JM’s Player Grid 3.25

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

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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

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Sunday Morning Update

Here’s a look at my exposures on the weekend, and how I’m attacking this slate ::

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

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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 :: $6.2K

Carson Wentz
Travis Etienne
Jordan Mason
Justin Jefferson
Elic Ayomanor
Chris Olave
Juwan Johnson
DJ Moore
Jaguars

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

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Blue Chips

No players or situations stand out to me as true Blue Chips this week.

“Light Blue” Chips

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Build-Arounds

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Building Blocks

“March In”

Rashid Shaheed + Juwan Johnson

Story:

“The Saints keep marching”

Why It Works:

No team in the NFL played fewer players on offense last week than the Saints. The Saints played 15 players (no other team played 16; a few played 17 players; most teams played 18+), and two of those players played 11 or fewer snaps. This is not an offense that rotates pieces. Juwan Johnson and Chris Olave are on the field all the time, and Shaheed is on the field most of the time. On top of this, the Saints are playing fast and creating volume. Since there aren’t a lot of different players on the field, there aren’t a lot of different places for this volume to go. Shaheed and Juwan cost $8.5k combined, and have averaged 17.5 targets per game. Imagine paying $8.5k for a low-owned wideout seeing 17.5 targets per game. Imagine paying $8.5k for a low-owned wideout who is averaging 28.1 DK points per game (scores of 24.9 and 31.1 so far). Ja’Marr Chase averaged 24.6 DK points per game last year. And with these guys, you cover two spots with this chunk of salary, while almost certainly getting better production on your “cheap guys” than most of the field will be getting. If the Saints are able to successfully execute this hurry-up offense in the noise in Seattle, this block can position us to have a solid floor of production with tons of salary left over.

How It Works:

This isn’t a block that’s designed to “win us a tourney,” but it can put us ahead of the field. Others will either A) be working with less salary than we have, or B) be getting less production than we’ll be getting from a couple cheaper options. Doing something unique with this extra salary can add extra value (for example: double-pay-up at RB, or double-pay-up at wideout), but no matter what, this is a valuable starting point that can separate our rosters from the field.

POTENTIAL DOWNSIDE:

The story plays out differently, and you don’t get first place — which is really all that matters.

“March In II”

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Bink Machine

A look at some of the rules I’ll be applying in the Bink Machine this week.

JJ + Wentz

Justin Jefferson is $7.5k. Carson Wentz is only $4k. If JJ does enough in this spot to be worth playing at his price tag, there’s a pretty good chance his QB, at only $4k, is doing enough to be worth playing at his price tag.

This rule says, “on at least 40% of rosters with Justin Jefferson, play Carson Wentz” (‘on at least 40% of rosters that include the locked player, make sure to include both players from this pool’).

If the rest of the slate shaped up differently, this rule could be 100%; but given what else is available (see the next rule), I went with 40% here…

JJ + Others

…Because here’s the thing :: Wentz could score 22 DK points at only $4k while producing a tourney-winning outing from JJ, and he could still not be the optimal way to go, as the clearest “upside spot” on the slate is Cowboys // Bears, where neither QB is particularly expensive. There is a world in which Caleb Williams scores 34. There is a world in which Dak scores 38. In those worlds, the strong score from Wentz still leaves you wishing you had one of these QBs. It makes sense to account for this possibility by also forcing some JJ builds with these guys.

After recording my Solo Ship show with Squirrel Patrol, I also added Mariota to this list. As Squirrel said, ‘What if JJ has a big game because Wentz is only throwing to him, and then Mariota runs in a couple scores.’ This is a really sharp angle as well.

Finally, I currently have these rules at “40%” because other stacks I’ll be targeting this week also include cheap QBs. Yes, if JJ posts a tourney winner, we’re probably getting a really nice score from cheap Wentz. But we could also get actual tourney-winners from other cheap QBs, so I want to account for that possibility this week.

Vikings D // O

This rule says, “On rosters that include the Vikings D, do not play any of JJ // Wentz // Hockenson.”

I don’t often like to play my offensive pieces with their defense anyway, but there are spots (for example: the Bucs) where I’m okay with it. In this spot, however, my hypothesis is that if the Vikings are sacking Browning, picking him off, scoring defensive touchdowns, etc., the Vikings, with a “backup QB,” will call things more conservatively on offense, thus making it tougher for us to get a tourney winner from one of these pieces.

On the flip side (uniquely), I don’t feel we need to play Bengals pieces alongside these Vikings. Yes, we want the Bengals to play well and keep this game competitive in order for O’Connell to remain balanced and aggressive; but given the matchup the Bengals have and the price tags the Bengals are carrying, this doesn’t have to mean “tourney winner” emerging from that side of the ball. I may have enough Wentz // JJ this week that I’ll slip in some Chase and possibly even Tee // Brown; but that won’t be a requirement for me on my Wentz builds.

Bonuses

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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 ::

Caleb Williams || Dak Prescott || Carson Wentz || there are others I could also potentially pull onto tighter builds, but this is my core focus at the moment (if pulling someone else on, Marcus Mariota would probably be the first place I would be looking; though I could also pull one of those lower-likelihood stacks (explored above) onto tighter builds this week)

RB ::

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A Wrap ::

I’ll see you at the top of the leaderboards this weekend!

-JM