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?”
Lots of fun stuff on this week’s slate.
First off, pretty quietly, we have all of Lamar // Allen // Mahomes // Hurts // Herbert on this slate (and we nearly had Jayden, too!).
We also have a double dose of “underpriced number two running back stepping into the lead role” — but unusually, both guys are playing in the same game, which should lower combinatorial ownership.
We have an afternoon window that’s full of attractive game environments.
We have some clear funnels — in terms of pricing and structure on the slate — that should push immense ownership toward CMC and Puka (and both are good plays).
We have the Bills and Lions carrying the highest implied team totals on the slate, but both are on teams where it’s sometimes tough to know who will benefit in the box score, and both are in games they are expected to win easily.
And we have the typical “handful of health question marks” that may not be answered until late Saturday night or even (Jauan Jennings) as late as Sunday afternoon.
Buckle up!
This is an interesting week because it’s the first week of the season where we have several high total games to choose from and then a few others that could potentially surprise to the upside. Unlike last week, there isn’t just one game that stands head and shoulders above the rest. We have value spots, and we don’t really have a lot of chalk…there are only a handful of plays over 20% projected ownership currently, which means it’s easy to go a lot of different directions. It’s a fun one.
The four highest game total games on the slate are in the afternoon, injecting an interesting dynamic to this slate. Expect significant ownership from those games (one excluded, which I’ll talk about around the site in other spots), making it a “PMR”, or projected minutes remaining, slate. We also have two backfields that have devolved into potential workhorse situations due to injury and CMC on the slate as the player leading the league in XFP/G, at any skill position. This is all likely to steer rosters in a similar direction this week, making it another slate where we don’t have to get too crazy to generate meaningful leverage.
As Hilow mentions, the afternoon slate shapes up as a great one and adds layers of dynamics to this. So much focus is always put on “ownership” of individual players, with analysis of the “chalk” and trying to find ways to be different. But we know that chalk is often chalk for a reason and also that across any set of games we often have a certain amount of fantasy points that can and will be scored. There are a lot of really good plays on this slate, but frankly there don’t seem to be a lot of spots where players are likely to put up outlandish scores that “put the slate out of reach” by not having them. What these two dynamics combine to form is the ability for us to build unique rosters simply through roster construction from looking at the two sets of games as separate player pools. Making a roster composed entirely of players from the early games would give you a level of uniqueness because it is so hard psychologically to make a roster and have no one from those last four games that project so well. Likewise, the late games have the highest game totals on the slate and you could make a lineup of players just from those four games with an extremely high ceiling as well. Considering the fact that the early slate of games has so many of the highest projected ownership players (the top three QBs, four of the top six RBs, wide receiver four through eleven, and the top eight defenses), if you simply made a lineup from the afternoon only set of players you would naturally be very unique despite the fact that you are playing all players from the highest projected games.
The beautiful thing about DFS is how each slate is like its own puzzle and the pieces always look different. Looking at pricing for the Week 4 slate presents us with a situation that becomes a bit interesting to think through. We are only two weeks removed from a slate where a bunch of the high-end wide receivers went off and provided a specific path to optimal, yet on this slate we are in a situation where there are seemingly far less paths to that outcome at the high end. In Week 2, Amon-Ra St. Brown and Malik Nabers went wild against the Bears and Cowboys while Ja’Marr Chase racked up his stats on massive volume playing from behind. Puka Nacua is obviously a great play, but the next four wide receivers in pricing are in iffy spots from a ceiling perspective (especially compared to the guys who broke the slate in Week 2) – ARSB plays the Browns elite defense, Nabers has a new/raw/rookie QB and faces a very good Chargers defense, Nico Collins is working in a struggling offense, and Emeka Egbuka’s salary has risen significantly while he is likely to deal with Quinyon Mitchell’s shadow coverage against the Eagles.
In contrast, at the running back position we can see there are a lot of players in very good spots at various levels of pricing. This makes it so that it is likely that there are multiple ways to stay “on track” at running back and the path to first will be decided by whether a couple of these elite guys can have a spike week that makes them “necessary”, or if they all have modest outputs which in turn results in cheaper wide receivers being the path to optimal.
With all of this in mind, what is your primary approach to the wide receiver position likely to be this week?
