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.
Week 7 of the 2024 NFL season was one of the stranger weeks of football I can remember in the last couple of decades. Not necessarily in terms of the outcomes of the games, but with all the weird injury situations, new injuries, and the overall breakdown of player usage and production there was just a lot that made it a weird slate of games and the lowest week of “winning GPP scores” I can remember in quite some time. The interesting thing about this is that (as JM discussed in a recent Winner Circle pod) people tend to remember what just happened and let it play a bigger role than it should in how they view a specific situation.
In last week’s Oracle, Hilow had a great point in one of the questions about how pricing often has more to do with overall slate scoring than the game environments themselves. This came to fruition as the slate’s lack of value showed up and left a situation where winning GPP scores were very low despite a slate with relatively high game environment expectations. This was the third or fourth week this year where we have seen running backs dominate, and we also had tight ends David Njoku, Kyle Pitts, Brock Bowers, and George Kittle meet or beat the wide receivers and running backs priced near them which made 2-TE builds viable if you chose from the right group of tight ends. Basically, you needed to have built with RB or TE in your flex to have a chance to win last week.
This week there is a lot more value that has opened up due to an increase in games on the main slate (from 10 to 13), 21 of 26 teams carrying implied team totals of 20+ points into the week, and some mispricing from players returning from injuries (looking at you, Tua). This creates a situation where it is very unlikely that the slate plays out in a similar way to what we saw last week, but our cognitive biases will have that fresh in our minds when thinking about how the slate could play out. How do you adjust your sights back to the week at hand after such a strange main slate?
Speaking from my personal point of view :: My process and approach to the NFL season tends to allow me to pretty quickly wipe out thoughts of the week behind. My big-picture thinking of teams, coaches, and game environments makes it beyond-rare for me to like a player “because they are coming off a big game,” or to dislike a player “because they are coming off a bad game” — and I don’t even mean that I consciously avoid that trap; I mean that, at this point — 11 years into doing this — this doesn’t even cross my mind. Similarly, the way a previous slate was constructed, or the way it played out, gets wiped out of my thoughts pretty quickly. I aim to assess my play BEFORE games kick off on Sunday (something I strongly encourage DFS players to do), and then I have a bit of time enjoying the games, a bit of time feeling tense as the games progress and I find myself hoping we had a sharp week for subscribers, and then a bit of time during which enough has been resolved that I feel good about the week from a “work” perspective, and I simply wait to see how the DFS results resolve themselves. Once games end, I shift my mindset pretty quickly, and I typically go on airplane mode for the remainder of Sunday and nearly all of Monday, trying to multiply my time by avoiding screens and soaking up whatever is going on around me. By the time I hit Tuesday, the past week’s slate feels miles away, and my focus immediately becomes sorting through the pieces of that week’s puzzle to see what it looks like.
I have to imagine that Mike, Hilow, and X will have more insightful answers pertaining to the actual question asked — but I also hope that reading through my own thought process on this type of thing triggers valuable thoughts on your end with regards to how you can handle that turning of the page from one week to the next. Each week is its own unique puzzle, and we can’t waste time or energy pulling pieces from last week’s puzzle into something that’s completely different this week. Having a clear process for how you conclude a week and turn the page to the next can be extremely beneficial in helping you maximize your expected value in each new week.
This is a great question but also one I have a tough time answering in a way that I think really adds value to our readers. In my earlier years of DFS I definitely fell victim to thoughts like “this player has been really good lately, I want to play him” or “this guy really bombed last week and I played him, no way I’m playing him again until I see him do well.” But that sort of short-term thinking is incredibly destructive to our results (as I try to remind people whenever I see someone say something like “I’m never playing so-and-so again after they burned me this week!”).
JM says something super interesting that I’ll expand on a bit. He mentioned that he aims to assess his play before the games start, and I think that’s a really worthwhile perspective to consider. We can’t predict outcomes. All we can do is try to make good decisions with the information that we have. Someone isn’t a “good play” or “bad play” AFTER we know the results – they were good or bad BEFORE the game started. Our job as DFS players is to take information and make good decisions with it, and whether or not those decisions are good ones is independent of the (not knowable) outcomes. It’s a hard mindset to really get into, but when people say “process over results,” this is just an expanded way to define what that actually means.
To paraphrase Ted Lasso, the happiest animal in the world is a goldfish, because it has an incredibly short-term memory. As DFS players we need to be the same: we need to take the useful, actionable data out of prior weeks, but we need to have short-term thinking about the outcome (whether or not the guy caught the TD, whether they got tackled at the 1 or got into the end zone, whether the RB got the goal-line carry or the coach gave it to the RB2, etc.).
I love this question because it is framed in a “what is most important” context, which matters much more than most realize. We’ve talked a few times about our individual processes this season, and if you remember, mine includes “diagnosing the slate” on Friday. That involves reading what the slate has to offer to formulate a good idea of what the end goal is on that particular slate. To me, understanding the state of the slate (this is why we begin the End Around with this section) is an important step to grounding your thoughts back to what is likely to be most important on that slate. And part of that reasoning includes a rough estimate of what it will take to win tournaments. We can then reverse engineer how to reach that target when constructing rosters, which will help guide roster construction decisions. Where is the value? How solid is the value? How many people will be on the value? How does that influence the target?
On this particular slate, there is no shortage of potentially viable value pieces, meaning the score needed to win GPPs is likely to be much higher than the previous two weeks (180-183 shipped majors in Week 7 and 188-190 shipped majors in Week 6). We’re likely looking at a slate where 205-215 is going to be required to win tournaments, meaning we need to be targeting beyond 4x when we construct rosters (not just from individual plays because that’s playing the lottery, but in how we are constructing our rosters, in totality). So, how do we get access to “more raw points” this week?
For me, the big thing about this week is understanding that the value available is going to change how the slate plays out as much as anything else. Also, since there are so many games on the slate, the tendency for most people is going to be to try to account for every game and think “oh man, I can’t totally fade that spot”. I think that will especially be true considering last week there weren’t any game environments that took off to the point of being a must-have to build around. Those things being fresh in people’s minds and psychologically driving thought processes will be a big deal, so refocusing on our tried and true roster construction principles will help us avoid those obstacles.
There are two clear situations that are going to drive a lot for this slate. First, the Dolphins offense is facing a relatively intimidating Cardinals defense in the return of QB Tua Tagovailoa, while their players have very suppressed salaries due to their to-date struggles without Tua. Second, the Bucs played on Monday night and lost their top-2 WRs (Mike Evans and Chris Godwin) after pricing came out. This results in a situation where the Bucs have 3 WRs and a TE all projecting for 10 to 30% ownership at price tags below $4,000 on Draftkings, in a game where they are facing a defense they got into a shootout with just two weeks ago.
The question I have around this is from a bit different angle than we usually have for these questions as it is not directly a strategy question, but how we answer it can be a valuable thought process and can give us some insight on the strategies we should take to approaching what will be critical inflection points on the slate. Below are the eight players in question, along with their salaries for Week 8. If Draftkings was given a “do-over” and you were in charge of the pricing, what do you think the appropriate salaries would be for these players and what do you think their ownership would be at those salaries?
