By :: Mike Johnson (MJohnson86)
PUBLISHED ON :: 6/29/25
While my main focus is on Drafters and their cumulative scoring format – with deep dives into historical performance, scoring, and draft tendencies – I still enjoy and am very active in the Best Ball streets of traditional playoff contests. I play on both DraftKings and Underdog in various contests and as often discussed regarding Drafters, the two formats have incredibly different strategies and game theories beyond just drafting players. In these playoff style formats, we know that correlation (specifically and especially in Week 17) is a massive part of figuring out the “puzzle” of each season. Week 17 in and of itself becomes a DFS tournament, a format that I have had enormous success on over the last decade. With that in mind, this article is designed to go deeper into Week 17 and look at it from a DFS GPP perspective, thinking through not just correlation, but player types and game scripts that “make sense” to pair together and may give you a unique lineup that is worth reaching for. The added bonus of this article is that these pairings are players who, based on ADP, are likely to be paired together at a relatively low rate and thus can give you that low-owned, high-upside roster that can launch you to the top of a GPP leaderboard. I don’t like “reaching” to force correlation in many spots, but there are a few that just make sense. Let’s dig in!!!
Saquon Barkley + Josh Allen
Saquon Barkley goes off the board within the top three picks of most Best Ball drafts, and I have never seen or heard of him lasting past the fifth pick in a draft. Meanwhile, Josh Allen has an ADP of 29 on DraftKings and 34 on Underdog. This means that Allen is often lasting until the back half of the third round and is very rarely paired with Barkley. The Eagles play the Bills in Week 17, but this particular pairing is especially intriguing because of how the players score points and the tendencies of their “ceiling” games.
On one hand, we have Barkley, who is consistently a high scorer but has a massive ceiling that is often reached in high-leverage games where the Eagles really unleash him. This game against Buffalo late in the year has a high likelihood of having massive playoff seeding implications for both teams and fits the bill. Likewise, as we often discuss during the DFS season, the Bills’ defense is schematically built in a way that makes it vulnerable to physically dominant running games. Buffalo plays “nickel” personnel as their base defense, which means they have an extra defensive back on the field and is the reason their pass defense has been so good recently. We saw Derrick Henry go nuclear on them during the 2024 regular season, however, and Barkley could easily do something similar here.
