Four weeks in, the standings have sorted themselves into two tiers and one landfill. At the top, Elliott Simmonds sits 4-0 with a 40-12 all-play mark, trailing only Charlie Koepsell's 42-10 for best in the building. At the bottom, Hunter Koepsell and Ryan Weaver are both 0-4, and this week they play each other, which means by Monday one of them has a result to point to and the other doesn't.
Start there, because it's the most honest matchup on the board. Koepsell's all-play reads 14-38. Across the sheet from him, Weaver's reads 6-46, the single worst mark in the league. Weaver's points for, 391.62, is also dead last by a wide margin, though his -0.115 luck delta isn't even the roughest number on this slate — Evan Sinn (-0.288) and Koepsell himself (-0.269) have had a tougher run of bounces. Four weeks of bad matchups don't fully explain a roster that's been outscored 38 games to 14 in theoretical head-to-heads, and that number belongs to Koepsell, not Weaver. A choice will be made by one of these two rosters on Sunday to finally win a game. Whoever loses doesn't even get to be lonely about it — Joe Hamm is also sitting at 0-4 this week, so nobody's the league's only winless team no matter how it breaks.
At the other end, Simmonds draws that same Joe Hamm, who owns an ugly 11-41 all-play mark of his own, though even that isn't the league's worst — see Weaver, two paragraphs up. Simmonds just ended someone else's perfect season last week, beating Charlie Koepsell's 3-0 Long Hair Dont Care and dropping Koepsell to 3-1, while staying unblemished himself. He's not walking into a trap this week. He's walking into Joe Hamm.
The matchup with the most reputational stakes belongs to Chris Boyle, who snapped a two-game skid with a win over Evan Sinn last week and now sits 2-2 against Ben Cunnion, who's 3-1 and riding a two-game streak of his own. Cunnion's underlying delta, +0.212, says the bounces have gone his way more than his all-play earns him — the same flavor of friendly variance Kevin Jones is riding below, not proof his start is bulletproof. Boyle, meanwhile, sits at -0.096, the mark of a team that's been better than his record over the last three games suggests. Per league sources — namely, the box scores — that's a real storyline that would get more airtime on anyone else's roster.
Elsewhere, two 3-1 teams in different divisions collide when Brian Jones hosts Tareq Hafza. Hafza arrives on a two-game winning streak; Jones has one of his own, a single win by comparison, not two. Their scoring totals are nearly identical — Jones at 528.28, Hafza at 506.42 — which should make this one of the closer calls on the board.
And in the Cajun Willie Division, Charlie Koepsell's 42-10 all-play mark, the best in the league outright, runs into Kevin Jones, who is 3-1 on the back of a +0.442 luck delta that's the most inflated number on this week's entire slate, despite an all-play record of 16-36 that says he's been winning games he had no business winning. Regression is a real thing. It has to find Kevin Jones eventually. I'm not sure it finds him this week, with Koepsell coming off a loss of his own.
My record this season sits at 7-6 on calls I'm willing to put my name on. I've also requested an interview with the league office fourteen times and gotten exactly as many answers. Maybe this is the week Chris Boyle calls back. I'll be here regardless, filing on deadline, which is more than I can say for the response rate out of that office.