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.
Just last week, we saw the Rams and Bills game go bananas in the afternoon with 86 total points as the relative strength of the defenses didn’t matter when a talented team with a great play caller faced an all-world QB in Josh Allen and the offenses started to interact and push each other. If that description sounds appealing to you, then this week’s game between the Bills and Lions (in a dome!) has basically all of the same ingredients and even more weapons at Allen’s disposal. This game opened with an over/under of 53 points and is already up to 54.5 as of Thursday morning. There are no other games on the slate whose totals are currently above 46.5, which is pretty wild on a 12-game slate (13 on Fanduel) for one game to be expected to score more than a touchdown above everything else.
Given that context, it feels like this game has potential to be an extremely important point on this slate and how you build your rosters will be telling a strong story on how you expect this game to play out – whether you are on it or not. So what are your expectations for this game?
I think there are some pretty key differences between this game and the Bills // Rams game last week. As the question noted: the Bills have more weapons this week…which might help them in real life, but it doesn’t really help us in DFS, where we’ve already gone all season without being able to rely on tourney-worthy scores from this offense. Now the Bills are playing a much better defense, with more weapons available for Allen to spread the ball amongst. On the other side, we have a Lions team that has been one of the best offenses in the NFL all season, while rarely producing DFS-useful scores, as this offense is full of high-priced pieces and tends to spread the ball around. Furthermore, the Rams (with a concentrated offense) move the ball through the air, while the Lions (with a non-concentrated offense) often control games on the ground. I honestly think it’s pretty sharp of the field to be moving away from heavy ownership in this game…
…but this opens the door for us to then move TOWARD this game. If this game were coming in with high expected ownership, we could argue that it was +EV to simply expect this game to play out “in the likeliest way” (which would leave no one producing tourney winners). But with the field playing things that way, it suddenly becomes +EV to say, “Yeah, but, can’t this game play to the upside?”
With that in mind, the idea of attacking this game gains attractiveness in my eyes. We can acknowledge that this is a different setup than the Bills had last week, while also recognizing that we would make money over time loading up on game stacks here specifically because the field is also recognizing this. If you load up on this game, “What’s likeliest to happen” is that you’re left a bit disappointed. But the fact that most people will be off this game also means that if you were able to load up on this game across a 100-times sample, you would be positioned to make money over that stretch.
I think that while anything could happen and it wouldn’t surprise me if this game really shot out (read: like 60-65 points or more – just hitting its Vegas total wouldn’t be “shooting out” since that’s the median of what’s expected). But…the Lions defense is much, much better than the Bills. They are, if memory serves (Mike can double check me), 1st or 2nd in pass defense DVOA. Now, that doesn’t mean an elite QB like Allen can’t take them apart…it just means it’s less likely than Allen taking apart the much-weaker Rams defense.
Put another way: we really only needed the Rams to exceed expectations against a tough defense last week, because the Bills offense had a soft matchup. The likelihood of the Bills falling flat last week was much lower than it is this week, and we still have to also think about the other side of the game in which we need the Lions offense to succeed.
Another angle: the Rams have been much better at generating tourney-worthy DFS scores because they are a wildly concentrated passing offense in which the top 2 guys account for an absolutely massive target share. The Lions, on the other hand, are a much more spread out offense in which we’ve very rarely seen tourney-worthy scores emerge this season.
All of this comes together to paint a picture of more risk than reward in this game…except….
NOBODY WANTS TO PLAY IT. Current ownership projections have everyone in this game as extremely low owned. So, I get the concerns. They’re real. This game is not a certain shootout, and even if it does shoot out, it could do so in very fantasy-unfriendly ways. But I think the upside case of “the game scores 70+ points AND does so in fantasy-friendly ways” is stronger than any other game on the slate and with relatively modest ownership, I’m interested in going after it.
My preferred way to attack it is via full game stacks. I doubt I’ll be playing any one-off pieces.
While this game includes the two offenses leading the league in points per game (Lions: 32.1, Bills: 30.5), it also includes two defenses ranked in the top eight in points allowed per game (Lions: tied for second at 18.0, Bills: eighth at 20.6). What that means is that this game carries an immensely wide range of outcomes as far as how it could play out. Furthermore, out of all the skill position players from these two teams, no player has put up a 4x salary multiplier their Week 15 salary more than twice all season. That said, this game clearly has the pieces to develop into something we had to have this week (remember, wide range of outcomes), meaning we should look to ownership to influence our interest. Only Ja’Marr Chase and Khalil Shakir are projected to be on 10% or more of rosters in play this week. The goal here isn’t to answer the question of how the game is likeliest to play out, the goal is to leverage the field’s stance on the game through the wide range of outcomes. I’ll have definite interest in full game stacks while I won’t be looking here for one-off selection.
The hard part about this game is also the beauty of it. We have some expensive players (Allen, Cook, Gibbs, Montgomery, ARSB) who feel uncomfortable to pay up for and two teams who tend to spread things out a bit – which makes all of the cheaper options also feel uncomfortable. The result is that none of them project for great games and therefore all of them are likely to carry low ownership.
Allen is in a spot that is hard for me to get away from. I truly think he has a massive ceiling in this spot. Obviously he isn’t going to match last week, but if/when he posts another massive game it is going to feel very obvious in retrospect. The Bills skill players are all tough to pull the trigger on. They use three RBs, two TEs, and five WRs – and this is the first game in a while where they are at full strength which makes projecting usage for the receiving options even more difficult. My preferred options of the bunch are Amari Cooper and Keon Coleman. If I think this game shoots out (which I do) and I think Josh Allen has a big game (which I do) and I know the Bills are likely to spread things out, then big plays are likely necessary for a Bills skill player to post a big game. Cooper and Coleman are most likely to fit that bill (no pun intended) and each is in the range where a 100 yard game probably gets them to 4x their salary and if they score a touchdown with it they are probably at 5x+. Obviously I like playing them with Allen, but at their salaries I’ll also consider them on other rosters where I am playing cheaper QBs. C.J. Stroud, for example, could post a 25-point game while Allen posts 35. If that happens then there’s a good chance one of Allen’s pass catchers drops a 20 to 25 point game for around $5k in salary and the 10-point sacrifice from Allen to Stroud is worth the $2,300 in salary savings.
The Lions certainly can spread the ball around, but in a high leverage matchup against a really good opponent we could see more aggressiveness and higher play volume. I really like this spot especially since the “uncertainty” around it based on the strength of defenses and plethora of options makes it likely to be lower owned. I am leaning into this spot as a bet on how the offenses interact and push each other.
We touched on the highest probability game for a shootout in the first question. As we saw last week, however, even when one game takes center stage we can have other games pop off and deliver tournament winning performances. Every single one of the other games on the slate has an over/under above 40 and below 47, creating a very tight spread in terms of expectations. Which game or two has you most intrigued as the potential “gem that unlocks the slate”?
