I was at a draft once — 2015, maybe '16, in a basement in Teaneck with a card table and a case of Yuengling doing the work your spreadsheets do now — where a man traded his third-round pick for a sandwich. We laughed him out of the room. Nobody traded picks back then because nobody was a coward back then. I bring this up only because Week 5 is here, the app still runs the league, and somehow we've got two undefeated teams and I trust exactly one of them.
Ryan Weaver is 4-0, and for once I don't need the all-play column to tell me it's real, though I'll cite it anyway because the standings don't lie: 38-6. Joe Buck Yourself has outscored the field by nearly a hundred points. Weaver hosts Elliott Simmonds this week, and Simmonds's All Gas No Drakes limp in at 1-3, winners of one straight themselves, though nobody will remember it by Monday. I don't see the upset. I see a man who's won a title before getting reminded why.
Then there's Trent Harley, also 4-0, also riding a four-game streak, and also a man whose whole league career amounts to 7-7 in the regular season. ParmBijan Cheese — and don't get me started on these team names, we'll get there — travels to face John Penney's Chase Greatness, and I want Harley's fans to sit with one fact before kickoff: he owns the highest luck delta on this entire slate, clear of every other team in the league. That is not the record of a four-touchdown juggernaut. That is the record of a man who needs the coin flips to keep landing his way. Penney has a ring. Penney knows what October asks of a team built on fumes. I'll take the champion.
Speaking of champions nobody trusts: Ben Cunnion hosts Ollie Simmonds this week, and before anybody tells me this is a trap game, look at the man across from him. Ollie is 0-4, with a six-and-thirty-eight all-play record that should be illegal to post publicly. Cunnion wins this one by Thursday afternoon, and I'll say what I always say about his reign: beating Ollie Simmonds by thirty doesn't erase how he got his three rings in the first place. The standings don't lie, but they also don't forget.
Now, the game I actually care about. Brian Jones is 2-2, coming off a loss, and the box score says ArabMamba6 — Ryan El Masri's team, and yes, that is a login, not a name, we'll be discussing this at length before the season's out — is the easier matchup on paper. But paper isn't where Brian Jones's three runner-up finishes live. That man has earned more rings than he's been handed, and I'll take him over a second-year-feeling login still finding its waiver-wire legs.
Elsewhere: Justin Waitt's Diamond Dogs are 2-2 with 538 points for, a number that embarrasses most of this league, but he's dropped two straight — the latest a blowout at the hands of Elliott Simmonds — before taking on Nick Inman's TacoDreams, a login if ever I saw one. Inman is still chasing his first ring, a runner-up finish sitting on his ledger from a season past that the record book remembers better than most of his regular years. I like Waitt's scoring too much to pick against it here.
Last but not forgotten: Kevin Jones, three championships to his name, hosts Evan Sinn, whose 1-3 start looks nothing like the 11-3 outfit that ran this league last year. A luck delta of minus-.25 is the worst number in Week 5, and I don't care what the algorithm wants to call it — points-against is destiny, and Sinn's destiny has been unkind. Kevin gets right.
One more thing before I go: somebody owes me a trophy with my name on it. I've been saying it since before the app, and I'll keep saying it until somebody listens.