Three weeks into the Nevin Place season, the standings have sorted themselves into the honest and the lucky, and Week 4 is where the league finds out which is which. Two teams are still unbeaten. They are, naturally, scheduled against each other.
Elliott Simmonds' DELAWARE CHICKEN FARMER'S and Charlie Koepsell's Long Hair Dont Care both sit at 3-0, and only one walks away with the zero still attached. This is the marquee, and the fact pack does the persuading for me. Charlie's all-play mark is 33-6 — the best in the league by a wide margin, the kind of number that says this team should be 3-0 against anybody, any week, in any universe. Elliott's is 27-12, plenty strong on its own, except Elliott's luck_delta sits at +0.308, tied for the highest in the field with Kevin Jones' Bannermen. Translation: the schedule has been kind to him three weeks running. Charlie's luck_delta is milder, +0.154, which means his 3-0 owes less to fortune and more to just being better. A choice was made somewhere in this matchup, and I think the numbers already made it. I'll take Long Hair Dont Care to survive.
Meanwhile, the league's most uncomfortable game doesn't involve a single win on the line. Chris Boyle's Epitome of Brutality is on a two-game losing streak, and this week's opponent is Evan Sinn, who's dropped one straight of his own. Both sit at 1-2. Both have a luck_delta deep in the red — Boyle at -0.282, Evan at -0.256 — which tells you neither manager has been terrible so much as unlucky, but only one of them runs the league office, and I notice these things even when nobody else in this publication will say it out loud. Per league sources, there is no league office comment on any of this, because there never is. A commissioner on a two-game skid in Week 4 is a footnote. A commissioner on a two-game skid who also decides waiver priority is a running joke that writes itself, and I intend to keep writing it.
Elsewhere, Ryan Weaver's Bock Bock Bitch is 0-3 with a 6-33 all-play record, second-worst in the league, trailing only Joe Hamm's 5-34 mark. He draws Brian Jones' ShitCo Summer, a team that's 2-1 and still somehow on a one-game losing streak after getting outscored by Jamie Sinn's Tuten That Thang Up last week. Jones should win this one going away, and if he doesn't, Weaver's winless start gets even harder to explain.
Joe Hamm and Sean Gibbins is the league's least-watched, most instructive game: Hamm is 0-3 with that league-worst 5-34 all-play mark, while Gibbins is only 1-2 but has actually been unlucky doing it (-0.103 luck_delta). Somebody's losing streak snaps here, and I like Gibbins to be the one who does it, if only because his margins have been closer than the record admits.
Over in the Cajun Willie Division, Ben Cunnion's one-game run of good fortune (+0.231 luck_delta, tied with Tareq Hafza) meets Justin Waitt's Wisconsin Weezy, the 2025 regular-season No. 1 finisher at 10-4, now sitting 2-1. Waitt's all-play is 27-12, clean and repeatable. Cunnion's is 17-22, buoyed almost entirely by schedule. I'd bet on the man who topped last season's regular-season standings over the man riding a lucky bounce, and I'll say so on the record.
Hunter Koepsell remains the league's unluckiest team by the numbers, -0.333 luck_delta and 0-3 to show for it, and he draws Kevin Jones' Bannermen, who are 2-1 on a +0.308 luck_delta of their own — the best in the division. Two men on opposite ends of the same coin flip. Only one of them keeps flipping tails.
The last unbeaten-adjacent game of the week: Tareq Hafza and Jamie Sinn, both 2-1, both riding win streaks, in a Cajun Willie clash nobody outside the division is watching closely enough. They should be.