The Week the League Splits in Two

Ten teams have started 4-0 in eighteen seasons of the League of Champions. All ten finished in the top six. Two won the whole thing. Schmidt is 3-0 in his first month as a franchise and a 62% favourite to make it eleven, which would put the Nashville Nights in company that has never once been wrong about a season.

There is a precedent for the newcomer doing this and it is a flattering one. Only two first-year franchises have ever been 3-0 at this point: Jamie Overkamp in 2016, who went 4-0, finished fifth and won the title the year after, and Chad Verly in 2017, who lost in week four and finished sixth. Schmidt has arrived here carrying the two highest-scoring players in the league — Jaxon Smith-Njigba, who has the most PPR points any receiver has produced through three games since 2010, and Josh Allen, second in the NFL in total quarterback EPA and now clear of the knee that had him Questionable. Patrick Mahomes has watched all three wins from the bench.

Standing in front of it is the one team on this board whose quarterback room has fallen in. Baker Mayfield is Out with a dislocated thumb, Caleb Williams is Doubtful with a hamstring, and there is no third arm on the roster. That is most of why the board has Dinsky last of twelve at 122.79 while he sits third in the league on points per week — a 22-point gap between form and projection, the widest on this week's board, as it has been on every board since the season began.

He is a long way from short of everything else. Kenneth Walker leads the NFL in rushing with 360 yards and takes 88.9% of Kansas City's carries inside the ten; Christian Watson is averaging 9.7 targets and 95 receiving yards a game; Travis Kelce is third among all tight ends in yards per route run. The receiving corps is second-best in the league at 52.9 points a week. Every game Schmidt plays this year is the first meeting with a franchise he has never faced. This is the fourth of eleven, and the first three are won.

281.28 combined is the largest projection on the board and the running backs are the whole reason. Jahmyr Gibbs has taken 100% of Detroit's carries inside the ten-yard line this season, the largest share in the NFL. Derrick Henry is on 87.5% and Kyren Williams on 80.0%. Three of the eight biggest goal-line jobs in football are in this one game, which is why Ghost's backfield produces 49.8 points a week and Orvieto's 41.0 — the two best in the league, with nothing else anywhere near either.

Everything else says Orvieto. His 465.02 is the tenth-highest three-week total in the history of this league; Ghost has the second-fewest points in it. Orvieto is a 62% favourite. And none of that has mattered once: Ghost has won the last three meetings, 140.52 and 170.54 and 142.92, and leads the fixture 4-1.

Orvieto's worry is that his line keeps sliding — 180.80, then 143.36, then 140.86, one of only two teams going backwards all season — and that he may be without the receiver holding it up. Zay Flowers leads the NFL at 9.0 yards per route run and is Questionable with a hamstring. Davante Adams drew Pat Surtain on 90.2% of his routes on Sunday and still came away with eleven targets; across 182 routes run without Puka Nacua on the field he has a 36.4% target share and ten touchdowns, and Nacua is Questionable again this week.

Ghost's case is narrower and more honest about itself. His receivers are last in the league at 20.6 a week: Tetairoa McMillan is 44th among wide receivers in yards per route run with three end-zone targets and no touchdown, and Justin Herbert is 1-for-12 with three interceptions on throws of twenty air yards or more. Gibbs is second in the league in rushes clocked above fifteen miles an hour and on pace for 470 touches. If this is close at six o'clock it is because one man made it close.

135.96 against 136.58. A projected margin of 0.62 on a 50-50 split, the tightest the board has been in four weeks and the closest game it has produced all season. Then note that one of these two was last in the league on points ten days ago and the other has just lost two in a row, and the 50-50 starts to look less like a judgement and more like a refusal to make one.

Geenen owns the only line in the league going up: 91.86, then 137.58, then 159.58, a climb of 67.72 in a fortnight, with the best lineup efficiency in the league at 93.5% and the fewest points left on a bench at 26.90. Three weeks ago he was the worst team in this league by every measure available. He is now sixth in the standings and still only tenth on points, which is roughly the definition of a team that has found something.

Javier is the same story read backwards. His best week was his first — 155.56, then 123.00, then 131.74 — and he carries four injury designations into the tightest game of the week: Lamar Jackson, DeVonta Smith, DJ Moore and Tony Pollard, all Questionable. Ashton Jeanty has seven carries inside the ten with nothing to show for them and is on pace for the worst running-back season by total EPA in six years, worse than his own last one. Geenen's answer at the same position is Bhayshul Tuten, who has more rushes above fifteen miles an hour than anybody in football.

The tight ends may settle it, and both are better than their slots have looked. Brock Bowers has four career games of ten catches, a hundred yards and a touchdown; every other tight end in the league has four between them. Dalton Kincaid leads every tight end in football in yards per route run at 3.87 and has gone 18.00, 22.50, 2.80 for Javier. History gives Geenen nothing here: he is 1-4 in the fixture, and it does not do middles — two of the five decided by under ten points, the other three by more than forty.

Hart is 2-1 and has not yet played a team that reached 150; the closest missed it by 0.86. He has given up 362.24 points, third-fewest in the league, while managing the worst lineups in it at 81.3%, five points worse than anybody else in the league. Drew is 1-2 and has given up 467.64, more than anyone, 8.42 clear of the next man. That is a 105.40-point difference in what the schedule has asked of two teams whose own scoring is 2.18 apart, and it is most of the distance between 2-1 and 1-2.

The easy road has also handed Hart the best quarterback in football. Brock Purdy's 0.59 EPA per play is the highest any quarterback has managed through three weeks since 2016, and his 54.79 total is close to double second place. Bijan Robinson is second in the NFL in rushing yards and takes 87.5% of Atlanta's carries inside the ten. Trey McBride gives him the best tight-end slot in the league at 19.7 points a week. On paper this is the deepest roster in the game, and it has produced 413.20 points — sixth.

Which is why the bench is the story. Kenyon Sadiq comes in at the flex, fourth among all tight ends in yards per route run, with Breece Hall Doubtful and down to third on the Jets depth chart and RJ Harvey taking the running-back slot instead. Blake Corum, the other man dropped, has turned half his carries into five yards or more — a share nobody in football beats. Hart changed three starters in week two and got all three right. He is not short of options. He is short of a reason to trust himself with them.

Drew has not moved a starter all season and is the only manager in the league who can say that. It has produced 130.00, 176.78 and 108.60 on the hardest three weeks anybody in the league has been handed, and he has not reacted to a single one of them. Travis Etienne is Out and needs replacing, and the obvious answer, Tyler Allgeier, is 41st of 42 qualifying backs in the share of his carries reaching five yards. Chase Brown has 59 touches without a gain of twenty yards, more than any back in the NFL. Lose this and he is 1-3, and only eight of the forty-eight teams who have started 1-3 here finished in the top six.

Three weeks in, Gosling has the fourth-most points in the league, the best receiving corps in it, the second-best lineup efficiency and a 1-2 record. He is 18-15 against the field and minus .212 on luck, second-worst in the league behind an 0-3 team. One of those three weeks was a perfect lineup — the best eleven available to him, to the cent, the only one anybody has managed this season — and it lost by 21.82.

Dave C has had the month the other way round. He is 2-1 on fewer points, sits fifth in the standings, and arrives the warmer of the two: two straight wins, and a Sunday built on the quarterback he had spent a fortnight leaving out. Tyler Shough scored 50.58 on that bench behind Drake Maye — who is now dead last of twenty-eight qualifying quarterbacks in adjusted net yards per attempt — before coming in and winning him the week.

Gosling's case is a receiving corps producing 55.1 points a week, two thirds of which is odder than that sounds. Drake London is third in the NFL in yards per route run and averages 0.66 PPR points per route with Michael Penix throwing — a figure only Puka Nacua has beaten among receivers with 300 routes since 2024 — and has twenty targets without a touchdown. Parker Washington is second among all receivers in targets per route run and fourth in points per route, on a Jacksonville side that is 32nd of 32 in dropbacks per game. Behind both of them, Michael Wilson's target share has gone 18.9%, 26.9%, 34.0% from Gosling's bench.

Dave C has a hole to fill at running back. De'Von Achane is on injured reserve with a torn ACL and Alec Pierce is on it behind him with a heel, which leaves Jacory Croskey-Merritt, 50 touches without a gain of twenty yards, and Woody Marks, whose runs are hit at or behind the line 59% of the time. Rhamondre Stevenson is at the flex having fumbled once every forty touches since 2024, the worst rate in the league. And the fixture does not do close: nine meetings since 2018, average margin 37.83, exactly one inside ten points.

Ten teams have started 0-4 in eighteen years of this league. One of them finished in the top six. None won a title. Zoz is 0-3, the board gives him 48% at 128.46 against Yim's 131.29, and if it goes the way the board says he becomes the eleventh.

The case for him is that almost nothing underneath the record agrees with it. Measured against every other team every week, his scores would have beaten nine of the thirty-three he could have played; he has beaten none of the three he actually did, the widest gap in the league between what a team has scored and what it has to show for it. Dak Prescott is third in the NFL in total quarterback EPA. Jaylen Warren played 91% of Pittsburgh's snaps on Sunday, took 85% of the carries and ran 70% of the routes. Luther Burden's route share has climbed from 66% to 77% and he now leads Chicago in first-read targets. And in 2021 this same manager started 4-0 and finished runner-up.

The case against him is David Montgomery, 42nd of 42 qualifying backs in the share of his carries reaching five yards, with 68% of his runs hit at or behind the line — the worst rate in the league — and a tight end slot producing 2.8 points a week, the worst any slot on any roster has managed this season. Puka Nacua comes back in for KC Concepcion, Questionable with a hip after a fortnight out.

Yim is 1-2 and falling faster than he is: 176.46, then 121.24, then 103.54, the steepest decline in the league and one of only two lines going backwards. Last Sunday's figure lost to all eleven other teams. Jonathan Taylor still takes 85.7% of Indianapolis's carries inside the ten and returned 9.20 for it; TreVeyon Henderson is last among every back with twenty carries in success rate and returned 3.90 from the flex; George Pickens has 25 targets and no receiving touchdown, tied for the most in football without one. She leads the fixture 10-8 across eighteen meetings since 2012, and the most recent of its three playoff games went to Zoz, 198.88 to 179.24.