International Simulation Football League
*Fun Facts about ISFL Player of the Week Awards - Printable Version

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*Fun Facts about ISFL Player of the Week Awards - slate - 02-11-2024

For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, please check out the league newspaper in the index. From the 4 analysts who cycle through the same truisms week after week when picking the winners of each week's biggest game to the error-ridden press conference writeups that discuss players beefing with one another or maligning their own team's performance, there are a lot of gems to be found. Thanks to a quirk of the sim backend in the DSFL, you can also see tons of writeups every week talking about how literally any player in the league is the latest new star media personality (including bots, frequently!).

One element of it that I find actually valuable rather than just funny is the Player of the Week awards. While I don't expect the sim to always choose the best performance each week that a human committee would choose (just look at the index's awards frontrunners), it honestly does a pretty good job passing the eye test where an actual outstanding performance eligible to win Performance of the Year usually feels like it gets awarded a Player of the Week award.

Typically, the only statistical data we get is at the season level either through the index's Player Stats page or directly in sim output (which has a bit more detailed info that gets used by the All-Pro committee such as targets for WRs and CBs). I think that neglects a big part of the exciting stuff that happens week-to-week - we have really bad information on who has the most big plays, which QB leads the most fourth-quarter comebacks, how teams perform in the final 2 minutes before half, etc. So I thought it would be cool to put together some data using the newspaper's Player of the Week awards and maybe learn some interesting stuff.

I put together a quick script this afternoon to scrape the index newspaper data and record each week's Player of the Week awards going back all the way to Season 1 and dropped the results in a SPREADSHEET WITH ALL THE DATA AVAILABLE HERE! Here is more than you ever thought to ask about how ISFL players across the league's history have stacked up in terms of Player of the Week awards!


Career Player of the Week Awards Leaderboard
1. Mike Boss, QB OCO - 31
2. Borkus Maximus III, QB NOLA - 20
3. Colby Jack, QB YKW - 19
T-4. King Bronko, QB ARI - 16
T-4. Mat Akselsen, QB YKW - 16
6. Wolfie McDummy, QB COL - 15
T-7. Franklin Armstrong, QB OCO - 13
T-7. Mattathias Caliban, QB COL - 13
T-7. Malcolm Savage, QB NYS - 13
T-10. Big Slammu, LB HON / YKW / BAL - 12
T-10. Marquise Brown, RB PHI / BAL - 12
T-10. Jay Cue, QB ARI - 12
T-13. Danny Grithead, S OCO / YKW - 11
T-13. Jarvis Harbinger-Marjin, RB PHI / CTC / CHI - 11
T-15. Owen Taylor, DE/RB BAL - 10
T-15. Jay Cue Jr., RB YKW / ARI - 10
T-15. Gus T.T. Showbiz, QB OCO - 10
T-15. Joliet L. Christ, QB SJS - 10
T-15. Easton Cole, QB AUS - 10

Those are all of the players with 10 or more Player of the Week awards! The list is dominated by QBs, with several RBs and two defensive players cracking the list. Of course, Mike Boss, the most statistically dominant QB in ISFL history and especially peerless in the league's earliest years, racked up the most of these awards.

Note that 3 of 14 teams have never had a player win 10 or more Player of the Week awards during their career. That makes a good segue to...


Team Player of the Week Awards Leaderboard
1. 161 - Yellowknife Wraiths YKW (Top 3: Colby Jack, QB - 19 / Mat Akselsen, QB - 16 / Danny Grithead, S & Cooter Bigsby, QB - 9)
2. 158 - Arizona Outlaws ARI (Top 3: King Bronko, QB - 16 / Jay Cue, QB - 12 / Andrew Reese, QB & Jay Cue Jr., RB & Akaki Akayre, LB - 9)
3. 156 - Orange County Otters OCO (Top 3: Mike Boss, QB - 31 / Franklin Armstrong, QB - 13 / Gus T.T. Showbiz, QB - 10)
4. 130 - Colorado Yeti COL (Top 3: Wolfie McDummy, QB - 15 / Mattathias Caliban, QB - 13 / Micycle McCormick, QB & Melvin Murder-Moose, LB - 8)
5. 126 - Baltimore Hawks BAL (Top 3: Owen Taylor, DE/RB - 10 / Childish Gambino, QB & Preston Beatz, QB - 6)
6. 101 - Cape Town Crash PHI / CTC (Top 3: Jarvis Harbinger-Marjin, RB - 10 / Marquise Brown, RB & Richard D'Attoria V, S - 7)
7. 94 - New Orleans Second Line LVL / NOLA (Top 3: Borkus Maximus III, QB - 20 / IsHe... ReallyInvisible, QB - 5 / 5 players tied for 4)
8. 86 - San Jose Sabercats SJS (Top 3: Jolie L. Christ, QB - 10 / Kolby Deringer, LB - 6 / Cruella de Ville, LB - 5)
9. 68 - Sarasota Sailfish SAR (Top 3: Daxtalia Chorizo Chan, RB - 8 / Dexter Banks II, QB & Mike Boss Jr., QB - 7)
10. 63 - Honolulu Hahalua HON (Top 3: Big Slammu, LB - 10 / Bean Delphine Jr., RB - 7 / Cobra Kai, RB - 5)
11. 59 - Austin Copperheads AUS (Top 3: Easton Cole, QB - 10 / Zoe Watts, RB & Jackie Daytona, QB & Spicy Ron, LB - 6)
12. 58 - Chicago Butchers CHI (Top 3: Juan Domine, LB - 7 / Lalu Muhammad Zohri, RB - 6 / Rose Jenkins, QB - 4)
13. 47 - New York Silverbacks NYS (Top 3: Malcolm Savage, QB - 13 / Blaine Falco, QB - 5 / Michaelangelo McTurtle, RB - 4)
14. 40 - Berlin Fire Salamanders BER (Top 3: BamBam McMullet, LB - 8 / Goat Tank, RB - 5 / Nick Kaepercolin, QB - 4)

It makes sense that all of the teams that started in Season 1 or 2 make up the top 8 with all of the later expansion teams in the bottom 6, although the gap between San Jose and Sarasota is smaller than you might expect for a 21 season headstart. I also find it interesting that Cape Town and Honolulu are the only teams without a QB in their top 3 POTW-getters. It definitely seems like the pre-sim-transfer era was dominated by quarterbacks while it's been much more even between RBs and QBs since S27.


Player of the Week Position Breakdown
1. QB - 424
2. LB - 359
3. RB - 237
4. S - 158
5. CB - 94
6. DE - 44
7. DT - 22
8. WR - 11

Somehow I have 5 more Defensive Player of the Week records than Offensive Player of the Week records, I have no idea how this happened.

QB makes up the majority of OPOTW awards, with RB essentially getting all of the rest with the exception of a handful of WRs. Props to William Lim (S29 W4) and Ttollem Mada (S42 W4), the only two WRs to receive a Player of the Week award after the sim transfer in S27. So we should think of OPOTW as a QB/RB award like MVP. Since the S27 sim transfer, the offensive awards have been much more evenly split between RB and QB with 165 QBs and 141 RBs winning POTW.

On the defensive side, LB makes up the majority with the rest more dispersed than on the offensive side but with the greatest concentration on safeties. If you only look after the sim transfer, however, it is a bit more lopsided, as LBs make up 195 of the post-S27 POTW awards vs. 51 CB, 46 S, and 19 DL. Despite being close to the same total amount of POTW awards as QBs, the distribution across individual linebackers is obviously much more distributed week-to-week and season-to-season which is why we see few LBs atop the overall career POTW leaderboard above.


Rookie Players of the Week
1. Mike Boss Jr., QB SAR (S26) - 4
2. Wolfie McDummy Jr., QB COL (S42) - 3
T-3. Melvin Murder-Moose, LB COL (S25) - 2
T-3. Willier Miller, QB SAR (S41) - 2
T-3. Jasper Fontaine, S PHI (S37) - 2
T-3. Acura Skyline, RB YKW (S22) - 2
T-3. Charlemagne Cortez, QB ARI (S27) - 2

* Note that this leaderboard only counts players who were designated as a rookie with an ( R ) tag in the sim, so it probably misses lots of very old players before the tag was introduced. The earliest rookie Player of the Week winner in my dataset is Mark Grau, RB COL in week 3 of Season 8, but I'm not sure if the ( R ) tag was extremely consistent since then.

Only 7 players have ever won multiple Player of the Week awards in their rookie season! Another 58 players have won a single Player of the Week award in their rookie season, with most of these coming in the wake of extremely large rookie classes like S22, S25, S36, and S41.

Although QB is the position to win the most Player of the Week awards as a rookie, other positions aren't that far behind:

1. QB - 21
2. LB - 17
3. S - 16
4. RB - 10
5. CB - 7
6. DE - 3
7. DT - 1 (it's Carter Goad for the 7 sack game)

As seen in the overall position data, QB and LB are once again the best positions to be for POTW awards even as rookies, although here safety has remained much more competitive after the sim transfer - LB and S have both received 6 rookie POTWs since S27.

RE: Fun Facts about ISFL Player of the Week Awards - UptownCord - 02-11-2024

Common Mike Boss W

RE: Fun Facts about ISFL Player of the Week Awards - DarknessRising - 02-11-2024

Do you have the data to extend to more players? Interested on my personal player ones, and the general who won WR Player of the weeks

RE: Fun Facts about ISFL Player of the Week Awards - .HoshinoIchika - 02-11-2024

Goad Mode can't be stopped :triumph:

RE: Fun Facts about ISFL Player of the Week Awards - infinitempg - 02-12-2024

wait wtf

RE: Fun Facts about ISFL Player of the Week Awards - slate - 02-12-2024

(02-11-2024, 10:15 PM)DarknessRising Wrote: Do you have the data to extend to more players? Interested on my personal player ones, and the general who won WR Player of the weeks

My fault for burying the link deep in the intro paragraphs:

FULL DATA AVAILABLE HERE