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.
As has been discussed ad nauseam this season, scoring has been a bit hard to come by across the NFL. This week, however, we have a potentially fun situation setting up as we have a whopping FIVE games with totals between 47 and 51 points on a slate where there are only ten total main slate matchups. We have seen several weeks where lower than usual scores have won GPPs and there have been many weeks where only a handful of players had 20+ or 30+ point scores, which had a very specific effect on what types of rosters were finding their way to the top.
With a smaller slate and a high percentage of them profiling as having potential to turn into high scoring affairs, what are your expectations for the winning scores needed for GPPs this week and does any of this have an effect on how you think about players or approach the slate?
“What you need in order to win a tourney,” of course, has to do with a number of factors. How many scores of 30+ points are available? How high are the highest scores on the slate? How high is the ownership on these 30+-pointers and high scores? And finally :: how possible (from a salary perspective) is it to access multiple of these 30+-point scores, and what do you have to sacrifice to get there?
There are a number of wideouts I could see going for 30+ (Justin Jefferson, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Malik Nabers, A.J. Brown, one of the Texans wideouts, Cooper Kupp if he plays and is actually healthy, possibly Jayden Reed, possibly one of the Seahawks, maybe even Diontae Johnson, and maybe someone random who we like for the upside but aren’t necessarily expecting 30+ points from); and while wide receiver looks like a better bet for 30+-pointers than running back to me this week, it wouldn’t surprise me if Saquon, Kyren, Walker, Mixon, or possibly Chuba got there from this position. I think there is an outside shot at Bowers going for 30+, and even in a tough matchup, there is outlier potential for a piece from the 49ers to post a tourney-winning score.
In terms of “what we might have to sacrifice to get there,” it really comes down to what the cheapies can do. Can JuJu or Tre Tucker go for 20 while opening salary elsewhere? Can one of the cheap tight ends go for 15 to 20? Can some random cheapie surprise with a big game?
It’s absolutely possible that we only get a couple games of 30+ points, and that we have to dip into underperforming value to access both of those at once. It’s also absolutely possible that we see a cheapie score 25+, and that five or six guys go for 30+, which would elevate the scoring ceiling across the board.
For me, the approach doesn’t really change. I’m always targeting players capable of scoring 30+ or significantly outperforming salary-based expectations, and I’m always targeting game environments capable of producing outlier scores. The rest is outside of my control, and the best I can do is position myself for “what will make me the most money if it happens.”
So, on the one hand, if we expect lower scores to be able to win tournaments this season that should tell us that we don’t need to chase only the highest-ceiling plays, right? It means cheaper punt guys who can go for 15-20 are more viable, for example, or even that we might be satisfied with 10-12 from a tight end who costs $3k.
But, at least to me, that way lies madness.
Changing our thinking like that has a couple of downsides. First is that we have no way of knowing if we’re right – what if the week is higher scoring than Vegas predicts, and we’re left out in the cold because we built lower-ceiling “safer” lineups? Second, and more importantly, when you start dropping levels of rigor in your assessment process, it becomes really, really easy to start justifying playing weak plays. Falling into the “well, maaaaaaybe…” type of player/team evaluation. At least for me personally, that’s a bit of a slippery slope, and so I don’t want to change the process by which I select players for my player pool at all based on things like Vegas totals or player pricing (note: I am not perfect at this!).
At first glance, the increased game totals would tend to shift our thinking to “higher scores are likely going to be required to win this week.” I would contend that the more correlative function between score needed to win and the slate is player pricing. When it’s so difficult to build rosters around those high game total games due to very few value options on the slate, we aren’t capable of building entirely around those spots. And with passing touchdowns still down, rushing rate up, field goals up, and red zone defense up, I think it’s likely we’re turning a corner in DFS to “210-215 if probably shipping tournaments most weeks” and away from the consistent 240+ scores of previous seasons.
As I’ve discussed in the past, my process generally starts in a vacuum while breaking down every game from a likeliest scenario standpoint. Then I start piecing the slate together to find the endgame goal (what is likely needed to win tournaments this week?). That process gives me a solid base from which to deviate through game theoretic reasoning as I look to exploit the field. On this particular slate, pricing is still so tight and we are still so starved for value that this question basically becomes “will there be a wide receiver priced below $5,000 to put up 25+ DK points while Grant Calcaterra (or some other cheap tight end) does the same at the same time.” I have no clue whether that will happen or not, but I do know that there are likely only to be so many 30+ fantasy scores this week (or 25+, for that matter) and I want as much access to those players as possible.
To that end, I truly don’t know if game totals or the presence (or absence) of value to go with the macro player pricing is more correlated to the score needed to ship tournaments, that’s just my read on the situation through experience (without doing an actual study on it).
Bringing back a weekly staple of The Oracle, what makes this slate particularly unique?
