Week 2 Recap

The blowout nobody saw coming. Certainly not this column.

The commissioner was picked to lose. He won by 60.80, posted the highest score in the league, and — this is the part that stings — ran a perfect lineup. Zero points left on his bench. Not a single swap available that would have scored him another tenth. Nobody else in the league was within seven points of optimal.

CeeDee Lamb 35.3. Dak Prescott 29.76. Travis Kelce 25.1, which is not a sentence anyone expected to write after Week 1. Chris Olave 22.6 in Baltimore. Omarion Hampton, the punching bag of both previews, bounced back for 17.5. Even the waiver pickup contributed — Aaron Jones went for 10.5 in his first week as Minnesota's lead back.

Fudge Friends, meanwhile, produced the perfect inversion of Week 1. Last week they won by 61 while Ja'Marr Chase scored 3.2. This week Chase caught seven of nine targets for two touchdowns and 26.5 points — and they lost by 61. Trevor Lawrence managed 7.16 in Denver. Dallas Goedert, promoted into the flex specifically because of last week's lesson, scored 1.4. And DJ Moore finished at negative 0.1, which takes real commitment.

Xavier Worthy scored 13.5 on the bench. It would not have mattered.

Surprise: the commissioner's roster of coin flips landed heads on nearly every one

Decided by 3.26 points. Decided on Thursday, if we're honest.

Here is the sentence this column wrote five days ago: "Max is also sitting George Kittle, who played in Week 1 and is limited rather than out… Johnson is the safe start. Kittle is the one with a rising role and a reason to check the Friday report."

George Kittle scored 18.0. On the bench. Juwan Johnson started and scored 10.6. Swap them and Max wins 146.70 to 142.56.

That's the whole game. Everything else Max did was right — Amon-Ra St. Brown went for 35.2, Stefon Diggs justified his promotion with 21.7, Jalen Coker's ankle was noise as reported and he added 14.6, and Zay Flowers was correctly benched and scored exactly the 0.0 the injury report predicted. Ladd McConkey played and managed only 6.5, which is its own small vindication of the warning.

Champion of the Sun God now leads the entire league in total points at 312.16 and sits 1-1.

Tom won it with Davante Adams going nuclear — eight catches, 195 yards, two touchdowns, 39.5 points against the Giants on Monday night. That was the single biggest week-over-week swing in the league after a 5.6-point opener.

Tom also left 20.92 on his bench: Mahomes scored 28.98 behind Hurts' 18.16, and Colston Loveland posted 1.3 in the flex, his second consecutive near-zero. The usage argument is getting harder to make.

Closest game of the week — 3.26

Haas did everything right and lost by 4.02 anyway.

Credit first, because it's deserved: Haas benched Kyle Pitts and started Isaiah Likely. The thing this column hammered for two straight weeks. Pitts scored 2.5, Likely 8.3, and the correction was worth 5.8 points.

He also made the aggressive quarterback call, and it was the right one. Jaxson Dart had thrown three touchdowns for 26.6 points in Week 1. Justin Herbert had managed 14.26 and was heading into a game without Ladd McConkey, whose absence gutted that offense in the opener. Starting the rookie over Herbert was the higher-upside play and the defensible one.

Then Byron Young hit Dart on a third-down throw on the first drive, and Dart went down with a sprained MCL. Jameis Winston played the rest of the night. Five pass attempts. 0.8 points.

Herbert finished with 9.88. So the arithmetic says the swap cost 9.08 and the game — but the arithmetic is only visible in hindsight. This was not a bad decision. It was a knee.

Saquon Barkley added his own bad luck, taking a shoulder stinger against Tennessee and finishing with 3.0.

Which makes this the cruelest loss of the season so far, because Haas also had the best individual performance in the league: Jaxon Smith-Njigba, 45.5 points. DeVonta Smith added 27.7, New England's defense chipped in 23.0. Three starters over 23, a fixed tight end slot, two in-game injuries, and a four-point loss. He's 0-2 and he has not really deserved either of them this week.

Conte rode Josh Allen's 41.32 — five total touchdowns in Buffalo's 41-31 win over Detroit on Thursday — plus Gibbs at 23.3 and Jaylen Waddle at 21.8. He correctly benched Nico Collins, who was ruled out with a grade 1 hamstring strain, though the replacement (Jayden Reed, 1.4) didn't help.

And TreVeyon Henderson scored 13.6 on Conte's bench in his season debut, the other thing this column flagged Thursday. Travis Etienne started and scored 7.1. Conte won anyway, so it goes in the file rather than the obituary.

Worst luck of the week

The sloppiest winning performance of the season.

Louie left 31.44 points on his bench — the most of any manager this week — and won by 18.32. Matthew Stafford scored 27.98 while Jayden Daniels managed 14.74. Jake Ferguson scored 20.3 while Tucker Kraft managed 3.5. Rachaad White beat D'Andre Swift by 1.4.

Last week Louie ran the cleanest lineup in the league at 2.6 points left over. This week he was the worst. He's 2-0 either way, and he leads the league at 286.00 total points among teams with a winning record.

Jonathan Taylor carried it with 29.2. Minnesota's defense added 18.0. Justin Jefferson managed only 8.5 and Drake London 8.9 — the Cooper Rush problem, still unsolved.

Lindeman's tight end correction worked exactly as intended. Dalton Kincaid scored 22.5, his second-best starter, validating the promotion. Christian McCaffrey added 22.6 and Sam LaPorta 17.2.

The quarterback undid all of it. Caleb Williams crashed from 37.26 to 8.72, and Brock Purdy scored 28.48 on the bench. Start Purdy and Lindeman wins 125.28 to 123.84. He's 0-2 with the second-fewest points in the league.

Most points left on a bench this week: ~31.4 — in a win

The lowest-scoring game of the season, and the lowest winning score.

Chuck's roster simply stopped functioning. Malik Nabers 1.1. David Montgomery 4.4. Malachi Fields 5.0. Joe Burrow played through the back tightness and was fine at 16.18, Kenneth Walker added 23.8, and none of it mattered.

The detail this column flagged Thursday landed exactly as advertised: Chuck's Detroit defense played at Buffalo against Josh Allen and scored negative 1.0. Allen threw three touchdowns and ran for two more. That is a hard place to be a fantasy defense, and it was a hard place in precisely the way predicted.

Puka Nacua was held out with a hip issue and scored 0.0 — correctly benched, no harm done. Josh Downs scored 14.2 from the bench while Nabers scored 1.1 from a starting spot, which is where the 19.7 points Chuck left in reserve mostly lived.

Buscho won with 95.92, which tells you everything. Bijan Robinson managed 11.1, a 20-point drop from his opener. Drake Maye 9.02 against Pittsburgh, as feared. Michael Mayer, the Bowers replacement, scored 5.3. Nothing on this roster cleared 14.5.

But he's 2-0. The Bowers meniscus has cost him nothing yet.

Lowest winning score of the season