Last Week:  Beat Freeballers 33-8

Last Week:  Lost to The Untouchaballs 30-26

Eyes Downtown have faced four opponents this season, and they have losses to all four of them.  Strange to say about the defending D1 champs, right?  Maybe it's tough to take the regular season seriously (especially in a crossover game) when you're only measuring success by championships at this point.

They woke up the beast!  Burr led Untouchaballs to an improbable win against the reigning D1 champs in the biggest (regular season) game of his career.  Was that enough to jump Bobby in the Power Rankings?  Not quite... Untouchaballs should have jumped to D1 if Burr wanted to be at the top of these rankings... but he definitely showed he belongs in the conversation of best QBs in this League.

Last Week:  Lost to Eyes Uptown 40-24

 

 

 

"That team is too good for their division".

 

"They don't belong in D3, that's definitely a D2 team"

 

Hang out at the bar long enough and listen to people talk about their games, and you're bound to hear someone complaining that a team shouldn't be in their division because they're "too good".  

 

But what does that even mean?  

 

There's always one team in first place, so there's nothing wrong with having a better record than your opponents.  It only becomes a "problem" if teams feel like they don't have a chance at a championship because that one team is truly unbeatable.  So we thought it would be interesting to look at which teams stand out (for better OR for worse) in their divisions, and see which teams really ARE "too good" (or "too bad") for their divisions.

 

Let's start with the obvious: wins and losses.  There are three unbeaten teams in the League between The Malones (D3), Cunning Stunts (D4) and GUCCI (D5), although GUCCI does have a tie on their record.  Then there is, surprisingly, only ONE team in the League with a single loss, and that is the Wanderers (D3).  Every other team has at LEAST two losses*, and if you've lost two games in your division, you're clearly not "too good" to play in it.

 

 

So that leaves Malones, Stunts and GUCCI as teams that can make a case for being "too good" for their division.  But are they really crushing everybody, or just the recipients of a few lucky bounces?  As always, we turned to math for an answer.

 

Below is a graph of each division's League leader in point differential per game (margin of victory) minus the NEXT best team in their division's point differential per game.  In other words, how much bigger is their margin of victory than the next best teams?  Here's what we found:

 

 

The Malones and Cunning Stunts, it turns out, probably ARE too good for their divisions.  Both teams are undefeated, and both teams are winning games by 12+ points per game more than the second best team in their division.  It feels like they could both be playing a division up, without any issue.  GUCCI is, of course, better than the rest of their division, but not by more than D2 Mavericks, or much more than D1 Eyes Uptown.  They probably belong in D5 (for now).

 

So if the Malones and Cunning Stunts are the two teams that we can say are "too good" for their divisions, are there any teams on the other end of the spectrum that should move down?

 

Every team in the TSL has at least one win except for Two Tuddies, but even the Tuddies have a tie... against a team that ALSO tied GUCCI (seems impossible for one team to tie an unbeaten and a winless team, but it happened).  And then there are seven teams in the TSL with exactly one loss.  Let's run the same type of graph for margin of defeat for the worst team in each division, vs the second worst:

 

 

Maybe you're not a "graph person" so we'll explain to you why this one is actually super interesting!  

 

Four of the six divisions (D2, D3, D4, D6) have almost NO difference between the worst team and the second worst, which means every team in those divisions should at least have SOME competitive games in the division they're assigned.

 

D5 has a slightly bigger gap between "worst team" TMA and "second worst team" Two Tuddies... but TMA actually BEAT the Tuddies, so clearly you can't say TMA "isn't good enough" to be in the same division as Tuddies.

 

The only division that really stands out is D1 with Frodo Swaggins.  Frodo is losing by an average of 13.9 points per game, which is 15.7 points worse than the next worst team in their division (Eyes Downtown, who are actually WINNING by 1.9 points per game).  Frodo Swaggins is a VERY good team... but they play in a division with only three other VERY good teams.  If you want to look at records and point differentials to see if any teams should move DOWN a division, the answer is Frodo Swaggins... and yet, they beat the reigning D1 champions this season.  So why wouldn't they want to play the best teams, if they've shown they're capable of beating them?

 

TL;DR: Most teams are in the right division, and even those who probably should move up or down a division can still win or lose on any given Saturday.

 

**

 

That's it for the TSL Power Rankings this week!  As we said above, we don't currently have our own email address anymore, so if you have any thoughts about QB rankings, or you want to make sure we know who's throwing for your team, please feel free to contact our good friend thegodfather@tsl716.com.  You tell him, he'll tell us.  

 

What's YOUR ranking?