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
Merry Christmas!!!
We have a unique week (of course).
The Angles Email (in your inbox) gives you a breakdown of what to expect from a content // schedule standpoint this week.
As far as things relate to me :: my likeliest plan is to go to bed early on Christmas night and start my work day a bit earlier than normal on Friday (though I may get a head start on Thursday night), and to then set aside basically the entire day on Friday to work on the slate. I’ll expect my Player Grid to go out later than normal that night (probably closer to my bedtime on the West Coast), so stay tuned in the Journal throughout that day as my thoughts develop. I’ll have preliminary thoughts in morning podcasts, and I’ll flesh out my thoughts throughout the day before wrapping the Player Grid that night. I then have Saturday set aside for working on the slate and developing deeper thoughts in my Journal as well.
Before we get there, however, I’ll have a handful of early thoughts rolling out today.
Lock in with family — and we’ll be ready for the weekend’s DFS slate when the time comes.
As we get deeper into the season, things become less predictable. We saw that last week in spots like Chiefs // Titans, Bengals // Dolphins, and Falcons // Cardinals (not to mention some spots where at least one team had something to play for — such as Raiders // Texans and Bills // Browns). As we slide farther from confidence // predictability, we should be willing to embrace more variance, and to give a little less trust to our ability to “push all the right buttons” in smaller-field contests. Said differently: our high-confidence rosters // players // core // etc. are going to be a little bit lower-confidence than they might have been in, say, Weeks 6-14, which means that at each level of play, we should be willing to be slightly more variance-embracing than we normally would be.
I was thinking about this on Sunday when the Cardinals and my high-confidence Chiefs pass catcher pairings were floundering (with the latter, of course, hurt by Minshew’s early exit), and it came to mind again just now when opening the slate and seeing (are you kidding!?) Cardinals // Bengals. 53.5 is the Over/Under. That seems low.
And then, of course, last week leaves us wondering…will it actually prove to be low? It should be. If this were Week 14 or so, we would feel very confident building that way. But this deep into the season, we have to at least acknowledge that things get less and less easy to predict. (This isn’t a note on that particular game, by the way. That game just triggered this thought trail.)
Take your high-confidence decisions this week, and then knock your confidence level down about 10% to 15%. If you’re thinking this way, you’ll have a better shot at landing on that perfect blend we might end up needing this week.
Salary doesn’t seem to be a major issue this week.
At quarterback, we have Burrow and possibly Trevor Lawrence over $6k with “slate out of reach” potential (we also have Josh Allen and Hurts taking each other on, if you want to bet on that one playing out a certain way), and then we have Brissett against the Bengals at $5.7k, we have Shough against Tennessee at $5.2k, we have Cam Ward (14+ in four of six, including games of 18.0 and 23.9) at $4.5k. And while it certainly won’t feel good to pull the trigger, we also have Geno Smith against the Giants at only $4.4k (if we remove his two games against Denver, Geno has gone for 13+ in five straight, including a game of 27.3 to go with a 26.1 from earlier in the year).
At running back, we have Achane at $8.5k bringing a tremendous floor, but having scored over 26.2 only two times all season (i.e., are you really terrified that he’s going to bury you for not having played him?), and we have the high ceiling and the low floor on James Cook at $8k. Outside of this, we aren’t afraid of fading much at the top, which brings us down to Ashton Jeanty (averaging 0.3 fewer points per game than $7.6k Saquon) at $6.1k, Rhamondre Stevenson (likely without TreVeyon Henderson) at $5.9k, Kenneth Gainwell (16+ in five of six; 18+ in four of six) still down at $5.6k, Tony Pollard (suddenly the workhorse again; recent games of 13.2 // 21.2 // 31.1) at $5.5k, and Tyrone Tracy (18+ touches in four of five; 16+ DK points in three of five) at $5.4k.
Tight end always provides us with quality ways to save salary, and DST doesn’t have a standout unit at the top that makes us feel like we have to pay up.
The highest confidence at wide receiver is JSN and Ja’Marr Chase above $8k — but we can build rosters with both of those guys if we want to go that way. The rest of wide receiver feels more dart-throwy; but we’re used to that after the wide receiver season we’ve had.
None of this is a prescription on how to build. Instead, it’s macro thoughts illustrating all the different ways we can go about building a roster this week that doesn’t run into major salary road blocks, and/or that allows us to get up to the couple of higher-priced guys we’re most interested in playing.
Unless you’re building around a story in which a particular game environment goes crazy (and this specific bet influences your use of salary across a chunk of your builds), this looks like a week to not get too married to one specific pathway of building. Maybe you won’t be able to build exactly the roster you want to build; but you should be able to build a roster with a high ceiling in each spot, and with a relatively clear pathway for getting to that ceiling at each spot. It’s a fun week that way.
A couple years ago, Josh Allen and Jalen Hurts played to one of the games of the year, and in what ended up being a massive week for OWS, if you weren’t building your rosters around those two quarterbacks that week, you didn’t have a shot.
So why did I sort of gloss over them when hitting on quarterbacks above? Well, two years is an eternity in the NFL.
Two years ago, Sean Desai was the defensive coordinator of an Eagles team that allowed the third most points per game in the NFL, and while the Eagles took a step back on offense that year after Shane Steichen left for Indy and Brian Johnson took over, they still ranked seventh in points per game. This year, of course, has been totally different. Quinyon Mitchell, Cooper DeJean, and Vic Fangio have transformed this defense into a top-three scoring unit, and Kevin Patullo has transformed this offense into a middle-of-the-pack unit. If we take out get-right spots against Washington and Las Vegas, the Eagles have recently scored 19 // 15 // 21 // 16 // 10, while their defense has recently given up 18 // 0 // 22 // 24 // 9 // 7. We have to separate what we either A) want to happen or B) are afraid might happen without us, and acknowledge that this year’s Eagles team is not a shootout producer.
That said, one of the critical components on this slate will almost certainly be landing on the right high-priced pieces.
When paying down this week, we will obviously want to bias our selection toward the players we think have the best shot at a big game — but we’ll also have to be realistic about the fact that we could mostly have lower-priced players scoring “perfectly well” this week, without many standout scores. If scoring is relatively flat among pay-down options, then, “nailing the high-priced guys who separate” will end up being critical.
Obviously, we can’t know for certain that this is how things will play out. But we can look at this slate and see that the path leading to that type of outcome is relatively broad // more likely than most other paths.
Said differently: when I’m paying up on this slate, I don’t want to pay up asking, “Can this guy get me a solid score?” Instead, I want to pay up asking, “Can this guy put up a score I will need to have in order to win on this weekend?”
I don’t think Allen (or Hurts, of course) is likely to put up a score I can’t win the weekend without. But he is capable of that type of score, and this matchup (being a clash between heavyweights — albeit heavyweights who don’t have a ton to play for at the moment) is the type of spot where that type of game could, theoretically, develop. With all that in mind, I don’t mind allowing these guys to hang around my player pool until deeper into the week.
Again: it’s not likely that we “need to have had” one of these guys. But it is possible; and this week, this should at least keep these guys in mind for us.
My Week 17 Player Grid is live :: https://oneweekseason.com/the-scroll/week-17-2025/#scroll-article-jms-player-grid-17-25
Winner Circle is up early this week. It’s a fun/valuable one, IMO, for what Week 17 can provide. Sort of a unique look at how we can think about attacking this slate.
If you’ve listened to this week’s winner circle pod, the focus was on the idea of positioning ourselves for the potential uncertainty/variance of this slate by building multiple player pools: running through all nine games, assigning scores to the teams, creating our player pool off the stories that would lead to these scores, and then building either A) a single-entry/three-max roster from this pool, or B) a set of rosters for mme. in my mind, we would do this several times — creating five or six unique player pools for five or six se/3-max rosters (for example), or creating five or six unique player pools for five or six mini-sets in our mme build. (see my pod for a deeper dive into this thought process.) the basic idea is that we would tell different stories around these games as we go through them different times. so one time, we may say that the patriots come out flat and play to a low-scoring game vs the jets. another time, we say the pats come out hot and smash the jets in something like a 41-13 win. one time, we may say that the eagles and bills play to an unexpected 35-31 shootout. another time we may say that game is a 13-19 slug-fest. (you get the idea.) ultimately, we would have five or six different — but clearly possible — outcomes mapped out for each game, with five or six different player pools built off these outcomes, for five or six hand-built rosters or five or six mini-sets in mme.
obviously, some of our game sketches would be similar to others — and some players would show up in all of our player pools (with varying degrees of emphasis depending on the scores we sketched out) — but the idea would be to open our mind (and our rosters) to some of the stranger outcomes we might see.
in the pod, i ran through one set of game outcomes for a sample player pool, and also touched on some of the other outcomes we might consider.
here are a few more outcomes to think about this week ::
seattle // carolina ::
cardinals // bengals ::
steelers // browns ::
jaguars // colts ::
buccaneers // dolphins ::
patriots // jets ::
saints // titans ::
giants // raiders ::
eagles // bills ::
this is just a set of ideas to get you started — but ideally A) you’ll have 30 minutes available to listen to winner circle on 2x speed, and B) you’ll have time to get creative around various ways the games on this slate can play out.
Not much here this week, but my “Sunday morning” update is live :: https://oneweekseason.com/the-scroll/week-17-2025/#scroll-article-jms-player-grid-17-25
