AFL Quickplay Finale

Andrew Nordmeier
Wednesday July 31, 2013

We made it through a 19-week season in the AFL and the competition has ended in the Quickplay game for the 2013 season. We’ve seen amazing shootouts this season like the Spokane-Orlando 83-82 game. We’ve seen some low scoring games as well and a vast majority in between.

But we’ve never seen anything like what the final week brought us. In the lead-in to the final week, I went on at length discussing playoff scenarios and how meaningless games would impact your fantasy team. The concept was solid and the picks were okay for the most part.

And then it happened.

We got hit by a Kurzball.

The situation that came into play revolved around whether Arizona or Spokane would win the Western Division erupted on Friday. When it did, two games went from basically irrelevant to as important as they could be. The Spokane-Pittsburgh game suddenly had value as did Arizona-Iowa.

Erik Meyer and Nick Davila went from fantasy gambles to solid plays and that played a big role in the final week’s outcome. With Spokane playing on Friday night, it also would have been impossible to update your lineup on Saturday and potentially get more points.

Let’s see how this all played out in the results from Week 19.

We had a three-way tie at 191 points for the top spot in the final week. The Commish, The Washington Commandos and South Phoenix Bombers all finished in first place. What’s more impressive is that they used three different lineups to get to that same point total.

Fat Nuts tied with sfvalleys for fourth at 189 points on the week. The Voice Says and skillet tied for sixth at 188 points. RochRush rolled up 185 points for the eighth spot. The Sugarmill Giants and Phantom Furballs tied for tenth with 183 points. Notice how incredibly close the top 10 teams were with just eight points separating first from tenth.

My team took a colossal nose dive when it mattered the most finishing 25th for the week with 132 points. Dan Raudabaugh of the Soul threw five interceptions to drop his score to just 21 for the week. But that wasn’t the worst of it. I thought JJ Raterink of the Barnstormers was going to be a good sleeper. Unfortunately, he had a horrible outing with 56 passing yards, no touchdowns and three interceptions. That resulted in a score of -5 for him for the week. So it is possible to get negative points in this game. It’s also possible to watch the backup come in and throw for four touchdowns which is what Brian Reader did for Iowa.

What did all of this do for the final standings? Quite a bit. I can tell you that I didn’t hold on to the third-place spot I had last week.

We’ll reveal the standings in reverse order starting with the 10th place team. It builds a little more suspense that way. Especially when we get to the third spot.

Finishing in 10th place with 3,825 points are the Short Bus Kids.
The ninth place team with 3,828 points is the Unemployed Punters.
The squad finishing in eight place with 3,839 points is the Washington Commandos.
In seventh place, The Commish piled up 3,843 points this season.
Coming in sixth place with a total of 3,850 points is The Voice Says.

Now this is going to become wild right here as we look at the three teams that finished in the third, fourth and fifth spots. The teams involved are the Nebraska Predators, Phantom Furballs and skillet.
These three teams were separated by a total of two points. One of them had 3,857 points. Another had 3,858 points and one had 3,859 points. Yeah, it was that close.

In fifth place, we have the Nebraska Predators at 3,857. One point ahead of them is skillet at 3,858. That leaves the Phantom Furballs a 3rd place finish with 3,859 points.

The teams that finished third through tenth were separated by a total of 34 points.

The top two teams are of little surprise as the South Phoenix Bombers finished in second place with a total of 3,958 points.
That leaves our champion as arenabowlbound and the only team to score more than 4,000 points this season. They win the title with 4.028 points.

With that said, we still have a little further issue to mention here with the prizes.

Arenabowlbound wins and will be awarded the top prize of 5,000 AF Points. The South Phoenix Bombers cash in with 2,000 AF Points for second place.

The Phantom Furballs finished third but will get ZERO AF points. Wait. What? Huh? How the?

Is this another Kurzball? No, it’s not.

The reason why the Furballs get nothing is that team is owned by Tim Capper and he’s one of the writers on the site. He also does that lovely podcast each week. Because of that, his team is ineligible for prizes. My team, the Unemployed Punters, would also have won nothing had I stayed in third place. Our teams were the only ones owned by ArenaFan writers.

So, who gets the third prize of 1,000 AF Points? We could settle it with sack races or an essay contest or a dance-off. Since none of them are practical, we’ll use the simple solution of letting the points go the next non-ArenaFan staffer.

That means our fourth-place team, skillet, will be awarded the 1,000 AF Points. It makes a heart-breaking loss for the Nebraska Predators as they finished just one point out of getting that prize.

Just like on the field, the game’s never over in this league until the clock hits all zeroes. This exciting finish in the QuickPlay is just like what the AFL is known for.

Thanks to all 59 teams that took the field this season. Congratulations to the top ten teams and our three point-winners. That does it for this season on QuickPlay. Hopefully you enjoyed the articles and found the advice and picks to be helpful.