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?
To me it’s the Zack Moss/Tyreek Hill dynamic. Moss is projecting as the single best point-per-dollar play we’ve seen the entire season. Hill is projecting for the most raw points we’ve seen from a player all season. They’re both going to be massively owned – especially Moss – and the pricing dynamic between them (Tyreek is the most expensive WR we’ve seen this season, Moss is comically cheap for his role) means they will very often be paired together. How to handle this is one of the key decision points of the slate.
I’ll echo what Xandamere says, above, about this slate being particularly unique because of the Moss/Tyreek dynamic. There are also some unique components around the setup of the games (I’ve covered my thoughts on this in the Angles Pod — unfortunately, not available via video this week, due to some technical issues, but you can find it on the One Week Season podcast feed), but the Moss/Tyreek situation overshadows all. How we handle this situation will be critical in determining our success this week, which means that if you are playing these two together, you need to recognize how popular this pairing will be, and you need to think about how you are carving out a path to first place somewhere else on your roster. At the same time, you can also recognize that Moss being “comically cheap for his role” and “projecting as a great point-per-dollar play” doesn’t guarantee that he’s going to post a monster game in one of the toughest run game matchups available.
Here are the BACKFIELD DraftKings scores against Tennessee this year:
New Orleans: 7.7
Chargers: 8.1
Cleveland: 27.3
Cincinnati: 9.7
Indy: 40.9
Baltimore: 12.8
Atlanta: 16.0
Pittsburgh: 28.9
Tampa: 19.5
Jacksonville: 17.4
Carolina: 23.0
Looking through those scores, you get a sense of what the range of outcomes is here (and as noted this week: Moss had a 9-pointer himself with the lead role this year). Moss is likeliest to score 16 to 23 DK points and prove to be a steal, but even those scores won’t kill you if you fade him. He also has potential to go for 27+ and bury you for fading him. He also has potential to score only 8-10 and hurt 50% to 70% of the field.
I’ll have plenty of Moss this week, but I’ll also have plenty of rosters without him.
Where I have Moss, I’ll look for another way to get different.
Where I don’t have Moss, I’ll already be in position to soar past the field if he ends up on the lower end of his range.
The dynamics at play on this slate are unlike anything we have seen this season. If we boil down the slate into what truly matters here, there are four primary governing factors at play – the median game total is higher than it has been in the previous month (meaning we are likely to need higher raw point totals to win GPPs this week), Zack Moss (we have to consider a player expected to be on 50-70 percent of the rosters in play as a primary decision point), the Miami Dolphins (slate-leading Vegas implied team total, more than four points higher than any other team on the slate), and the 49ers-Eagles game (the game with the highest likelihood to develop into something you had to have on this slate). Decisions begin to become a little easier if you break down the slate in this fashion and single out the most important aspects.
The Zack Moss/Tyreek Hill situation has been covered pretty deeply already and is obviously critical to this slate. Taking that a step further, the unique thing about this slate is how uncomfortable basically everything else feels. There aren’t many standout spots this week and the couple that there are have clear issues. San Francisco and Philadelphia is a high profile matchup, but those are good defenses and all the players are pretty expensive. The Texans passing game is now priced up and facing a Denver defense that is far more susceptible to the run. The Lions have a good matchup but have struggled a bit recently and there are a lot of questions around whether the Saints can keep pace. You have four games with very questionable quarterback play on one or both sides that threatens to torpedo game environments and bring down all the players around them::
All of those “uncomfortable” spots only raise the comfort of the standout plays in Moss and Hill, creating a unique situation where there will be an overwhelming amount of rosters built similarly with those two players but there’s a pretty good chance those rosters are, at the very least, in decent shape. The fact that this is also the last week with a lot of teams on bye, and therefore only 10 games on the main slate, is another factor that really condenses things in a certain direction.
Last week the Bills and Eagles game was hyped up as the game of the week and had huge expectations. It did not disappoint. This week we have four games on the slate with totals greater than 45 but lower than 50::
After seeing how that game separated and was the turning point for the slate, we have to ask ourselves if any of these games this week have that same potential and if so, which one?
