Above The Field. 17.21.

First of all, big congrats to our very own Papy324, who finished 6th in DraftKings’ Millionaire Maker and 2nd in the Flea Flicker (amongst other things, I’m sure!). It must be an awesome feeling to back up his own words in One Week Season’s NFL Edge write-ups with a lineup that rockets up the leaderboards. Hell yeah, man. 

Here’s his amazing roster:

The Joe Burrow, Tee Higgins stack with Mark Andrews coming back was a must this week. I also loved the low-owned, same-game, RB combination of Devin Singletary and Damien Harris. Something tells me that our pal, Hilow is particularly fond of this play. OWS has been crushing as the year comes to a close. Papy represented us well!

This week I’m going to examine the rosters of a DFS player who was successful using an approach that may or may not differ from yours and once again illustrate a different way to the same place, with multiple lineups sweating the top of the tournament. 

billsfan777 used a tight player pool of 51 and managed to land cash a whopping 145 of his 150 rosters. How the eff did he manage that?

Ok then, that certainly explains that. How sick must billsfan777 feel? He literally locked a player that threw for 525 yards and four touchdowns, and he couldn’t get a lineup past 51st place. They placed 18 lineups in the top 1,000, but it was a lack of a particular Ravens bring-back that proved costly.  

Only five rosters with Mark Andrews, and sadly three of those featured James Robinson and his 1st quarter Achilles injury. 

There was no thought of limiting cumulative ownership by billsfan777. In fact, not a single lineup landed below the 125% threshold. Their totals ranged from 130.6% all the way up to the chalkiest at 204.7%. They had one lineup that was duplicated 11 times and another six times. If you like the chalk…overweight the damn chalk! 

In terms of stacking, billsfan777 opted for a skinny stack of QB/WR-only in 105 of the 150 lineups (70%). The five Mark Andrews lineups provided the only semblance of a bring-back, as there was not a Marquise Brown nor a Rashad Bateman to be found. 

At the running back position, billsfan777’s tight pool proved to be a double-edged sword. 

The uber-aggressive stance on Justin Jackson certainly paid off, while the 45.33% James Robinson exposure proved costly due to injury-induced bad luck. The 72% Ronald Jones was actually just as costly on a high-scoring week like this one. 16.1 points from the running back position looks “fine” but ultimately was a tournament death knell from an opportunity cost standpoint. Using a RB slot on a player that only managed to 3x his salary thwarted the possibility of landing on a Joe Mixon (4.56x), Damien Harris (5.59x), or Rex Burkhead (7.09x). 

Obviously, this is all based on hindsight (essentially the premise of this article), but perhaps if taking the aggressive stance at QB, it would have been prudent to spread the RB allocations a little. Rostering chalk RB-only left these awesome Joe Burrow/Tee Higgins stacks vulnerable to being leveraged by similar lineups that incorporated some lower-owned elements. 

A similar issue occurred at WR with, of all people, Cooper Kupp. His 24.3 points provided a nice floor, but for tournaments, it only amounted to 2.67x, so rostering Kupp put a bit of pressure on lineups to find ceilings in some much cheaper places. This week, guys like Burkhead and Isaiah McKenzie provided this. It is just tough to land these cheaper guys who had massive days into the same roster. 

Here are billsfan777 WR allocations: 

My hindsight-driven observations should in no way subtract from the awesomeness of billsfan777’s play in Week 16. Ballsy as hell and super profitable. They “only” managed to 3x their investment in this particular tournament but also submitted another 450 entries and took down the Wildcat, Three Point Stance, and several others en route to a massive $471,169.06 in winnings on the week. The winning lineup in these tournaments was somehow not entered into the Milly and would have finished in 3rd place for an additional 40K. Holy shit. Have yourself a day, billsfan777! Well. Fucking. Done. 

The Buffalo Bills also managed to bitch slap my Patriots this week so let me sincerely say to you and all Bills fans…

Up yours. 

Were you ballsy enough in Week 16? Did you take a real stand on the players you felt best about? Did you mix in enough low-owned plays with your chalk? 

I had a decent sweat in the Milly this week. I got as high as 17th before running out of steam when Michael carter failed to convert on his final five goal-line touches. But I don’t feel like I played as well as I could have. In my Player Pool article, I preached about time allocation and making sure to take a step back and look at the slate holistically. Sadly, my takeaway from this week was that I simply did not take my own advice. I ran out of time and didn’t get my allocations exactly where I wanted them. This is why we review. This is how we improve. Let’s put it all together for a glorious Week 17. 

See you…you know where.

LFG!