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?”
There are a few things I could hit on ::
>> The unique calendar placement, where we’re close to Christmas and may have some focus falling off from our competition
>> The question marks that abound below the high-priced running backs
>> The tighter pricing that we always tend to deal with at this point in the season, but that always feels unique after a nearly-full season of prices not quite getting to this point
But I’ll focus, instead, on something that may only apply to me, but that nevertheless feels unique to me on this slate.
I mentioned this in my Journal this week, but I’ve had a very good year with betting — logging over 30 units of profit on the year. This is a good number — a number I’m happy with — which means that at this point, my mind has shifted more to “preservation” than to “growth.” And yet(!), on this one week, I have increased my pre-kickoff “units risked” by over 15%(!). I had risked about 85 units in non-live bets heading into this week; and this week alone, I have 14 units on the table.
Where this relates to DFS?
I put three units on the Over in Jags // Broncos at 45.5.
I put three units on the Over in Falcons // Cardinals at 47.5.
I put 2.5 units on the Under in Bengals // Dolphins at 50.5.
(I also put a full unit on a three-leg parlay that rolled all of those together at +584.)
That’s three games in which I’m essentially expressing extreme confidence that the game total was wrong. I feel very confident that Jags // Broncos plays to the upside. I feel very confident that Falcons // Cardinals plays to the upside. At this stage of the evolution of DFS, projections and sims are a big driver of ownership, and these tools leverage betting totals and spreads as a big part of their calculations. In other words: If we have confidence that a total or spread is wrong, well…we won’t necessarily be right — but we should treat this as “edge over time.”
Both of those totals have since gone up a point (though this won’t massively impact projections), and Bengals // Dolphins has since gone down three points (where it won’t be popping as much as it previously would have been), but this is certainly unique, and worth paying attention to from my end, in that A) I’m trying NOT to put as much at risk with betting at this point in the season, B) even with that, I wanted to get heavier bets down on these totals that just felt plain wrong, and C) totals are a big part of projections, which means I essentially have confidence that projections will be off in some spots as well.
Finally, I didn’t bet the under in Chargers // Cowboys, but I have felt all along that that total was too high as well.
Basically, in a number of spots, I think projections will be a little less sharp than they normally would be.
This is when we start to get into the “what are they playing for?” part of the season. First off: when NFL teams are on the field, they’re playing to win, because these guys are highly competitive athletes, they’re playing for themselves (and their next contract), their fans, their teammates, their pride. They aren’t just going to give up on the field and say “I guess I won’t tackle that guy because coach says we’re supposed to lose.” But what we DO start to see is teams utilize players differently. We start to see veterans on teams with no playoff aspirations start to take a backseat as the focus switches to getting younger guys playing time and evaluation at the NFL level.
A perfect example of this is Tyrone Tracy last week. Tracy has been in something of a timeshare with Devin Singletary for weeks now and Singletary sometimes outsnapped him, but this last week, after their bye, Tracy played 76% of the offensive snaps (his highest of the season) and handled 19 opportunities to Singletary’s 24% and 6 opportunities. It’s hard to predict those situations with certainty – and if we could, we would see huge ownership on guys who were suddenly fantastic values – but we can take shots. We can try to guess where it would make sense for a player’s role to change. Coaches don’t always do the rational thing and will disappoint us, but when we get it right, we can find spots where projections are just flat-out wrong because they’re projecting a much smaller role for a player, which means we can get a bigger role (and thus a bigger points projection) at very modest ownership.
This is more of a “rest of season” dynamic than something specifically for this week, but as we get into the last few wild weeks of the year it bears consideration.
After going through the slate and starting the roster building process, this slate feels like DraftKings is daring us to pay up at running back and hit the mid-range wide receivers hard. All of the backs feel priced up, even the “value” options. Within the context of this slate, with so many top tier options at the position, raw points are likely to matter a bit more than on a “standard slate” at running back, making players like Audric Estime, Aaron Jones, Michael Carter, and Kenneth Gainwell borderline unusable. That is part of the theoretical reasoning that has me giving a nice, hard look at Omarion Hampton, who would carry 30+ point upside against the Cowboys if he sees his snap rate increase (it hasn’t yet since returning from injury).
Wide receivers like Justin Jefferson, Courtland Sutton, DK Metcalf, Mike Evans, and Jameson Williams all feel materially underpriced relative to their respective ceilings on this slate. This pricing dynamic should lead to a clear “chalk build,” giving us a clear blueprint for generating leverage (again, is the answer Omarion Hampton?).
Something that I believe is often overlooked and not thought about at a deep enough level in DFS is evaluating slate sizes and therefore how that affects ownership, game theory, and strategy. On one end of the spectrum, we have Showdowns where all the players are from one game. On the other end, we have a handful of 13-game slates (like last week’s) or Week 18 when we get a whopping 15 games (along with a bunch of other dynamics). In the middle, we have slates of varying sizes which are often mentioned in passing as “this is a smaller slate” or “a lot of options this week!” However, the effects of these changes DO matter. This week is a perfect example, as we have 11 games on the slate, after having 13 last week, and next week we will only have 9 games on the Main Slate. These changes significantly alter the outlook of the slate and make it so our targets in terms of points and thoughts about “great play at ownership” need to be different. This is something that has become far more evident to me over the last two or three seasons as the NFL messes with various schedules and slate size changes so often along with the fact that I do the Afternoon Only article each week. On that slate, we have anywhere from two to six game slates, so a player pool can literally be three times as big one week as it is another. There isn’t necessarily a huge take away for you for this week in all of this, but it is more of a PSA of something to be aware of. A 3% owned QB on last week’s 13-game slate is not the same thing as a 3% owned QB on next week’s 9-game slate. The “unique” thing about this week is it is providing a bit of a soft landing between the two extremes so we might not be as aware of then change as we would if the weeks were consecutive.
The thing that drives me nuts sometimes is when people get infatuated with “motivation” for teams at this point in the season. They “have to win this week for playoff positioning!!” is kind of crazy to me because, well, frankly these teams only play 17 games and from the start of the season each game is extremely important. If a team was simply able to turn it on and win or be successful “because they need to”, then they wouldn’t be in their current situation to begin with. Sorry for getting on my soap box, but I think the greater point here is that implying some teams will be “more motivated to win” implies that others will be apathetic in their approach. Now, of course, some teams will make big picture decisions regarding player health or usage with a long-term view, but players, coaches, and teams are entering the stadium on Sunday with success on their mind. Coaches who have been eliminated from the playoffs are trying to justify keeping their jobs. Players are trying to maximize their value in contract negotiations and not put bad film on tape.
The question here is about those “dead” teams who seemingly have “nothing to play for” and/or have a lot of turnover in their personnel from how they started the season. When two of these teams meet, the range of outcomes can be huge and being on top of one of these spots can be the path to big money in a week like this. There are often cheap “value” plays involved, defenses may be without key players, and teams may actually play more aggressively to see what their players are capable of with less downside risk. We have five games on this week’s slate where BOTH teams are eliminated from playoff contention entering the week::
Which spot or spots from these are most appealing to you?
