Monday, August 31, 2020

2020 Season Preview

 After an offseason like no other, and heading into our first virtual draft, it's time to bring some sense of normalcy back to this league. The blog is back baby! We are a week away from the draft, and less than two weeks away from NFL kickoff, so as we move into to FALAFEL Season 12, let's take a look at where each team stands from a historical perspective. As usual, this post can be used by Gutman, AGD, and Esco for the Division Draft, but it's also useful to make other people feel bad about themselves.

FALAFEL Team Power Rankings

All historical data has been updated on the sidebar, and for those who only care about winzzz, here are some fun facts:

  • There is a weird phenomenon where the teams that have yet to win a Stevens Bowl have the best overall records of active teams:
    • Zacherman, Nick, Marco, myself, and Barnard all have top 7 overall win percentages yet no Chef's Coats.
    • The bottom 7 active teams combine to have 8 Chef's Coats.
    • The AGD reunion has pushed them to the top overall record, and along Levine, a clear top two spot in FALAFEL history (more on that below).
    • The only team in the bottom 7 without a Chef's Coat is Bennett, which also feels right.
  • Sample sizes are getting pretty large here. Zacherman is the first to hit 80 total wins, which means we are likely three years away from our first Centurion.
  • Team shifts haven't been fun to everyone, as one 4-9 season from Billy dropped his solo efforts from 6th to 14th #BringBackMarshall.
  • If we averaged the AGD solo seasons and included them with their combined seasons, they would be even with Zacherman overall.
As always, the purpose of this post is not to look at records alone. The PAA (Points Above Average) updated through 2019 is below:

Some thoughts:
  • Levine's consistency is borderline boring, but is still impressive considering how far ahead of the pack he is.
  • From a predictive standpoint, four of the top five in PAA also scored in the top five last year, with Gutman as the only party crasher.
  • Billy and Alan are below the Long Line, which is never a great sign, though their three Chef's Coats would say otherwise.
  • Bruno's one season remains twice as bad as Levine's six combined seasons have been good.
Here are my Division Draft tiers:
  1. Levine
  2. AGD (Captain), Joseph
  3. Esco (Captain), Kumpf, Zacherman, Marco
  4. Weissbard, Gutman (Captain), Ajay, Barnard
  5. Bennett, Billy, Alan
Finally, here are the overall points for those who are interested: