Saturday Crunch is an Inner Circle feature that can be found late on Saturday nights and non-IC members can receive a chunk of the content each week. Mike also posts updated thoughts to Discord on Saturday mornings for Inner Circle members.
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I live in Wisconsin and for the last couple of days, the weather has been absolutely brutal. As I was outside shoveling yesterday in the blistering cold, I was trying to occupy my mind by thinking about the upcoming Saturday football slate. Thinking through the games, as I could barely feel my extremities, I couldn’t help but think about all these games that will be played in bad conditions this week. One of the games that is likely to be hit the hardest by this is the Saints // Browns game, with single-digit temperatures and 25-30 mph winds with gusts to 50 mph (meaning below zero wind chills), which is contributing to the game’s 32 point over/under – the lowest we’ve seen all year. However, standing there I couldn’t help but think to myself “there is nothing I would have less desire to do in this cold than try to tackle Nick Chubb”. We know the weather is going to force both teams to run the ball even more than normal and Chubb is one of the best pure runners in the game. He will have very low ownership and slate-breaking potential in this spot. He could certainly run the ball 25 times for 80 yards and not score any touchdowns, giving him a low floor, but his ceiling is far higher than most people will give it credit for due to the low game total. If the Browns build a lead, it will likely be based on Chubb’s success and will also lead to more carries for him as defenders become more defeated.
I talked up Drake London last week in this spot and see an even better opportunity for him this week. Desmond Ridder has a game under his belt now and the Ravens run defense is so good that it forces the third-highest opponent pass rate on the season. London has seen an absurd 46% target share over the last two weeks and even if that drops a bit this week we can reasonably expect 8 to 10 targets at a low price and low ownership for a very talented player. I think London will likely spend most of his career priced in the $6k to $7k range on Draftkings, so I’m going to play the discount with relatively locked-in volume while I can.
Permanent Price Bump coming at the end of Week 2!
Lock in the lower price for life!
