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 unique?”
I’ve hit on this throughout the week, but this is a week with some solid game environments, some solid totals…and yet, seemingly very few pathways to full-on eruption rosters in DFS.
We’ll skip over game environments for the moment, but one of the clearest pathways to eruptions outside of game environments is for popular individual pieces to hit for a big game. But this week — outside of Rico Dowdle — it’s hard to see clear pathways to popular individual pieces putting up price-considered games you “had to have.”
There are three running backs expected to garner 30% or higher ownership (and these are the only three currently projected above 13%). One of them is Dowdle. The other two are CMC (likely to have a strong game, but highly unlikely to bury you at $9k) and Achane (only three games in his last 18 that have gone for more than 21 DK points, which illustrates just how unlikely he is to bury you; yes, he can — but again: it’s just not likely).
At wide receiver, we have JSN and Puka highly likely to score 20+, but unlikely to bury you. Amon-Ra St. Brown can put up 40 if this is “one of those games” for the Lions; but if it’s not “one of those games,” he’s usually scoring around 20. And then, of course, the other popular wideouts are guys like Zay Flowers, Deebo Samuel, Khalil Shakir, etc., who have very narrow pathways to blowup games.
Swinging over to game environments, we have spots like Pats // Bucs and Rams // 49ers that we, as optimistic DFS players, can paint a picture of becoming shootouts…but if we zoom out and look at things more objectively, we realize that while a shootout is possible in those spots, it’s unlikely.
Maybe Giants // Bears takes off in bad weather.
Maybe Ravens // Vikings takes off.
And again: maybe the Lions just stomp here.
But also, maybe none of these game environments take off…and maybe none of these popular pieces erupt. And maybe we end up with a relatively low-scoring week as a result.
If you’ve been reading JM’s notes in Discord I think he sums it up well. There is a LOT of really fragile chalk this week! At running back our 3 highest owned plays are CMC (high price, awful matchup), De’Von Achane (bad offense, has only really put up 1 tourney-worthy score this season), and Rico Dowdle (awesome, but, on the Panthers). At wide receiver the highest owned plays are Zay Flowers (Ravens spread the ball out a ton, only 1 performance all year of 15+ DK points), JSN (elite but pricey and only 2 games of 30+ points all year due – volume concerns in this one), Wan’dale Robinson (he’s a Giant), Khalil Shakir (he’s a Bill)…these guys aren’t bad plays by any means, but they’re just very, very fragile as highly owned plays.
The Week 10 main slate is riddled with fragility, maybe more so than any slate we’ve seen this season, which is an interesting conclusion considering seven of the 10 games on the slate carry a game total of 46.5 points or higher. Pricing is also ruthlessly tight, with very little in the way of projectable value. That makes building rosters uncomfortable, which is something I absolutely love. Being comfortable being uncomfortable becomes an elite trait on a slate like this one and I urge you to consider that when constructing your portfolio in Week 10.
I somewhat disagree with my peers listed above here, as I don’t necessarily see the same fragility in the chalk that they reference. Every slate starts at the running back position for me, and I think CMC and Dowdle are anything but fragile (barring injury, but injury is something you can say for any NFL player). The issue this week as I see it isn’t as much about the “chalk” being fragile, but there being a large group of players and game environments that for one reason or another do not project that well but have clear paths to outlier high end production. Derrick Henry is a road favorite with Lamar on the field. The Lions are big favorites and it won’t be shocking if they score five or six touchdowns. Tampa and New England are tough to project individual plays strongly, but have clear paths to excessive play volume and scoring. The unique thing about this week to me isn’t that the popular spots are likely to fail, but rather that there are a lot of strong spots that it wouldn’t be shocking to have outlier scores from.
The Week 9 slate showed us how valuable a single game environment can be. We had Brock Bowers and Drake London both put up 40+ Draftkings points, but I saw tournament winning lineups that had only one of them. However, the Bears-Bengals game was an instant classic and every winning lineup had multiple pieces from that game, while most were built heavily around it. With that in mind, what game environment stands out to you on this week’s slate as most likely to turn into a wild shootout?
