Week 3: The Upside Down

 

Arthur is all smiles right now including while celebrating Easter with the family last weekend

• Yes, everything is upside down right now. 
• Perennial power houses Dave, Dean, and Michael are in the the bottom five of the Yahoo standings and Michael is the worst team in the league, according to Expected Week Wins.
• Who needs draft capital? Three "weeks" in (according to how Yahoo has scored this year), and there's been basically zero correlation between draft capital and fantasy-team production. Last year, it also took the top draft capital teams awhile to rise to the top (week 9 was the blog post asking if the standings were 'inevitable' based on draft capital). So perhaps Michael is just too close to things right now, but it's been a weird start to the year.
• Ok but back to our regularly scheduled analysis. Arthur was the big winner last week with a stomping of a 10.52 EWW. That is the highest number since Dave put up an 11.62 in week 18 of 2024. Arthur is re-writing the record books with our new roster categories this year with enormous outputs like 22 SB.
• Robert just keeps stringing together big weeks and has surged to the lead in the year to date power ranks.
• 7.14 actually isn't Michael's worst power rank of all time, which came in week 2 of 2024 (7.29), but he's one clunker of a week away from it.

This week felt like it deserved some matchup recaps.

We have to start with Arthur's statement win over Dave. Speaking of resetting expectations around our new league settings, Arthur's Sunday is the example. He had 7 HR, 14 R, 13 RBI...in one day. Arthur has surged with basically all of his draft picks hitting right now with more top 100 players than I can count. Dave also had an excellent offensive week, but it was the pitching that did him in. With the updated roster settings, we are throwing fewer innings and the blowup outings hurt more, and Dave had a number of them. The page turns to week 4 and Dave is in just fine position. 

The headline matchup of the week was supposed to be between the top two teams in the standings. By week's end, Cory took down Kevin. Both of these teams had fine weeks with nearly identical 6.9 v 7.1 EWWs, but Cory edged just enough categories to get the week win. Cory has ridden the Chase DeLauter breakout and Carlos Correa resurgence. Kevin didn't quite keep up his blistering pace from the first two weeks but still sits with a 3 as the first digit in his power rank, which teams that his team is elite right now. His offense has been nearly untouchable with a power rank of 2, meaning that his team averages being the second best in every hitting category. 

The matchup of brotherly love saw Robert show big brother Dean what's what. Dean threw a very impressive 1.87 ERA over 82 innings but his offense was not able to keep up with Robert's. Robert's picks of Andy Pages and Sal Stewart have minted him thus far while his pitching has kept him afloat. Dean has had mixed production across his team so far with names like Gunnar Henderson being what he was supposed to be while others like Ketel Marte are off to a slow start.

In the battle to buy lunch, Paul put Keith back into 2025 with a big victory. Nearly matching Dean, Paul had a 2.05 ERA over 74 innings. Keith's team just hasn't had it yet this year. Handcuffed coming into the draft, a number of the picks haven't worked out yet either. His team does have health and a few big names on it to prop it up over the course of the season, so there is still plenty of time to turn it around. On the other hand is Paul. His team, like Arthurs, is FULL of breakouts: Josh Bell, Brandon Lowe, Christian Walker. You get the idea. With Paul's draft capital, he needed to hit on a number of draft picks, and so far, he's done it.

Last, and potentially least, the pillow fight of the week was Max trouncing Michael. Both teams had over a 4.4 ERA (in plenty of innings) and a .225 AVG won the week. Neither team made it to 10 Home Runs. Michael didn't hit his first HR until Friday afternoon. Max's team is mostly healthy but has three minor leaguers on it. For Michael, this season has been a story of whatever can go wrong has gone wrong. Among the top 200 ranked players per Yahoo's pre-season rank, there have been 7 hitters and 2 pitchers that have gotten hurt and gone on the IL since draft day (not counting players like Gerrit Cole or Zach Wheeler who we knew were hurt on draft day), Michael has 5 of those 9 players. Beyond injury, most of Michael's picks have....um....underperformed. 

As you can see, with chaos comes storylines, and this league has plenty of them right now. Breakouts, busts, injuries. We're off and running on Floored 2026.