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.
We often start The Oracle with the question, “what makes this slate unique?” However, this week it is fairly obvious. The first week of the season is always exciting and we can certainly learn a lot about players, teams, and situations from seeing actual live game action for the first time. That being said, as noted on “The Workshop” this week, teams can only play who is on their schedule. This creates a scenario where we get a false sense of what to expect from some teams based on the results of their opening game, and it happens on both extremes. On one hand there are teams who looked great but it had more to do with their opponents struggles or players whose skill sets fit perfectly to have a big game against their opponent’s scheme. On the other end, there are teams who struggled but it was likely caused by tough competition or players who were hampered by bad matchups.
I love this question. I’ll also add: each team in the NFL is somewhat closely matched, from a talent perspective. And every week, each team’s coaches are looking at what they did well, what they did poorly, and what they want to emphasize and improve on that week. Will the Dolphins come out flat again this week just because they did last week? Will the Lions continue to look lost just because they looked lost in Week 1? If some of these things happened as an outlier in Week 7, we wouldn’t think anything of it, but because this was Week 1, we can have a tendency to overrate things. We should trust what we saw in Week 1, but we should also balance this against what we felt we knew heading into the season.
As to the meat of the question:
I see a lot of talk about how the Ravens looked unstoppable until they stopped themselves, etc. I still expect the Ravens to be a juggernaut this year, but we should also remember that they are built in such a way that they are pretty much guaranteed to be a problem for Buffalo. The Browns are better equipped to at least make life more difficult on the Ravens, but the general belief this week seems to be, “If they did that to the Bills, just imagine what they’ll do to the Browns.”
The Cowboys gave the defending Super Bowl champs all they could handle, and the Giants are a dramatically inferior team. The public sentiment around the Cowboys was not positive heading into the season, so it’s probably easy to overlook how impressive they were in Week 1. The Giants have that excellent defensive line, of course; but the potential is still there for the Cowboys to flatten New York in this one.
Speaking of the Lions: they played the Packers’ defense in Week 1. The Bears are not the Packers.
Finally, the Colts looked awesome against the Dolphins. It’ll be a much tougher task against the Broncos.
Love this question! I’ll go by position instead of by team….
RB: James Conner. Last week on the road vs. a Saints D that has historically been tough due to scheme, I mostly stayed away from Conner. This week against a Panthers D that has been absolutely trampled by opposing running backs all last year as well as by Travis Etienne in Week 1 I think he’s a much stronger play. Also Breece Hall – that’s partly matchup-driven (BUF looks like an easier matchup on the ground than PIT) and part of it is driven by how the Jets looked like a pretty capable offense last week, giving me more confidence in their ability to find overall success and thus ceiling for individual plays.
WR: Puka Nacua. I don’t really love playing guys against the Texans D, but against the Titans he looks much tastier. Malik Nabers looks like a better spot (if you trust the Giants to not fall flat on their faces again – but he makes a nice play away from the chalky Dallas D). Garrett Wilson goes in my “the Jets may be better than expected” bucket.
TE: Nothing really jumps out for me here.
I think the easy answer is everyone. The stats can be very misleading early in the season because we really don’t have the sample size to make sweeping conclusions. I alter my own process during this time to be heavier on the film, backed up by the stats, instead of being overly reliant on trends that are not yet trends at all. I also want to shift the mindset early in the season to view Week 1 as “preseason Week 4,” in that we now have two seasons with lower overall scoring since the league shortened the preseason. Teams are still figuring out their identities, coaches are still tinkering, and players are getting their bodies up to speed for the long haul. We’re likely to see more injuries early in the season as well (Xavier Worthy, 49ers, Jayden Reed, Austin Ekeler, etc). All of that to say, the process is slightly different early in the season now.
But to more directly answer the question, I mentioned early in the week on DFS Labs that there are some teams that I want to be attacking after Week 1, based on their film – those teams were the Bengals, the Dolphins, and the Panthers. So, give me Travis Etienne, Brian Thomas Jr, Kayshon Boutte, James Conner, and Trey McBride for my player answers here.
The Colts had about the best setup you can imagine at home against the Dolphins who apparently thought it was another preseason game. This week they have a much stiffer test with the Broncos, and I will be extremely interested in how they approach it.
Cincinnati played conservatively on both sides of the ball as they didn’t seem particularly worried about the Browns offense. This week they face a Jaguars team that didn’t look great offensively themselves, but who has a lot of weapons and the Bengals must take seriously. I am interested in if the Bengals try to get more pressure on Trevor Lawrence to force mistakes and/or if they push the tempo early to get their passing game going.
The Eagles faced a Cowboys defense that was very vanilla and conservative in Week 1, leading to a grinder of a gameplan and zero downfield passing. This week they face an always aggressive Chiefs defense who plays a lot of man coverage and just got dusted by the Chargers receivers. The narrative around the Philly passing game could be very different after Week 2 than it was after Week 1.
While Week 1 gives us our first real glimpse of these teams in live action, it is also the first time that these coaching staffs get to see how their team responds and get a feel for what is working and what isn’t. Since the NFL cut the Preseason down to three games instead of four, we have seen the opening week be relatively “sloppy”. Just as we watch the games and make evaluations, the coaches get to do the same and are then likely to adjust some things. Being able to predict adjustments like that can often allow us to be ahead of the field, as the field generally waits to see something first and then react to it. What are a couple of situations (player usage, play calling tendencies, aggression, etc.) that stood out to you in Week 1 that you are expecting coaching staffs to make adjustments on for Week 2?
