The Greatest “Cheat Sheet” In DFS
Each week in The Oracle, OWS team members will take on the key strategy questions from that week’s slate :: sharing their thoughts on how they plan to approach these critical elements from a roster-construction, game theory, and leverage perspective.
Bringing back a weekly staple of The Oracle, what makes this slate particularly unique?
The clear “best plays” on this slate, for the most part, have wider ranges of outcomes and fewer paths to “had to have it” scores than a week like last week. And many of the plays in the second tier, below the clear “best plays,” don’t have much separating one from another on-paper. In the Angles Podcast, I went in-depth on this topic, and on how I’m handling it myself, but the short of it is twofold:
Firstly, I want to get out of my old “one lineup on the week” mindset that would require me to take a stand on “who the best play is” out of the clumped-up bunches. If I can’t find anything that clearly separates one play from another in a particular tier, I need to adjust my play accordingly.
Secondly, I want to look for the spots where the clumped-up plays aren’t all that likely to produce a slate-winner, and I want to then see if I can hunt for higher-volatility plays that have enough ceiling to jump my rosters over those clumped-up plays.
Obviously, the Chargers and Vikings game has broad opportunity to be an exception to the idea of there not being as many clear pathways to “had to have it” scores, and that game is another unique component on this week. But away from that game, there are still many decisions to be made, and I’ll be making some of those decisions by simply “not forcing myself to make them” — instead leaning into the uncertainty I’m seeing and finding the edges that are available through that approach.
It projects to be relatively high-scoring, for one….despite losing an extra game to Monday, this week we have three games with totals at 48+ and just two with totals under 40. Lots of DFS goodness to sort through.
We also have a massive pile of running back value (if you extend “value” up to the mid-range of, say, $6k), with something like 9 or 10 running backs at $6k or less that I think can be considered firmly in play this week.
The combination of these two things means that we can expect ownership, especially at running back, to be spread out. There will be plenty of popular plays, of course, but I don’t think we’re going to see anything like one 30-40% owned mega chalk guy (as we normally would with a guy like Kelley or Ford this week on most slates).
The general composition of the slate is unlike anything we’ve seen this season – we have a game with the highest game total of the year, we’ve got a plethora of teams carrying a Vegas implied team total approaching (or surpassing) four touchdowns (Ravens – 26, Jaguars – 26.25, Chargers – 26.5, Dolphins – 27.25, Vikings – 27.5, Cowboys – 27.75, and Chiefs – 30.25), and we’ve got injuries starting to pile up in some spots that could condense the offense even further. When we look at this slate through that lens, we can begin to reason that the score ultimately needed to ship GPPs this week might be higher than we have seen up to this point in the season, and we need to be building rosters accordingly.
For me, there are two things about this week that stand out to make it “unique”. Both things have more to do with how the season has played out so far than they do about specifics with this week. The first thing is how last week’s main slate worked out with none of the “premium” players popping off for huge scores and the tight end and quarterback positions having relatively flat scoring. The second thing that stands out to me is how we have one game that has a much higher total than the rest of the games on the slate and we’ve had the same situation each of the first two weeks with very different results each week. For that second part, you can refer to question 3 to hear how each of us views that spot and adjusts to that dynamic. For the first part, it is important to remember that DFS is largely a game of psychology. The optimal way to play last week was a balanced lineup. Everyone who paid up for the highest priced players at tight end, quarterback, and wide receiver got burned for the most part. Maybe “burned” is extreme, but with none of those top guys putting up 35-40 points and a lot of guys in the mid range scoring 20 to 30 points it made balanced builds clearly the path to first. It will be interesting to see the field’s reaction to this and if there is an edge to be gained from finding unique ways to play those high end guys.
Through 2 weeks we have some teams off to hot starts and some teams who have fallen flat on their faces. It doesn’t take long in the NFL for the honeymoon phase to end. When coaches start to get desperate, long-term concerns can get thrown out the window which can matter for us in fantasy as some players may get a spike in usage.
With that in mind, which coaches do you think are on or close to the hot seat and what, if any, changes in player usage will you be looking for and/or trying to be ahead of in the coming weeks?
