Dummy Grid 3.26.3

JMToWin is a high-stakes tournament champion (Thunderdome, Luxury Box, Game Changer, Wildcat, King of the Hill/Beach, Spy, etc.) who focuses on the DraftKings Main Slate

---

OWS Fam ::

This is not a complete list of all the good plays on the slate

This is, instead, a look at the player pool I’ll be fishing

---

The Grid ::

Bottom-Up Build

:: covered in the Angles Pod (it’s highly recommended that you listen to the breakdown of the roster in order to see the thinking behind it, and in order to understand what we’re talking about when we look at a “bottom-up build”)

Blue Chips

:: my “Tier 1” plays: the plays I feel confident leaning into across different types of builds; these players have a high ceiling and a low likelihood of price-considered failure

Build-Arounds

:: games, offenses, situations, or scenarios I’ll be looking to build around across my rosters

Building Blocks

:: unique player pairings that can be used as foundational building blocks for tournament rosters

Bonuses

:: players who don’t fit into the categories above — either Upside pieces who don’t have the floor to be Blue Chips (and are not being focused on within my game-focused builds) or players who may not have a strong shot at ceiling, but are worth keeping in mind from a “role” perspective

Beta

:: players who are not going to be “featured” on my tighter builds (i.e., one could show up on a tighter build, but they are not being prioritized as such), but who I will be mixing and matching across some portion of my MME builds

---

Bottom-Up Build

Bottom-Up Build
DK Salary Remaining :: $____K

Join The Bottom-Up Build Contest On DraftKings!

Buy-In:

Free

Rules:

Build with a salary cap of $44k or below!

Prizes:

1st Place = $100 paid out to the winner(!) (OR free Bink Machine access!)

<< Join Here >>

*must use an OWS avatar (found on your profile page) to be eligible to win

---

Blue Chips

Jahmyr Gibbs

In half of his last 12 home games, Jahmyr Gibbs has gone for 37 or more DraftKings points, and it’s not a difficult decision to list him as a Blue Chip this week.

The only concern I have in this spot is that Gibbs has averaged 28 touches per game so far, after averaging 18.8 last year. If the Lions control this game, do they lighten Gibbs’ workload a bit? This tilts me toward wanting to play a Jets pass catcher on my Gibbs rosters (essentially, a bet that the Jets are finding their footing on offense). But that’s not a hard and fast rule for me.

Realistically, it’s right to surface the concerns, but to not be too concerned about them. Gibbs is a Blue Chip play capable of burying you for not having played him. There are plenty of scenarios in which he hits for a solid score but doesn’t turn into a had-to-have-it play, and I think you can certainly justify building rosters without him this week. But I’ll be happy to have him on any build where I’m able to make him fit, and I’m also fine with prioritizing him at the top of a roster.

“Light Blue” Chips

---

Build-Arounds

---

Building Blocks

“Chiefs Cheat Code”

Kenneth Walker + Emmett Johnson

Story:

“Chiefs Smash”

Why It Works:

In the Chiefs’ first game of the season, a game in which they handled Denver, Emmett Johnson played 36% of snaps and had eight carries and two targets. In the Chiefs’ Week 2 game against the Colts, they were in a battle until the end, and Emmett Johnson played 18% of snaps and saw two targets with two carries. Where does the game against Miami land in our range of expectations for the Chiefs?

Especially early in the season, people can overstate how good or bad a team is. Coming into the year, people wondered if the Cardinals could win any games. People assumed the Raiders would be a dumpster fire. We could go down the list. Oftentimes, we come to realize that as long as a team is bought into what their coach is selling (and as long as the coach is competent), they typically have at least a shot to win any game they are in. But the Dolphins are genuinely a junior varsity football team. Two or three years from now, most of these players will not be starting on an NFL roster. That’s who the Chiefs are playing this week. Last week, Brock Purdy went 20 of 22 in this matchup, and the 49ers scored a touchdown on each of their first five possessions.

The Chiefs have Super Bowl aspirations, and through two weeks, Kenneth Walker has 26 and 30 touches. I personally expect Emmett Johnson to mix into this game a little bit more in the early going than he has the past two weeks, and I think that the fourth quarter will mostly be an Emmett Johnson quarter. Put it all together, and I have him penciled in for 9 to 12 carries and 2 to 4 targets, and I think he has a pretty good shot at scoring a touchdown this week.

Standing that up on its own, it makes Emmett Johnson an interesting large field tournament bet. But also for small field play, where floor matters, and you still need to get first place but against only, say, 100 people, or 200 people, or 500 people, I think a case can be made that Emmett Johnson + Kenneth Walker is a sharp way to build.

I touched on this in my journal, but in Week 1, Walker and Johnson scored 33.9 pre-touchdown DraftKings points, and in Week 2, they scored 32.3 pre-touchdown DraftKings points. If they keep that up and add two touchdowns this week (both things they have a good shot at doing), then at $11.8k in combined salary, they’ll be just about keeping you on a 200-point pace.

How It Works:

Strategically, another thing I like about this block in small field play is that if Walker fails at relatively high ownership, he’s probably not failing because the Chiefs failed, but is instead failing because Emmett Johnson is stealing a bit of the work, and one or even two of the touchdowns. By playing the block, you’ll get hurt alongside the other Walker rosters, but you’ll be one of the only ones benefiting from how everyone else got hurt.

And then if Walker hits, you’re there at high ownership, keeping pace with the field, and Johnson is a $4.4k player where you’re still probably getting 6 to 12 points, and where plenty of other rosters picking a player under $5.0k are getting a similar score. As tournament fields get bigger, it becomes sharper to split these two up. But in small field play, I think a very strong case can be made that playing these two together is a sharp way to build.

POTENTIAL DOWNSIDE:

The story plays out differently, and you don’t get first place — which is really all that matters.

---

Bink Machine

A look at some of the rules I’ll be applying in the Bink Machine this week.

JSN + Darnold

A story, in three screenshots.

Cascading projections ::

“What changes in Darnold’s projection if we say JSN scores 36?”

Stacks ::

“How often have JSN and Darnold combined to go for 4x their Week 3 salary?

Bink Machine:

“On 90% of JSN rosters, play Sam Darnold.”

Flipping through game logs in the Stacks tool, you’ll find that Darnold’s scores when JSN has scored 30+ have been 29.7, 17.7, 20.0, 31.6 (and there’s also a game in which Darnold hit 31.2 when JSN went for 25.0).

Because this is such a concentrated offense, you don’t think of “JSN hitting” meaning that “Darnold hits,” so I went hunting after Cascading Projections raised his projection so much. But there you have it: JSN hits, and there’s a pretty good chance Darnold hits for an elite score at his price tag; and when people are playing JSN, they’re not typically following that flow chart.

Because I’ve been focused on SE/3-max the last year and a half or so, I don’t use the Bink Machine to “build my 150 rosters,” but instead, I use it to “build examples of the rosters I want to be hand-building.”

If I were playing MME, I might have no Darnold on 50% of my JSN builds.

But if I’m hand-building, I want to consider Darnold on my JSN builds, and this rule helps me quickly see hundreds of rosters built around my player pool with Darnold forced onto JSN 90% of the time.

Bonuses

---

If Building For Single-Entry // Three-Entry Max

This is my narrowest pool, which means it’s the pool likeliest to change a bit as I move deeper into builds. If it changes throughout Saturday night, I’ll add an update in this space.

If I were building for single-entry // three-entry Max, my tightened-up player pool would be:

QB ::

Josh Allen || Brock Purdy || Justin Herbert || Bryce Young || Tyler Shough || Geno Smith

RB ::

---

A Wrap ::

I’ll see you at the top of the leaderboards this weekend!

-JM