JMToWin is a high-stakes tournament champion (Thunderdome, Luxury Box, Game Changer, Wildcat) who is focusing this year on single-entry/three-entry max
This is, instead, a look at the player pool I’ll be fishing
:: covered in-depth 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”)
:: 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
:: games, offenses, situations, or scenarios I’ll be looking to build around across my rosters
:: unique player pairings that can be used as foundational building blocks for tournament rosters
:: 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
Permanent Price Bump coming at the end of Week 2!
Lock in the lower price for life!
Full breakdown (of what this is, and what the thinking is behind these players) can (and should) be found in the Angles Pod (above).
Matthew Stafford
Darrell Henderson
Saquon Barkley
Noah Brown
Davante Adams
Ben Skowronek
Juwan Johnson
Greg Dortch
Cowboys
Matthew Stafford
Darrell Henderson
Chase Edmonds
Noah Brown
Jahan Dotson
Ben Skowronek
Juwan Johnson
Greg Dortch
Bengals
We’ve talked about this a lot this week, but one of the easiest traps to fall into in Week 2 is assuming that Week 1 told us everything we need to know. Will Davante Adams average 10 catches for 141 yards this season? Well…no. Of course not. That would be 170 catches for 2394 yards. But can he continue to produce at a level this year that has him priced higher than $8600 pretty quickly? Absolutely! Adams is likely to end up as the highest-owned wide receiver on the slate, so you’ll want to make sure he’s on a roster that does things differently in other spots (note: pairing him with Greg Dortch — or even with Carr and Dortch — is no longer shaping up to be “different”; as explored in this week’s Angles Podcast, you can still do that, but you need to make sure you’re also finding separation from the field somewhere else on your roster), and the field is likely overrating the chances of Davante “never disappointing again”; but he’ll be the most popular wideout on the slate for a reason. His “disappointing game” here should still provide strong raw production, and his ceiling is as high as any player on the slate.
There is probably no one in DFS who will come into this week expecting Kupp to “fail” — and yet, he’ll likely draw about half the ownership that Adams will draw, as he’s priced high enough above Adams for Adams to feel like a “bargain.” While we’re typically very value-conscious in our thinking, we also want to be willing to let go of “value” a little bit in places where we can gain obvious separation from the field as a result. As I’ve said many times over the years: the moment games kick off, salary no longer matters; all that matters is the production you get. At worst, Kupp is a coin-flip to outproduce Davante (and realistically, he’s probably a slight favorite), and if we land in a scenario where he outproduces Davante by 10 or more points, he becomes a particularly powerful piece.
New this year: these are unique player pairings that can be used as foundational building blocks for tournament rosters
“Rams score four or five touchdowns, and Kupp gets only one (or none)”
Low combinatorial ownership. The field will have plenty of focus on the Rams’ offense, but this is a pairing that very few people will have. If the Rams have a big game (four or five team touchdowns) and two or three of those scores flow through Henderson and A-Rob, you’re sitting very pretty with this one.
You need this game to play out along a specific path in order for this block to work out just right — but the initial entryway for that path (“Rams score four or five touchdowns”) is wide open. It’s not unreasonable to believe that in a game that has the Rams scoring “four or five touchdowns,” there will be anywhere from three to five touchdowns available outside of whatever Cooper Kupp produces. To be clear :: the Rams could score “only four touchdowns,” and Kupp could account for two of those, and the chances of this block hitting would diminish. There is also (obviously) a chance that things work out “exactly the way we need” (Rams score a bunch; Kupp doesn’t dominate all the touchdowns), and yet the touchdowns go to Higbee or Skowronek, leaving Hendy and A-Rob empty-handed. But compared to the ultra-low combinatorial ownership you will get by making this “complete bet,” the chances of it paying off are pretty high. This is a sharp, high-upside “starting point” in tourneys of any style/size — giving you two popular, “obviously good” plays in Stafford/Hendy, while coming with low overall ownership and clear paths to ceiling.
The story plays out differently, and you don’t get first place — which is really all that matters.
“CMC and Saquon are the focal points of their respective offenses, opposite one another”
“Is it okay to play these two running backs together?” Both of these players will be popular, but a large chunk of the field will get stuck on that question, and will have a hard time pulling the trigger on these two together, thus allowing us to gain exposure to a pair of strong plays at lower effective ownership.
Same as the individual plays themselves, this one is about as easy as it gets. Neither guy directly correlates to the other, but a big game from one has a zero-percent chance of “directly hurting the other,” and there are very clear ways in which a big game from one of these two provides a slight boost to the other. The mega value here comes from the fact that these are both “obviously good plays,” and yet the percentage of rosters that pair these two will be relatively low due to the uncertainty from the field on “whether or not this actually makes sense.”
The story plays out differently, and you don’t get first place — which is really all that matters.
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:
Derek Carr || Matthew Stafford || Russell Wilson || Jameis Winston || Trey Lance
I’ll see you at the top of the leaderboards this weekend!
-JM
