Week 3 wasn’t exactly the easiest week to predict QB performances. As a rule of thumb, any time both Eli Manning and Mark Sanchez end up as top 5 QBs, you know there must have been some crazy happenings. Add in 4 Tom Brady INTs (he had 4 all of last year) to go with performances that placed Michael Vick & Philip Rivers outside the top 20 QBs, and you have a recipe for some tough accuracy scores.

Fortunately for the experts, several of the other main positions (notably RB & TE) weren’t quite as unpredictable. Familiar names like McFadden, McCoy, Finley, Gronkowski, etc all appeared near the top of the leaderboard for their respective positions.

Which experts did the best job of predicting these outcomes? Let’s take a look at week 3’s top 10 accuracy standings (out of 67 experts). You can also view  the YTD leaderboard here.

Week 3 Leaderboard

 *See how all 67 experts ranked for the week

Notes:

• Kudos to Michael Beller (SI.com) for stepping up as the most accurate expert in week 3. Finishing #1 in a field of 67 requires an expert to nail his picks across multiple positions, and Beller did just that. Specifically, he finished in the top ten for 3 of the 4 positions that factor into our overall scoring: QB (#5), WR (#7), and TE (#2). For his QB rankings, Beller went against the grain by ranking Eli Manning (QB #9) and Matt Schaub (QB #5) the highest of all the experts we tracked. That proved to be a major boon as both players finished the week with top 5 fantasy numbers. Perhaps most impressively, Beller netted a PAY™ of 82.4% for TEs based, in part, off of his high rankings for several week 3 studs: Jermichael Finley (TE #1), Owen Daniels (TE #3) and Jimmy Graham (TE #5). That score effectively means following Beller’s advice would have netted owners 82% of all available TE fantasy points. Yes, that’s pretty good.

• The staff at FantasyFootballCafe landed in the top 5 primarily due to the strength of their RB & WR rankings (#4 for both). For their WR picks, they managed to rank 7 out of the top 10 players as well or better than the Expert Consensus. That includes Wes Welker (WR #12), which was important because it’s generally a good idea to be high on the guy who scores 35 fantasy points in one week. On the opposite end of things, it didn’t hurt FFCafe’s RB rating that they had little faith in several week 3 duds, such as James Starks (RB #27), Knowshon Moreno (RB #40) and Steven Jackson (NR).

• The crew at NFL.com is proving to be a major player in our accuracy competition. Lead by Dave Dameshek, the site nabbed 3 out of the top 10 spots in the standings this past week. While Dameshek may be best known for his comedic touch, he’s also showing that he knows a thing or two about fantasy football. His best pick from week 3 was slotting Fred Jackson (RB #9) higher than all but 1 other expert. Jackson rewarded that faith by having a monster performance as the week’s 3^rd best RB.  Not to be outdone, Dameshek’s colleague, Michael Fabiano, finished as a top 10 expert for the second week in a row. That hot streak was enough to vault Fabiano up to #6 overall in our YTD standings.

• One of the oddest week’s we can recall in our 2+ seasons tracking accuracy was turned in by WhatIfSports. Check out the level of feast or famine for their positional accuracy: QB (#67), RB (#6), WR (#5), TE (#66). That’s quite a spread! On the one hand, touting Tarvaris Jackson (QB #9), Kevin Kolb (QB #6) and Zach Miller (TE #3) represented big time gambles that backfired. However, WhatIfSports was able to go out on a limb and correctly spot several key performers including Ahmad Bradshaw (RB #9), Felix Jones (RB #12), LaDainian Tomlinson (RB #29), and Lance Moore (WR #19). Unfortunately, racking up a bunch of “big hits” doesn’t count for much if there are also a lot of “big misses”. We value consistency across the positions rated and that’s evident in the overall ranking (#55) WhatIfSports earned.

That wraps up this week’s accuracy report. To see how the entire field rated for the week, head over to the accuracy section of our site. You can view the results by position and we also have a YTD leaderboard that displays the overall standings.

If you’d like to get involved with your own predictions, be sure to check out this week’s Beat the Expert Contest vs. Brad Evans (Yahoo!). The contest is completely free with a $1,000 prize pool (courtesy of our sponsor, FanDuel). Good luck!