If you were paying attention, there were some important takeaways from Week 1. For the sake of succinctness, I will harp on one, discuss another, and mention a third. How can one harp and be succinct at the same time? I just don’t know, but I’ll try my best.

1)     The favorites swept.

There won’t be very many upsets this season, at least not until the tournament. This is the norm every year though. Dirty Mike and Los Matadores have both been involved in upsets the past couple of seasons. Two years ago, Dirty Mike resembled Buster Douglas when they shocked Los Luchadores – defending champs – at GOTW. And like Buster Douglas, they faded just as fast.

And last year:

During Rivalry Week (week 11) Sacred Sword beat Slowride, Chalmersiz beat Goats, Love Garden beat Das Boot, Corksuckers beat Free State, Brew Ballers beat the Rockets, Toe Pokes beat West Coast, Gang Green beat Asteroid Head, Screamers beat Shaolin, Ghosts beat Balls Deep, and Los Mats beat Hurtz.

These were all lower seeded teams winning against higher seeded foes. All good games, not upsets though. Some of the lower seeds were possibly even favored before the games were played.

What about unexpected outcomes between teams in pool play? Is Das Boot over Pita Pit an upset? Hurtz over Wildman?

Although the outcomes may have been a surprise, I don’t think games between teams in the same pool can be considered upsets. And some kickball pundits probably did predict DB or Hurtz would win, though I’m not sure whom.

Looking at lower seeds beating higher seeds in division play – Brew Ballers beat Liberty Hall in 7-4 in week 3, Liberty Hall beat Los Mat 14-9 in week 4, Dirty Mike beat Slowride 11-10 in week 5, Red Lyon beat the Goats 8-6 in week 6. Also, there was the vacated win by Los Mat over Das Boot in week 1.

The only true upsets (lower seeds winning and the outcome surprised me) were Liberty over Los Mats and to a lesser degree Dirty Mike over Slowride.

Will there be more than two upsets in the regular season this year? Will they involve Dirty Mike and Los Mats? Will I stop asking rhetorical questions? (No. No. Yes!)

There are at least two teams in each division that could pull off at least one: Corksuckers and Rockets in Nation, Brew Ballers and Dirty Mike in Brown, Liberty Hall and Ghosts in Burroughs, Channel 6 and Bullet Proof Tigers in Hughes.

2)     Scoring first is important.

I put the line scores below to show why. Nineteen teams scored in the first inning, which is crazy. I will be keeping an eye on this trend. I expect this percentage to drop a bit during pool play.

Teams that scored in the first inning were 14-5.

Sixteen of those teams scored multiple runs in the first inning. Teams that scored multiple runs in the first inning were 14-2.

Teams that scored first in the game were 12-4.

3)      Game of the Weeks are going to be a little more exciting this year. The first one was a good one (full disclosure, I wasn’t there) with Reign of Terror making a comeback after the Toe Pokes strong start. The rest of the GOTWs look evenly matched as well, and to me that is the most important thing because blowouts are boring.

The games for this week are going to be difficult to predict. The first week is a good indicator of how teams will perform for the rest of the season, but a few of those games were closer than I expected. So I don’t know if I over or under shooting the mark on some of these – I’m looking at you, Langston Hughes.