Above The Field :: Week 8
Each week this NFL season, top MME player // Milly Maker winner SonicLibrarian will help you orient your GPP mind in Above The Field.
Week 8 :: Nightmare on Lombardi Avenue
John Wilkes Booth, James Earl Ray, John Wayne Gacy, Lee Harvey Oswald (allegedly), Mark David Chapman. Ever notice how these murderous psychopaths all have three names? WTF is that all about? Perhaps the police and media are trying to protect the unfortunate people who happen to share a first and last name with these cretins. I do know that I should have thought twice before rostering Marquez Valdez-Scandling last week.
MVS felt like such a great idea at the time. With so much chalk around that Green Bay/Houston game with one of the highest projected totals of the week, the hyphenated one looked really tempting at $4100 and ownership under 5%. I figured he could take advantage of single coverage due to all the attention being paid to Davante Adams, Robert Tonyan and Jamal Williams. Just get past the secondary once or twice and suddenly I have some really juicy leverage on the field. I analyzed matchups, tendencies and ownership but I failed to consider one important factor – Maybe this player just…sucks. Maybe MVS underperforming and being a complete afterthought in this offense was always a big, fat, humble slice in the proverbial pie of potential outcomes.
Either way, I shouldn’t have let my guard down and allowed Marquez Valdez-Scandling loose on his homicidal rampage through 27% of my MME Entries. I won’t be trusting him again anytime soon.
On the bright side, Juju Smith-Schuster is only $5400 this week and projecting for sub 3% ownership. What could possibly go wrong?
I might as well go down into the basement at midnight and see if I can fix that pesky lightbulb.
Happy Halloween, Folks. Don’t play bad players.
Millionaire Maker Chalk Attack
As referenced above, I kind of got caught with my hand in the cookie jar last week. I went under the field on most of the chalk and found some strategic spots to try and exploit those highly-owned plays. This is a decent strategy unless of course, the chalk smashes.
Oops.
The subject of our focus today is thewogshow, who did not have this problem. He (or she) just identified the week’s top plays and hammered that chalk into a wispy cloud of dust, reminiscent of Michael Jordan’s pregame ritual.
Thewogshow managed to make the money with 74 of his 150 lineups, including finishes of 37th, 47th and 159th.
Trimming his player pool down to a super-tight 49, “wog” had no choice but to be above the field on the majority of his plays. At Quarterback, he featured the consensus #1 player, Kyler Murray, in 48 lineups. A whopping 38 of those were naked, with no other Cardinals, although many captured the opponent’s potential upside with 35 DK Metcalf rosters and 15 Tyler Lockett. Somewhat unique, I suppose, to run so many Kyler lineups in this way…but there were very few instances of secondary stacks, contrarian pivots or game theory-oriented plays in general. But maybe that is the lesson we can draw from this week. Maybe some us have forgotten how and when to embrace players at high ownership. Sometimes we get carried away with doing things all “GTO” n shit, that we forget to step back and say “Maybe this week, the chalk is chalk for a reason. Let’s ride”.
A closer look at the rest of thehogshow’s allocations will only work to reinforce his style of play as almost all of his players that performed poorly were the low-owned ones.
I can tell you that I added a third name to Gabriel Freaking Davis’ moniker myself. Ugh.
I’m never one to trash another DFS player’s game and I’m certainly not going to here. Sure, my friends would call me a “chalk donkey” if these were my allocations but frankly, I could use a little bit more of thewogshow’s style in my game. I may need to check myself about becoming too enamored with fancy plays and make sure I have a solid floor in my rosters. Secondary stacks, positional leverage and all sorts of advanced lineup construction concepts are useless if you don’t friggin score points! As Jeff Goldblum uttered in Jurassic Park, “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”.
Having said all that, I can’t help but wonder if thewogshow could have jumped up the standings a bit more had he turned over a few rocks and discovered the Diontae Johnson’s (5.04%) and the D.J. Moore’s (4.5%) of the world.
Those of you that have taken my DFS Tournament Mastermind Training Course know that we usually choose to try and keep our collective ownership under 150% because the overwhelming majority of Millionaire Maker winning lineups have been under that number. In fact, most fall between 75 and 125. I often create a rule for my optimized lineups that keeps the ownership under that threshold and ensures that each lineup will have this:
Having success this week despite flying in the face of our rules, thewogshow clearly did not GAF.
He had the highest ownership percentages and the most duplicated lineups that I can remember seeing in a full NFL slate.
Somewhere in the grey area, lies a happy medium between my overly risky, contrarian approach and thehogshow’s tight pool of popular plays. Sometimes the chalk attacks and other times, it remains much more docile.
Okay fine people of the OWS community. That’ll do it for Week 8 of Above the Field.
Keep your head on a swivel and play it your way in Week 8. Good luck!
Sonic OUT!
Get Inside Of Sonic’s DFS Mind
An excellent, highly-recommended read!
Sonic’s DFS Q&A. This is awesome stuff if you’re looking to keep improving your DFS game!
