Dummy Grid 8.25
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
Full breakdown (of what this is, and what the thinking is behind these players) can (and should) be found in the Angles Pod (on YouTube, or on the One Week Season podcast feed).
Bottom-Up Build
DK Salary Remaining :: $6.3K
Lamar Jackson
Derrick Henry
D’Andre Swift
Rashod Bateman
Marvin Mims
Rome Odunze
Mark Andrews
Dalton Schultz
Colts
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
Ravens
There’s a lot I want to get to here, but let’s start with this ::
This week is full of uncertainty, but the highest-certainty bets I feel we can make this week are:
- Falcons doing well on offense (but with question marks as to what this means for fantasy production, at cost)
- Eagles doing well on offense (and someone from the Eagles’ trio of healthy stars in Saquon // Devonta // Goedert hitting for a nice-to-elite game)
- Colts scoring points (but with question marks as to what this means for fantasy production, at cost)
- Bengals throwing the ball (but with questions regarding how this shakes out in actual production)
- Ravens doing well on offense (with far fewer questions or caveats than we have in other spots)
In all three games that Lamar played start-to-finish this year, the Ravens scored 30+. After a slow start to last season through the first three games, the Ravens also scored 30+ in 11/14 to close out 2024 (with the games below 30 coming against the tough defenses of the Browns, Steelers, and Eagles). It will be a surprise if the Ravens fail to produce on offense here; and on a week with lots of uncertainty, that’s worth quite a bit.
Lamar Jackson has scored 26+ DK points in 50% of his regular season games since the start of last year, and Derrick Henry has scored 27.5+ in 40% of games that Lamar has started and finished since the start of last year. Again: one of the highest-certainty bets on this “full of uncertainty” slate is that the Ravens will score points, with Lamar and Henry being the likeliest beneficiaries. I’m genuinely playing around with the idea of using something like 80% Lamar, and of using Ravens on 100% of rosters.
Some additional numbers I want to hit on from the Journal this week ::
Obviously, if rostering Lamar, we’re hoping for more than 26 DK points; but given the shape of this week, 26+ might be a fine cutoff point to think about. With that in mind…
Lamar has gone for 26+ 10 times since the start of last year (half his full games).
In four of those games, Derrick Henry went for 27+ DK points (though Henry also posted quite a few absolute duds in such games; basically, Lamar + Henry is highly viable, but it can also go horribly wrong).
Zay Flowers topped 15 DK points in only two of those outings (with only one elite game, and with a whole pile of duds). Flowers can obviously hit alongside Lamar, but this seems likely to be a very popular stack this week, and it hasn’t typically been the best way to capture the upside of Lamar over the last couple years.
Mark Andrews has gone for 14.8 or more in four of these games (with three of those four being games of 18.8 or higher).
Isaiah Likely has gone for 16+ in two of these games (though of course, he has posted absolute duds in almost all the others).
Because of his touchdown-scoring ability (and the correlation between touchdowns and Lamar’s bigger games), Rashod Bateman has gone for 15.8+ in five of these games (including two of 22+).
Ideal structures for Lamar builds (starting from the most recent) would have been ::
Lamar naked (two touchdowns for Devontez Walker on two catches; one apiece for DeAndre Hopkins and Tylan Wallace; since none of those would be +EV guessing games outside the Milly Maker, the way to have played it, realistically, was Lamar naked)
Lamar + Henry + Flowers
Lamar + Bateman + Andrews
Lamar + Henry + Andrews
Lamar + Bateman (+ Justice Hill — but who would have done that?)
Lamar + Bateman + Andrews
Lamar + Henry + Bateman + Andrews
Lamar + Flowers + Bateman + Likely
Lamar + Henry
Lamar + Likely
Lamar + Bateman + Andrews showed up three times in Lamar’s last 20 games (15%), with Henry in the mix on one of those (a 41-31 game against the Bucs — i.e., if you’re overstacking like this, you want to bet on a shootout, with pieces from the Bears included).
Lamar + Henry included an additional piece in three of four.
In the pair of games in which it made sense to pair Flowers with Lamar, another piece from the Ravens should have been included as well (Henry once, Bateman and Likely another).
Lamar feels like one of the higher-confidence bets on the slate; and if I had to venture a guess, I would feel comfortable saying most of our competition will play him in sub-optimal ways.
How I’m Attacking The Week ::
A final note from my Journal before we get into the rest of the Grid:
Here’s a map to my current prescription for my builds this week ::
- Blend Eagles // Ravens offenses
- Include some Bears with Ravens, and have some Bears stacks as well
- Bet on Bijan and JT
- Next tier down :: bet on passing volume from Bengals
- Next tier down :: small swings on passing attacks of Saints // Texans
- Also, small to moderate swings on the Jets (if Tyrod under center)
- Breece (fine with Fields as well)
- Mason Taylor
- Wideouts???
- Also, small to moderate swings on the Jets (if Tyrod under center)
- Fill in around all this with ::
- Panthers pass catchers
- Broncos pass catchers
- Cade Otton (with other Bucs viable as well)
“Light Blue” Chips
Build-Arounds
Building Blocks
“Fly off the Bye”
Lamar Jackson + Rashod Bateman + Mark Andrews
Story:
“What has happened 25% of the time happens here”
Why It Works:
In 25% of Ravens games since the start of last season (25%!!!), Lamar + Bateman + Andrews would have kept you on a 200-point pace (with a 240-point pace in 15%!).
Because Lamar’s big games often come with heavy passing touchdowns, and because Bateman and Andrews are two of this team’s primary targets in the red zone, there is plenty of room to the upside here, on a stack that most people will completely overlook.
How It Works:
Due to the touchdown reliance of this stack, it can miss HARD when it misses, putting your roster in position where you’re highly likely to finish out of the money. That’s not great. But at the same time, when this stack hits, it hits in such a way that your path to first place becomes pretty wide-open; and since we play tourneys in order to target first-place finishes (rather than playing tourneys to cash), this is a pretty fair trade-off to make this week.
POTENTIAL DOWNSIDE:
The story plays out differently, and you don’t get first place — which is really all that matters.
“55.5%”
Bink Machine
A look at some of the rules I’ll be applying in the Bink Machine this week.
No High-Priced RBs
As I’ve mentioned this year, I’ve been using the Bink Machine for Single-Entry/3-Max this season, rather than using it for MME; and as such, I’ve been building far fewer rules, and have instead been running lots of roster sets with different inputs in order to shop for ideas, and in order to run the Sims and see what’s popping as my highest-ROI approaches. But one angle I want to make sure I have “options to shop through” this week is “rosters that do not include any of the high-priced running backs.” I don’t know that I’ll necessarily force myself to include such rosters in my SE/3-Max set this week, but I do know that one of the most unique ways to be different this week will be to simply avoid the three highest-priced running backs. In order to give myself some rosters I can shop through that lean into this build, the following rule says, “On at least 20% of all rosters, include no high-priced running backs” (‘On at least 20% of all rosters, include zero players from this pool’).
$6.60/Week:
Just a reminder :: the Bink Machine is an outrageously useful tool for single-entry/3-Max. We intentionally keep the price tag on the Bink Machine cheap (as far as I know, it’s cheaper than any other optimizer out there) in order for our SE/3-Max users to feel like they can justify the cost. If you typically play playoff DFS, you’re basically paying $6.60 per Main Slate with a $99 Bink Machine pass. If you use it for a week and don’t find it to be useful, reach out to support and we’ll refund your money. Get in there to try it out if you can.
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 ::
Lamar Jackson (probably with some Caleb Williams trail bets) || Jalen Hurts || Joe Flacco || possibly Bo Nix
RB ::
A Wrap ::
I’ll see you at the top of the leaderboards this weekend!
-JM
