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.
A weekly staple of The Oracle, what makes this slate particularly unique?
My answer to this question will move a bit outside the realm of “what the NFL slate provides for us in terms of DFS” and into the realm of “what the DFS field is providing for us on this slate in terms of DFS.”
“What makes this slate unique?” — well, the fact that I’m tilting my answer in the direction laid out above is exactly what makes this slate unique. In a nutshell: “This is shaping up as a slate that compels me to highlight what the DFS field is providing for us on this slate.”
If you listened to the Angles Pod this week, you heard me dive into this — namely, “The plays that stand out to me on this slate as the best plays are also, generally speaking, shaping up to be low-owned plays” — but that was recorded on Friday morning, using Friday morning ownership projections. Friday morning ownership projections will always be less accurate than deeper-into-the-week projections, and especially on a week like this — when content tends to come in late across the industry — it’s fair to assume that Friday morning projections are largely algorithm-driven, and are thus less accurate than normal.
But now, it’s Saturday evening, and projections are showing roughly the same thing — to a point where I hit up Mike, Hilow, and Xandamere in our group text to see what they were thinking here. “The field can’t really be seeing things THIS differently than the way we’re seeing things, right?”
All three guys pointed out a handful of reasons why ownership projections are shaking out the way they’re shaking out, and Xandamere in particular — who has a lot of sharp methodologies for jiggering with algo-driven projections to get something that more fully captures how people are truly likely to build — had some sharp insights on why projections currently look the way they look.
I’ll still enter the weekend assuming that there’s no way “My favorite plays” can be quite as under-owned as they’re showing (to be clear: I’m not just talking about OWS projections; projections across the industry reflect the same thing you see in ours), and that, instead, I’ll be getting “my favorite plays” at merely “lower than it should be” ownership, rather than at “egregiously low ownership.” But the point still stands that this looks like a week — if you’re seeing the slate the way I’m seeing it, and the way most of the rest of the OWS team is seeing it — when simply playing “favorite plays” can double as a way to “be unique and different.”
If we ran into setups such as this 100 times, there would — obviously — be times when “our favorite plays” would nevertheless fail. But over that same sample size, we would make more money than we would with just about any other setup you could think of.
What makes this slate unique? For me, it’s the fact that I can play my favorite plays, and be “different” simply by doing that.
This is the week of close spreads. We have the Chiefs at the Raiders favored by 8.5, but outside of that game, every other game on this slate has a spread of just 3.5 or fewer points. There are a lot of games that could very viably turn into back and forth shootouts, which is just all kinds of fun to build for. I’ll be going for more game stacks than normal (i.e. not so much on the “stacks of high-scoring teams with no bringback” approach I’ve been doing most of the last few weeks).
The best way to describe this slate is to use the word “chaos.” It’s chaotic in the sense that everyone has had less time to dedicate to main slate preparation, with the holidays upon us, people traveling for Thanksgiving, the Thanksgiving slate soaking up attention, and now the addition of Black Friday football adding yet another slate to the week. That has led to some questionable stances by the field this week, which we broke down in depth on The Slate podcast.
I see the field struggling with three primary points of emphasis this week – failure to accurately identify the top expected game environment on the slate (BUF-PHI), failure to identify the top on-paper running back plays, and failure to identify the “projectable value” pieces that carry upside. That is leading to more balanced builds as the prevailing roster construction strategy on the slate and is reducing the ownership expectations for players priced at the extremes in salary.
For me, the unique things about this slate are the lack of value and the situations at the RB and TE positions. Running back doesn’t have any cheap guys with bankable workloads and also doesn’t have the top end guys on the slate this week. It’s all bunched up in a small range, so Jonathan Taylor is popping in projections in a good game environment with his role and talent. And again, there are no real cheap spots at the position so every lineup is going to use like $13k+ on RB. Same at TE……no solid cheap options, so $4,200 to $5,000 is going to be what over half the lineups spend at the position. All that salary at those 3 spots makes it super hard to fit the studs from PHI/BUF/KC, creating a situation where the clear top team scoring environments are going relatively underowned. That’s a really rare and unique opportunity if we can find ways to play those spots, as usually those top projected teams are where most of the field funnels to.
We have four games on this week’s slate with an over/under of less than 37 points::
Considering there are only ten games on the slate, we are talking about 40% of the overall slate being extremely ugly projected game environments. Do you see any chance of any of these games surprising in a competitive and somewhat high-scoring affair? If so, which one(s)?
