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?
I covered this at the top of the Player Grid and throughout the Angles Pod, but to summarize it here :: the most unique component of this slate, for me, is that the chalk pretty directly reflects the player pool I landed on in my bubble…and yet, “the player pool I landed on in my bubble” is far less confident/robust that my player pool typically is. Said differently :: I think the chalk is “sharp,” in terms of “being among the strongest on-paper plays on the slate,” but I also think the chalk is more fragile than normal. It will succeed less often (in many cases, far less often) than typical “sharp chalk” would; and if a lot of these plays were on a better-looking slate, they wouldn’t be drawing much attention at all. This is already the rare week, then, in which I actually agree with most of the chalk. It’s also, however, a week in which that won’t necessarily mean I’ll be playing a ton of that chalk, as it’s “likelier than normal” that “attacking away from the top handful of on-paper plays” proves to be the most +EV way to build.
It looks likely to be a lower-scoring slate than we’re used to seeing. There are only 10 games and just 4 teams are projected for 25+ points…and 3 of those are under 26. Most of those teams are also significant favorites (PHI -7.5 over DAL, SF -6.5 over TB, MIN -7 over JAX, BUF -3.5 over IND). So, stacking game environments is less likely to be viable this week – which is fine with me, I’m generally on board the “game stacking is viable and can be +EV but doesn’t need to be forced” train. But, since so much of the field is locked into using “every roster starts with a QB, 1-2 of their pass catchers, and a bring back from the other team,” I think that gives us an edge if we can identify good teams to target for points that don’t necessarily need a bringback from the other side.
This slate has thrust us directly back to “Valueless town with poor game totals on top.” That brings two fundamental truths to the table for Week 10: (1) There are likely to be fewer 25+ scores and fewer 30+ scores on this slate, which makes accounting for those scores paramount, and (2) There are fewer players that can put the slate out of reach at the onesies positions (QB and TE), which brings “value primary stacks” to the forefront of consideration. These will be the two primary tenets that I will be building around this week.
The nature of this slate is such that we have five teams (MIN, PHI, SF, ATL, and BUF) in great spots to put up a lot of points. However, all of their opponents (JAX, DAL, TB, NO, and IND) are dealing with injuries at QB and/or their skill positions. Considering that all of the teams in the first group have good to great defenses, it creates a situation where it is hard to see any of these game environments taking off when viewed on their own. That being said, across those five games it seems likely that one of them does in fact turn into a high scoring game that becomes the “had to have it” spot on a relatively small main slate. To me, that is the unique aspect of this slate. No games that jump out as clear spots to attack, but with that many on the verge of it one is likely to break through.
We are at the midway point of the season, the trade deadline has passed, some coaches are getting fired (or are on the brink of it), we’ve dealt with many injuries and now are seeing players who have been out weeks or months coming back. Suffice to say, a lot is changing. The deeper we get into the season, the more reliable a lot of our data becomes. We can see who teams are, how they will use players, identify trends, etc. However, all of the dynamics listed in the first sentence also present situations where the “data” becomes somewhat irrelevant as changing situations will often turn teams into something different than what their statistics and trends say.
With that in mind, are there any teams that you are seeing right now who you think the makeup and outlook of who they are – and by extension, what their player usage and game environments will look like – is unlikely to be accurately reflected by the traditional things we look at to evaluate a team or game?
