September, it has survived two weeks, and I am now calling against my own prediction with four days of September left. Do with that what you like.
Kickoff is 8:15. Six of you cannot look away. Three of you should probably eat something first.