Mike Johnson (MJohnson86) has racked up nearly $500,000 in DFS profit as an NFL tournament player with success in all styles of contests
The whole idea behind this piece of content is that it is unique. Specific content and strategies for the “non-main slate” contests are 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 who 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 fewer 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.
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.
Quarterback is always an important position, but that importance goes to another level on these small slates. There are two main reasons for this. First, on average, QBs obviously score the most points of any position and we can only start one of them. Second, as noted above, correlation is even more important as the slates get smaller and there are fewer scoring opportunities to go around. By choosing the right quarterback, you are also increasing the chances that you are right at two other positions. Again, the shorter slate condenses the scoring across all lineups, making each position more vital to separating and giving yourself a chance to win. This is why quarterback strategy has its own section:
