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?
A couple things stand out to me this week.
Firstly, we have only four teams implied to score 25+ points — and all of them are favored by seven or more points. This means that the “favored outcome” for every game on the slate is either A) one team winning comfortably, or B) neither team scoring a ton of points. Of course, if we were just taking ONE game, and were identifying the “favored outcome” and then playing out that game, we would probably get a “slate” that looks a lot like we were expecting. But we have 10 games, and it’s unlikely that all 10 play out exactly as expected. So for me, the questions become :: 1) can one of these more heavily-favored teams either A) stay aggressive regardless of score, or B) be put in position to have to be aggressive; and 2) can one of these games implied for a lower score instead become higher-scoring?
Secondly, we have sweeping price cuts from the DraftKings salary factory. It’s normal for pricing to rise throughout the year; but this year — in a low-scoring year for real-life football and, in particular, for fantasy — DraftKings got way too aggressive with their pricing, way too early in the year. For a good month and a half, we’ve been exploring the unique nuances that are in play this year with so many players so clearly overpriced; but now, out of nowhere, pricing has been slashed all over the place. As I’ve noted a few times this week: this doesn’t necessarily lead to me feeling we now have “a bunch of underpriced players” so much as I feel we have players who are “less overpriced than before”; but this is a unique component that gives us another feature to deal with in putting together this week’s puzzle.
There’s only one game that really looks like an obvious stacking spot (ARI/SEA). I guess that isn’t entirely unique this season, but it feels very much the case this week. There are high total teams in good spots which is drawing ownership but that’s primarily going to the running backs, whereas at pass catcher spots it feels like the chalk is pretty darn shaky. I guess that makes this week not very unique…since it makes it very similar to last week (except without the two “obvious” spots to stack of BAL/PIT and SEA/SF, which, of course…both flopped horribly).
This is another slate where the field is demonstrating clear intentions when it comes to where they plan on spending salary, which is likely to lead to an extremely straightforward chalk build. It is also a slate with one clear game environment that stands head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to chances of becoming something you had to have, and yet, the field seems to be taking an underweight approach to said game (Lions-Colts). I love slates with this type of setup as it becomes extremely easy to generate meaningful leverage on the field while not even straying from the top on-paper plays.
Mike’s answers will be live later Saturday
Last week we saw the Lions absolutely dominate the Jaguars in a game where basically every Lions player with a full-time role posted a game that could help you win a tournament. That may have been a bit excessive, but as we have seen macro trends of scoring and passing across the NFL be moderate this season and we have talked about all season that specific game environments can separate rather easily if and when they do hit. A team doesn’t need to score 50+ points and have 600 yards like the Lions did to bust a slate completely open and at this time in the year you start to see some teams looking to the future and others trying to make the playoffs and/or sharpen up for a deep run. Those ingredients give the potential for games like last week’s to be even more important to identify on a weekly basis and the shorter slates that we see during bye weeks, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc. make those spots even higher leverage. I see six games on the ten-game slate that could turn into a “smash spot” for one of the teams::
Do any of these spots stand out to you as potential “smash spots” that we should be considering making concentrated bets on team stacks?
