Last Week:  Lost to Frodo Swaggins 21-20

Last Week:  Beat Passed Our Prime 44-6, tied Grey Hair - Don't Care 31-31

 

Last Week:  Beat Scared Hitless 33-15, lost to Sticky Bandits 44-6

Passed Our Prime are no cowards.  They won D2 and moved up, knowing that it would cost them their two best players.  Then they scraped together just enough of a short-handed team this past week to beat Scared Hitless and move out of last place in the D1 standings.  Yes, they also got killed by the Sticky Bandits, but again, short-handed!  Hogan makes this team dangerous for playoffs.

 

Last Week:  Lost to Passed Our Prime 33-15

 

Last Week:  Tied Sticky Bandits 31-31

 

Last Week:  Lost to No Punt Intended 34-28

Underrated:  You already know they're great, but can we just remind people for the 10,000th time in this article that No Punt Intended is STILL undefeated against their own division with their starting QB present?  We'll copy and paste this from the QB Rankings above: "No Punt Intended's only two losses this season were a D1 crossover in their very first game as a team, and the week that Kyle wasn't in town".  Take away those two games (and of course a forfeit win over Untouchaballs which isn't included in the numbers above anyway) and their point differential per game rises from +8.13 PDPG to a whopping +18.8 PDPG... which would be the best in the entire TSL.  You know they're great and you're STILL underrating them.

 

Overrated:  Freeballers are third in the D2 standings which sounds like they should have a decent chance to compete for a championship... until you remember that their stats are padded by a 61-0 annihilation of The Replacements and a forfeit win over Untouchaballs.  They have two actual wins on the season not counting those games, both of which came against the DILFS, and a -7.2 PDPG if we toss out the Replacements massacre (which would drop them into "pretender" status on the chart above).  They'll probably beat Buffalo Vice Retro this weekend in our opinion... but that'll be the last game they win this session.

 

We Don't Know What The Hell They Are:  We didn't include them in either Overrated or Underrated above, but let's take a second to talk about the Untouchaballs, who had one of the weirdest seasons in recent memory.  Are they overrated?  Underrated?  We still have no idea!  They took two forfeit losses this season, another loss to Buffalo Vice Retro when Travis subbed at QB, another loss in a D1 Crossover game to TEIM, and they were the only team to play The Replacements twice.  Those last two games don't count (we don't mean to kick them when they're down, but the Replacements are not currently a competitive team in D2) so that means Untouchaballs only played three competitive games this session against teams they might meet again in the playoffs.  They've beaten a full-strength Buffalo Vice Retro by 18, lost to Frodo Swaggins by 2, and lost to DILFS by 2.  What are we supposed to make of that??  The Untouchaballs could make the Finals and it wouldn't shock us.  They could get wiped out in the first round and it wouldn't shock us.  Your guess is as good as ours.

 

Underrated:  How are we going to pick overrated and underrated teams in D3?? The best team in this division is winning by +8.3 PDPG.  The worst team is losing by -6.4 PDPG, only 14.7 PDPG worse than the best team.  Here's how that compares to other divisions, graphing the difference between the best and worst teams in each instance:

 

 

We modeled D2 with and without The Replacements because they're really throwing the comparison off in that division.  So, what's the point of this graph?  Essentially the taller the bar, the wider the gap between the best and worst teams in the division. And D3 is the shortest bar, which means it's the tightest division top to bottom.  With so many relatively even teams it's going to be splitting hairs to declare one "overrated" or "underrated", but we'll take a shot at this anyway...

The most underrated team in D3 is Practice Squad.  Why?  Because they're a #8 seed going up against a #1 seed this weekend that they've already played well against twice this season.  Practice Squad started the season with a 28-18 win against Mountain Dew Me, and then lost the very next week to the same opponent by a score of 33-32.  You think they're going to feel intimidated going up against a team they could easily be 2-0 against?  And what happens if they play well again and knock off the top team in their division?  The confidence boost could carry them to a second consecutive Finals game.  Look, we're not saying it's likely (Mountain Dew Me has improved tremendously since those first couple weeks) but we wouldn't give ANY division's lowest seeded playoff team better odds to win their division than Practice Squad.

 

Overrated:  Again, same story as above (if there aren't a lot of truly underrated teams, you won't see a lot of truly overrated teams) but we'll take Scott Senior's Starting as the most overrated team here based solely on their recent trend.  As we said in the QB Rankings above, they're a narrow Bullet Club loss away from a five-game losing streak to end the season, and they've surrendered an average of 37.8 PPG defensively over that stretch.  That's not the type of momentum you want right now going into the playoffs.