SAG 2021 — Week 3 Report
2 points make a line, 3 make a trend. At this juncture of the season, GMs are staring at their pre-draft predictions and wondering how they could have gotten it all so wrong, patting themselves on the back for having the foresight/dumb luck to grab that deep rookie sleeper, and scouring available player lists to find that confirmed next superstar on the waiver wire. Data is now all important to the aspiring SAG Bowl champion franchise and with this in mind, lets step into the SAG LAB+ (copyright and patent pending).
The Lab is a constantly evolving look into the numbers that matter, the mathematics behind the SAG, and one man's attempt to divine reason from the unreasonable. All inputs and additions are welcome in the Lab, other GMs are explicitly encouraged to make corrections, suggestions, and inferences. With the wealth of data manipulation experience within the GM cohort, I’d expect derivations of this to already exist in the bowels of My Documents folders across the tech stack of the SAG community, but this is communal access materials. A gift from your benevolent and eternal leader if you will.
The LAB+ dataset will be periodically updated to provide analysis and insight on the 2021 SAG season. New metrics will be discovered, and existing ones made to look outright amateur in hindsight as we go on. So, let's take a quick peek into first roll of the data dice before we recap the week that was.
Week 2 saw the all-important twins of Consistency and Sustainability raised and those threads have been plucked to look at how the fortunes of some are blossoming while others begin to wither in the burgeoning southern hemisphere springtime. The Rubbers at this stage should be applauded for being the lowest variance team in the comp. It is most unfortunate that their performance, while being consistent, is by far the worst and the second largest negative trend.
Let's head to the other end of the ladder and look at Patches. Healthy average points, low variance and undefeated. However, week 3 was a large regression and their cumulative trend has dipped below 0. Has the sizzle gone out of the Albert Park based team? Are we seeing the beginning of a decline to irrelevance? Stories and juicy insights everywhere.
So what teams are looking sharp and ‘building a house’ in this early season period, we now turn to the 3 teams with positive trend data. JABs are everyman’s safe bet, the team lives and dies on economic Billy Bean style moneyball. Last year’s champ* who has previously joked (or not joked) that he farms out research assignments to his grad students with the sole aim of hive-minding his fantasy team research, has seen some volatility in his early results but has an ever-increasing floor. Django is in a similar boat with the creamy glut of talent that only a wallet stuffed fat with SAG dollars like his can buy at draft night. But the hero here is the Co-cainers. Variance is off the charts but his score line has more momentum than a penny stock getting fluffed silly on a Reddit thread.
No doubt week 4 will make a mockery of all of this but hindsight is a beautiful mistress. Let's talk about the results that mattered in week 3:
C4NT defeated Bandits
The slow creep towards the Monday night game left News Team fans holding their collective breath at the start of the week. Zeke came out swinging to cause mild arrythmia, but Dak looked spicy enough to keep the C4NT win in hand.
Co-cainers defeated Rubbers
Rubbers must feel a little like Shane Watson right now, highly nervous as he nears triple figures. In a very lopsided and highly predictable result, the real stories of note are A.J. Brown going down and King Henry not breaking 20 pts.
Patches defeated Gypsies
This was looking to be closer after the Sunday games, but Goedert and Cooper fizzled on MNF to keep the Patches sheet clean. Ja’Marr Chase is something to get excited about for the Gypsies though, Cinci fans are “A.J who?” right now.
JABs defeated TacoCorp
Marshawn Lynch saw a sea of red this week as his TacoCorp shares plummeted. If it weren’t for the Rubbers, there would have been a reverse Wolfman result, a winner despite the second lowest score. Not sure if this has ever occurred in SAG history and it still hasn’t.
There are many things that the executive branch of the SAG is looking forward to aside from week 4 this week. Some insight into what stories the league’s investigative journalists are getting deep into the weeds on: “Aftermath of the Dee’s historic win and its impact to SAG teams”, “Corruption! The REAL story behind the sputtering SAG punters club”, and “Who is really is James Brugler? The Man, The Myth, The Asterisks”.
2nd and 3,
Commish Clue
