Elliott Simmonds took care of business against Joe Hamm, putting up 178.02 to Hamm's 125.36 and dropping Hamm to 0-5 with a five-game losing streak that now has company at the bottom. Drake Maye went for 39.46, Malik Nabers added 29.1, and Trey McBride chipped in 26.1 — a top three that look absurd stacked next to each other, and for Simmonds this is apparently just how Tuesdays go. He is 5-0. He owns the best all-play mark in the building at 53-12. Per league sources, the other thirteen rosters in this bracket would like it on record that they noticed. Jayden Daniels put up 32.26 for Hamm and it still wasn't remotely competitive.
The actual Winless Bowl, the one this column flagged last week between two teams both carrying 0-4 records into kickoff, belonged to Hunter Koepsell and Ryan Weaver. Weaver won it, 108.4 to 87.3, on the strength of George Pickens' 28 and Garrett Wilson's 23.4, snapping his own streak and shoving Koepsell down to join Hamm in search of answers. Worth saying plainly: Weaver's all-play record is still 10-55, the worst in the league by a wide margin, and he got there this week by starting Baker Mayfield for zero points and Mike Washington for two. A win is a win. It is not a vote of confidence.
Now, the matter of Chris Boyle. Two weeks ago this column noted, with some restraint, that his team had lost two straight that nobody in the league office wanted to discuss. Last week it was a one-game winning streak receiving less scrutiny than it deserved. This week it is two straight, and the discrepancy between what Boyle's roster is capable of and what gets asked about it in commissioner-adjacent corners of this network continues to be a story in itself. He put up 140.02 on Ben Cunnion, got a 37.9 from Isaiah Likely and a 36.8 from Jaylen Warren, and it genuinely did not matter that Tyson Bagent and Carnell Tate combined for 4.78 points at the bottom of the lineup. Cunnion, for his part, got 24.04 out of Tyler Huntley and still went down, 140.02 to 60.28. Those are the receipts. Draw your own conclusions about what a commissioner's point totals look like under a pseudonym nobody acknowledges.
The tightest game of the week belonged to Sean Gibbins and Justin Waitt, decided by 0.64 points after Waitt got 37.7 out of Jahmyr Gibbs and 25.28 out of Jordan Love and still found a way to lose. Davante Adams' 22.1 and Kyren Williams' 19.6 were enough for Gibbins, who is now 3-2 with back-to-back wins while Waitt drops to 2-3 on a two-game slide that his -0.277 luck delta suggests is mostly bad fortune and not bad roster-building. Small comfort when the margin is two-thirds of a point.
Elsewhere: Jamie Sinn put up 177.28 against Evan Sinn's 68.14, a family-named mismatch settled by Parker Washington's 30.4 and Jared Goff's 28.94, and it extends Evan's slide to three straight losses and a 1-4 record that his -0.246 luck delta says is somewhat deserved and somewhat not. Charlie Koepsell, still searching for anything resembling revenge for his perfect season ending last week, beat Kevin Jones 122.48-86.88 behind Mike Evans' 26.3 and Joe Burrow's 24.6, pushing Koepsell to 4-1 and a share of second place. And Brian Jones outlasted Tareq Hafza, producing the week's highest-scoring loser, 156.94-139.84, with Christian Watson's 32.3 and Bucky Irving's 31.5 overcoming Puka Nacua's 37.7 on the other side. Jones is 4-1 with the highest luck delta among the top three contenders at 0.2, which is either sustainable or a problem for October.
Five weeks in, the standings have a top three — Simmonds, Charlie Koepsell, Brian Jones — that looks like it belongs there, and a bottom pair in Hamm and Hunter Koepsell that looks exactly as bad as 0-5 twice over should look. Kevin Jones sits 3-2 with a 0.323 luck delta, the highest mark in the entire league, which this column will be watching closely the moment his schedule stops cooperating. I have requested comment from the league office fourteen times now. I expect the fifteenth to go the same way the first fourteen did.