Three teams sit at 2-0 in the Nevin Place Memorial League heading into Week 3. Three sit at 0-2. Everybody else is stuck in the muddy 1-1 middle, which in a 14-team league means eight franchises are currently lying to themselves about who they are. A choice will be made this week, by all fourteen of them, and most of those choices will be wrong.
Start at the top. Charlie Koepsell's Long Hair Dont Care has been the best team nobody's talking about, a league-high 326.94 points and a nearly unbelievable 24-2 all-play mark. That's not just winning your matchups, that's beating almost the entire league every single week. Koepsell draws Sean Gibbins this week, a 1-1 team with the opposite profile: a 9-17 all-play record propped up by one useful Sunday. Per league sources — meaning the standings page, which doesn't lie the way McBoyle does — this is not a trap game. It's a coronation waiting to happen.
Elliott Simmonds' DELAWARE CHICKEN FARMER'S is the other unbeaten worth watching, sitting on 313.14 points and a 21-5 all-play mark that would be the story of the week in any other season. Simmonds gets Hunter Koepsell, who is 0-2 with a luck_delta of -0.385, the worst mark in the league by a wide margin. Hunter isn't just losing his games, either — his 10-16 all-play mark means he'd be a losing team even in a world where he never had to face his actual schedule. That's not bad luck anymore. That's a bad roster.
Then there's Brian Jones. Last season, ShitCo Summer finished 3-11 and somehow walked away owning three first-round rookie picks, a transaction this desk covered with the appropriate amount of confusion. Now Jones is 2-0, and his luck_delta of 0.346 is the highest number on this page, which means the football gods have been kind and the tape says something less flattering. He gets Jamie Sinn's Tuten that thang up, 1-1 but averaging more points per game than Jones is. If Sinn's defense shows up, Jones's perfect record meets its first real test, and this column's early money says it doesn't survive it.
At the bottom, Ryan Weaver's Bock Bock Bitch and Joe Hamm are both 0-2, part of a three-way tie for the league's worst all-play mark at 5-21 — the third team sharing that dubious distinction is Tareq Hafza's Shadynasty, who at least has a win to show for it. Neither Weaver nor Hamm is favored this week. Weaver draws Kevin Jones, who's 1-1 but has quietly been the more competent operation of the two. Hamm draws Ben Cunnion, also 1-1, also better positioned to keep it that way.
And then there's the game this desk has circled for reasons that have nothing to do with fantasy points. Chris Boyle's Epitome of Brutality opened the year with the league's best score, then followed it with an 80.98-point collapse that this column already covered in detail and will not relitigate here. He's 1-1, on a one-game skid, hosting Tareq Hafza — also 1-1, also on a one-game skid, and sporting that same 5-21 all-play mark that suggests his record is a mirage built on matchup luck (his 0.308 luck_delta is second-highest in the league). Two shaky 1-1 teams, one of whom signs my rejection emails. Draw your own conclusions. I've requested comment fourteen times and counting.
Justin Waitt's title defense and Evan Sinn's quietly excellent 18-8 all-play mark round out the slate in a game that deserves more attention than it will get, buried as it is under everything else happening this week. Watch it anyway. Waitt's 1-1 record undersells a team that's been better than its record, and so does Sinn's.