The Greatest “Cheat Sheet” In DFS
Each week in The Oracle, OWS team members will take on the key strategy questions from that week’s slate :: sharing their thoughts on how they plan to approach these critical elements from a roster-construction, game theory, and leverage perspective.
A weekly staple of The Oracle, what makes this slate particularly unique?
There are two distinct, unique components I’m seeing on this slate — and the slate itself takes on a particularly unique shape when adding these two distinct, unique components together.
The first thing I’m seeing is a slate without a lot of standout one-off plays. Among all running backs, it won’t be surprising if we don’t see any that end up going for 4x their salary on DraftKings (and if we do see any, it’s likely to be guys on the lower ends of the price range who aren’t providing a true “separator” score), and at wide receiver, we have some pretty clear paths to the highest-price plays underperforming salary-based expectations, while the other ranges of the WR pool don’t provide the clear opportunities for 30-pointers we can typically hunt down.
The second thing I’m seeing is a number of game environments that have a lot of room to the upside, with opportunity for one or more of these games to really separate from the field.
While both of these are unique components, they create a particularly unique slate when paired, as this slate — to me — looks like one in which my high-reliability core is going to be less about “having high exposure to a handful of high-confidence plays” and more about “selecting a small number of teams/games to build heavily around.” I expect my rosters to be heavily focused on teams and game environments, with a larger-than-normal pool of clumped-together one-offs I’ll be mixing around matching around these teams/games.
After a couple of lower-total weeks…we have games with totals! Like, actual, real-sounding totals! On a 10 game main slate, only 4 games are under 40 points, and 5 games are clustered between 43.5 and 48.5 points. A few years ago that wouldn’t sound good, but in 2023, it’s pretty good. So, we have some games with healthy Vegas totals, but we don’t have one clear head-and-shoulders above the rest game, so there isn’t that one huge decision point of “everyone and their brother are investing in this game…do I go there at massive ownership, or cross my fingers and hope it flops?” With a lot of games that could deliver useful environments, this is a slate that we can approach in a whole bunch of different ways, and those are always interesting to me.
The most unique and interesting aspects of this slate are the relative lack of projectable one-off plays and the fact that the field seems slow to react to the changing dynamics as the week has progressed. We spent a lot of time talking about those two theoretical components of the Week 10 slate on The Slate podcast, so check that out if you missed the show this morning!
The most unique thing I am seeing about this slate is how many games we have that have the potential to turn extremely pass-heavy whether that is due to strong run defenses, offenses that rely heavily on the pass, or a combination of the two. Games that feel like they fit that criteria, include: SF // JAX, WAS // SEA, HOU // CIN, TEN // TB, and DET // LAC. We just saw last week when the Texans and Bucs game took off into the stratosphere due to those circumstances.
The second thing that stands out to me as “unique” for this week is the state of the running back position. It really does feel thin as most of the backs with the most secure workloads are very expensive and seemingly have narrow paths to “ceiling” games while the best on-paper RB plays in the mid-tier of salary (Pollard, Mixon, Bijan) have a history of disappointing.
In Week 9, we saw the Texans and Bucs game combine for 76 total points and absolutely blow up the slate. We once again have a smaller 10-game main slate this week and we don’t have as many “duds” as past weeks have presented. There are multiple spots where both defenses would be considered some level of a “pass funnel” and a couple of spots where two very good offenses are facing off. With all of that in mind, which game do you think is most likely to combine for a huge point total that ends up as the key to the slate?
