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.
For the first time this season, a weekly staple of The Oracle: “what makes this slate unique?”
Oh, man! – so much.
From my Angles Pod notes:
1) Literally the maximum number of games we can have on a Main Slate (outside of Week 18), with 13.
2) Nine teams implied to score 24 to 25.5, with several other teams close to that mark and no teams really pulling away (albeit with each of these, of course, somewhat unique against the others).
3) Five backup quarterbacks starting (which isn’t even to mention the running back injuries that are impacting the slate)
Another thing not in my notes for the Angles Pod :: still quite a few wideouts who are underpriced relative to where they’ll be later in the year.
And on top of all that, one game that clearly has a better shot than any other to shoot out…but that is, by no means, as slam-dunk to do so.
Let the games begin!
Let’s go with “what happened to all the quarterbacks?” It’s been a rough season for QB injuries so far and that’s also introducing a lot of values, with not one but TWO minimum-priced QBs (on Draftkings, at least). Let’s also add some RB value thanks to injuries to Aaron Jones and Zach Charbonnet and all of a sudden this slate is looking like a real stars and scrubs build. We also have one game that’s going to attract a ton of ownership (CHI/DAL, duh) and a few other high-end plays in good spots attracting ownership due to all of the value (CMC, Bijan, JSN, Puka, McBride) and this slate is shaping up to be our first extremely chalky slate of the year. We can have a high degree of confidence in how a large chunk of the field is going to build, and when we know what our opponents are likely to do, that makes our job easier to figure out how to do something differently.
This is the largest main slate of the 2025 season so far. There are 12 games with a game total between 41.0 and 46.5, with the lone outlier being everyone’s favorite Cowboys versus Bears. Week 1 was dangerous because we knew very little. Week 2 was dangerous because we thought we knew more than we did. Week 3 is closer to Week 2 than it is to Week 1 in that we don’t have a large enough sample to draw sweeping conclusions just yet, but the majority of the field is likely to overweight what we’ve seen to this point. That creates an interesting dynamic for the slate. There are likely many teams that haven’t shown us their true colors just yet, and there are many games that are experiencing suppressed projections because of it. I want to be relentlessly hunting for upside on a slate like this, and if you tuned into Searching for Ceiling earlier today, you likely understand what I mean by that statement. Ditch what we think we know about this slate – where are the spots where true ceiling can develop?
It is so early in the season and we have multiple teams with fluctuating quarterback situations that alter what pricing/value looks like on the slate as well as make it difficult to know what to expect from their offenses, their teammates, and the overall game environments they are dealing with. The CIN // MIN game, for example, is one that entering the season we would have looked at with wide eyes as a smash spot – Joe Burrow is one of the best in the league against the blitz and Vikings defensive coordinator Brian Flores blitzes like a mad man regardless of opponent, while the Bengals defense appeared to be a mess and everyone was excited about J.J. McCarthy taking the Vikings offense to another level. Now, we have Jake Browning at QB for the Bengals and Carson Wentz for the Vikings. Both seem likely to do OK in this spot, but the chances of a “game of the year” type shootout appear far less likely. Add in the injury to Aaron Jones, which puts Jordan Mason in play as the likely best RB value on the slate in that same game, and there is a lot to think about just in that one game. In addition, we have Justin Fields out with a concussion and Brock Purdy and Jayden Daniels in doubt. The really unique thing about all of this is that it is happening so early in the season. It is common later in the year to have a few teams with things in flux, but we know a lot about most of the teams by then. This week, we still know so little about a lot of these offenses (or at least we should be less confident in our assumptions now than we would be later in the year). This leaves us in a spot on a massive 13-game slate where there is really uncertainty across the board and that makes for a volatile mix at this point in the season.
We start the season with Week 1 and all of our preconceived notions about teams and situations. Then we head into Week 2 where we have to weigh the initial thoughts on these teams with what we saw on the field in Week 1. Now we head into Week 3, where it is the first time we have multiple data points to compare and we can start to get a feel for what some of these teams look like. For example, the Giants offense looked atrocious in Week 1 against the Commanders and elite in Week 2 against the Cowboys. The big difference was Washington getting consistent pressure on Russell Wilson while Dallas did not.
Are there any other teams/players that stand out to you as spots where the data we have gathered so far is telling you something about their outlooks? This could be a team that has performed well due to a soft schedule but has some underlying issues waiting to be exposed…or teams who have thus far been disappointing but you attribute it in large part to matchup and/or game environment….or something like the Giants example where you can see that a certain team will be very matchup dependent.
