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?”
For the third consecutive week, running back feels like a really strong/stacked position. The last two weeks, I looked at running back and thought, “I don’t have to overthink this. If I play my favorites from this pool and mix and match the other strong options, I’ll end up in great shape at the position.” Both weeks, that turned out to be the case, and it (obviously) won’t surprise me if we see that again.
Also similar to last week, we have 10 games, we have a high-upside (but highly fragile) quarterback value taking on the Cowboys, and when we ask the question of, “If this fragile QB performs to the downside, who ends up winning the slate instead?” we find that there is really no clear answer.
Where this slate starts to look different from last week (though not a dramatic difference) is that those “other QB spots to consider” feel even thinner this week than what we had in Week 6 (and this, of course, trickles down to wide receiver, where it’s hard to establish much confidence on players across the board).
In short (a rarity), what makes this slate unique, to me, is how similar it looks to something we’ve already seen. This feels like Week 5 with tighter pricing at running back and the volume turned up on QB/WR uncertainty. Let the games begin.
This is the first slate this season where pricing feels tight, and where decisions feel like they need to be made. We also have more games with relatively high game totals, but also a general feeling of a lack of certainty. That is likely to lead to the field placing increased emphasis on the few spots of more perceived certainty (Puka Nacua, Christian McCaffrey, Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Cowboys), while feeling like “we have to account for these spots.” But again, there are five games with a game total between 46.0 and 49.5 points this week, and those places of perceived certainty account for only three of those games. All of that to say, I think there are numerous paths to success on this slate and the field is clearly indicating the path they are likeliest to take.
As Hilow mentioned, pricing is starting to feel tighter. There are still value options, as always, but it’s harder to build a roster that feels really strong top to bottom compared to the first five weeks of the season. We’re also lacking (or at least I feel we’re lacking) one clear “best game environment,” as there are 3 games with game totals of 47+ and close spreads, and a couple of other spots with very high individual team totals.
Hilow and I both talk a lot about the best slates are slates where there are likely a lot of different ways to win, but where the field (or a large chunk of the field) is fixated on just one of those ways.
I think that on DraftKings this is a “two tight end week”, based on the way the salary structure and slate dynamics are shaping up. There are just a lot of tight ends who are priced in a way that their usage and ceiling outcomes far exceed their peers at other positions at the same price points. Additionally, with Puka, CMC, and JT all on the slate and pricing being tighter with those studs being more difficult to fit into lineups the value that those tight ends open up for your roster has extra value.
Last week one of our questions discussed playing two players from the same team without their quarterback and how that was an especially appealing strategy on last week’s smaller 10-game slate as it allows you to make a concentrated bet on a team without having to necessarily build around the quarterback. The results that followed were terrific, as we saw several of these pairings become skeleton keys to the slate::
We have another smaller (10-game) slate this week, so let’s go back to the well. What (if any) player blocks of two non-quarterbacks are you most interested in this week?
