Afternoon-Only 4.25

Mike Johnson (MJohnson86) has racked up nearly $500,000 in DFS profit as an NFL tournament player with success in all styles of contests

Afternoon Only Strategy Ideas and Things To Consider:

• Finding An Edge
  • The whole idea behind this piece of content is that it is unique. Specific content and strategies for the “non-main slate” contests is very rare in the DFS industry, and most players who enter them are casual players or doing so on a whim after their main slate entries have had things go wrong and they want something to root for or to chase their losses during the late games. Edges are getting harder and harder to find in DFS as information gets better, projections get sharper, and the field gets more experienced. These smaller slates present a clear opportunity for an advantage for those that focus on them, as most players will just take their thoughts from the main slate and approach these lineups the same way – without considering how much having seven to nine less games (depending on the week) changes the strategy. The biggest win of my career came on an “Afternoon Only” slate in January of 2021 and I once again posted the highest score of the “Afternoon Only” slate in Week 15 of 2024, while being in contention late into the slate several times each season. I hope to share some of my insights on the format to help you attack this niche corner of NFL DFS, and have OWS flags littering the leaderboards on this awesome slate.
• Ownership Strategy:
  • Ownership will be higher for pretty much every player on “short slates,” just because there are fewer players to choose from. This will be especially true for “chalky” players from the main slate.
  • This means getting these players right is even more vital than on a main slate. There are less alternatives to choose from so if they have a big game and you aren’t on them it is much harder to find other ways to make up those points.
  • This also means it is easier for lower owned players to pay off, as there are fewer players at their position that they need to have “fail” for them to be worth the risk.
  • Correlation is even more important than on the main slate because the useful fantasy games that pay off for the slate are likely to be clumped up from the same games. I always make lineups with a game stack (QB + at least one pass catcher + at least one opponent) and then one or two “mini-correlations” from other games.

Overview::

This week’s afternoon slate features the four games with the highest totals on the slate. We have our usual strategy angles involved on this fun four game slate, but also should consider the following which I mentioned in one of my Oracle answers::

The afternoon slate shapes up as a great one and adds layers of dynamics. So much focus is always put on “ownership” of individual players, with analysis of the “chalk” and trying to find ways to be different. But we know that chalk is often chalk for a reason and also that across any set of games we often have a certain amount of fantasy points that can and will be scored. There are a lot of really good plays on this slate, but frankly there don’t seem to be a lot of spots where players are likely to put up outlandish scores that “put the slate out of reach” by not having them. What these two dynamics combine to form is the ability for us to build unique rosters simply through roster construction from looking at the two sets of games as separate player pools. Making a roster composed entirely of players from the early games would give you a level of uniqueness because it is so hard psychologically to make a roster and have no one from those last four games that project so well. Likewise, the late games have the highest game totals on the slate and you could make a lineup of players just from those four games with an extremely high ceiling as well. Considering the fact that the early slate of games has so many of the highest projected ownership players (the top three QBs, four of the top six RBs, wide receiver four through eleven, and the top eight defenses), if you simply made a lineup from the Afternoon Only set of players you would naturally be very unique despite the fact that you are playing all players from the highest projected games.

TL;DR – Make lineups from this slate and put them in the Main Slate contests.