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.
The NFL season goes through cycles. Early in the season, we don’t know as much as we think about teams and we are learning on a consistent basis. As the season goes on, teams show us who they are and who they are trying to be. For a large part of the season, we can have a pretty high degree of confidence in what teams will try to do on a weekly basis and, generally speaking, how they match up. Then we get to the end of the season and it seems like every team is moving in a different direction. Some teams are eliminated, many teams are dealing with coaching changes and/or large scale injuries, quarterbacks change, weather changes…..there’s just a lot going on. All of that change can create a good deal of chaos and uncertainty. While uncertainty provides opportunities for us to find an edge, there is also an incredible amount of value in finding spots that do provide us with certainty.
For Week 17, there appears to be two spots where there should be a strong degree of certainty on a team having a very strong game. Those two spots are the Eagles and 49ers, two of the top offenses in the league facing the two worst defenses in the league. To truly separate ourselves in DFS tournaments, we will have to embrace some uncertainty in other spots (we will get to that later). However, to be in the hunt we are probably going to need to get these two spots right as well.
How are you seeing those spots and which players from those teams are standing out to you? If you are looking at stacking either or both of these teams, will you have any interest in their opponents?
This question does a great job laying out some of the core components we talk a lot about in Winner Circle: you often need to take some swings on “uncertainty” in order to complete a roster in such a way that you are both maximizing ceiling and maximizing your chances of landing on a first-place finish if the pieces on your roster hit, but if you load up with too much uncertainty, you give yourself a set of dots that are difficult for the math to connect. Ideally, your rosters (especially your tighter builds) will have a core of higher-certainty plays, and you can build forward from there. Especially if you are building multiple rosters and are mixing and matching these “higher-certainty plays” across all your builds, you’ll be well ahead of the field on ALL your rosters on the weeks when your high-certainty pieces hit.
I see the 49ers offense and the Eagles offense as being the highest-certainty spots on the slate from a “team scoring” perspective, but I also see these teams as being in different categories from one another. There have been only three weeks all season in which a core piece from the 49ers has not gone for 26.9 or more DK points (and in two of those games, Deebo Samuel was sidelined), and this team is now playing the Commanders. It’s extremely likely that we see a score of 26.9 or higher from one of the core four on this team. The Eagles, on the other hand, have produced only five games of 26.9 or more DK points all year (the 49ers have 13 such games in all; if necessary, read those numbers again and notice the disparity). This is due in large part to the fact that, as we know, “upside in fantasy is heavily dependent on touchdowns,” and Jalen Hurts has vultured 15(!!!) rushing touchdowns on the season, effectively taking 90 DK points away from his teammates. I like the Eagles plenty this week, but I don’t see them in the same “source of certainty” bucket as the 49ers.
On the other hand, the Rams have produced 11 games of 26.9 or more DK points among THREE players (two of whom missed chunks of the season), which means they have been even more reliably productive in a DFS sense than the 49ers on a per-player basis — which serves as a reminder that strong, concentrated offenses can provide even more value than “offenses that are even better, but that don’t have the same concentration of production and scoring.” Similarly — as explored in my Player Grid this week — C.J. Stroud has produced a WR score of 26.4 or better in eight of his last 11 healthy games (with the only exceptions being that weird, three-game stretch in the middle of the season when he was not playing up to his normal level), which gives us something in the range of 85% to 90% certainty that a Texans WR will produce a high-end game in a matchup against the Titans’ secondary…with only two guys for us to really choose between (Nico and Brown).
I bring these other two spots into the discussion to highlight the nuanced view we want to always bring to the table when hunting for “certainty.” It’s not just about “which teams are going to perform well?” It’s also about “what’s under the hood with each of these teams?”
The highest “sources of certainty” on this slate, as far as I’m seeing things, are the 49ers, the Rams, and the Texans wideouts. The Eagles are right behind that.
The 49ers and Eagles are two spots we definitely have to think about for our rosters this week because, as Mike notes, these are two of the top offenses in the league and both are facing bottom-tier defenses. Points will be scored. The question is if points will be scored in such a way that generates tourney-worthy fantasy scores. It’s important to recognize that there are paths to failure that have nothing to do with a team not scoring real points – because those points can be distributed in such a way that no player actually has a good game for their salary (and these two teams are full of expensive players). I’ll be on these teams, of course…but I don’t think it’s a spot where you MUST play a 49er and an Eagle on every single roster, because at their prices it’s entirely plausible that none of them put up must-have games. It’s just a very, very good spot.
I don’t think we need to force bringbacks in either spot. We can certainly use them, but I don’t think it’s a must – both the Eagles and the 49ers are perfectly capable of generating big scores without their opponents pushing doing so. The way I tend to play these situations when using an optimizer is a rule that says something like “in a roster that has Jalen Hurts, boost all Cardinals skill position players by 10%” – this encourages some amount of correlation without forcing it on every roster.
Yup, those are two of the three (four?) primary points of emphasis that I have identified on this slate. It is highly likely that someone from the 49ers and Eagles (and Rams) puts up an elite GPP score this week. From an ownership perspective, the field is expressing a high degree of certainty that those players WILL be Jalen Hurts and Christian McCaffrey, but any one of Deebo Samuel (my favorite leverage play from the 49ers), George Kittle, or Brandon Aiyuk could be that guy for San Francisco and any one of D’Andre Swift (my favorite leverage play from the Eagles), A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, or Dallas Goedert could be that guy for Philadelphia this week.
Similarly, the field is expressing a high degree of confidence that the player that WILL succeed for the Rams is Kyren Williams, but Puka Nacua and Cooper Kupp are each equally as likely to return an elite GPP score this week.
I’ll be relatively surprised if the 49ers don’t score five touchdowns in this spot. Considering the way they use their skill players, if that holds true, it would mean that it’s extremely likely that Christian McCaffrey scores at least two touchdowns and/or Brock Purdy throws at least three – making it optimal to have at least one of them in your lineup and putting just about any combination of 49ers players as viable DFS options. They are a virtual lock for 400+ yards of offense and that combined with the touchdowns makes them an absolute must-play on this week’s slate.
The Eagles are a bit of a different animal, as Jalen Hurts can suck up the touchdowns in a way that doesn’t necessarily benefit the rest of the crew and their drives tend to eat up a lot of clock, resulting in less opportunities for skill players to rack up points and reach bonuses. That being said, Devonta Smith and AJ Brown are likely to go very low-owned and it wouldn’t be shocking for one of them to go over 100 yards and score a touchdown. D’Andre Swift is also one of my favorite RBs on the slate, as I can see a game script where he finally gets in the end zone and they reward him for being the “good soldier” when they give Hurts all those TDs. The Eagles defense also makes a ton of sense playing at home against an offense that lacks talent at the wide receiver position, which is usually where teams are able to exploit them.
This week seems to be a “barbell week” at the quarterback position, with most people likely to spend way up or spend way down. There are a whopping eight QB’s on the slate with salaries of $7,000 or higher and all are in good to great spots::
On the other end of things, there are four quarterbacks with salaries below $5,000 that all have at least decent spots and could make some sense and draw a bit of ownership, while opening up your salary for the rest of your roster::
This is a 13-game slate, meaning there are 26 total starting quarterbacks. 12 of those 26 fit into one side or the other of the “barbell”, but that leaves 14 as our “middle class” of the position. Is there anyone in that middle class that sticks out to you as a potential option or will you be sticking to the pricing extremes at the quarterback position?
