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 second week in a row, we have later-week injury news shaking up the way we’re looking at // thinking about the slate, with D’Andre Swift and Rhamondre Stevenson, in particular, shaking up the way we’re thinking about things here. Maybe this is more pronounced for me than for others, as the field seemed pretty willing to go to Tyrone Tracy and Jaylen Warren in a similar price range, but Monangai is obviously in a different tier of DFS plays than those ones, and the availability of TreVeyon Henderson (as well as Kareem Hunt, of course) seems to further open things up. If you were building practice builds throughout the week, your perception of this slate in your actual builds will be different from what you were working with before.
We also have 10 teams implied to score 25+ points, and while four of those teams are expected to win their games easily, the other six teams are in games with close spreads. When we look at individual players on the slate, building with the mindset of “trying to pick the best plays across the board,” there is little enough certainty that it sort of feels like, “I don’t know, will this week be as high-scoring in DFS as it seems?” But when you shift to building through the lens of game environments and the ceiling that can emerge along that path, it does start to feel a lot more like we’ll see scoring pile up this week.
In the context of what we’ve been dealing with to this point in the season, this week is also unique in that we have pricing on certain players reaching a point where we really have to think about what we’re missing out on by spending that much on one player. “Yes, I think this player can have a great game; but do they have a great enough game that I should be taking away this much salary from the rest of my roster?”
Finally — along those same lines — this is a week in which I don’t personally feel all that comfortable paying down at tight end or DST, which is a place where we sometimes free up salary to chase higher-confidence plays in other spots.
Ultimately, it does feel like this will be a higher-scoring DFS week, so the name of the game is turning the math in our favor to maximize our chances of collecting a high score (while also maximizing our chances of a first-place finish if we get the scores we need).
Well for one we’ve added an extra game after several weeks of 10-game slates. One extra game may not sound like a huge deal, but it gives us more options to play on our rosters and it also spreads ownership around more widely.
More specifically to the dynamics of the slate, we have multiple contenders for “best game of the week,” with FOUR games that have big totals (48.5 or higher) and close spreads. That gives us good game environments to target but also spreads out ownership to where there isn’t one clear “best spot” we have to consider either leaning all the way into or away from. We also have multiple other great offenses in great spots with high totals that might be blowouts (Rams, Chargers, Packers). All in all, there are a lot of potential great spots to attack.
We also have what I, at least, would consider some really dubious chalk. We don’t always have this in NFL DFS anymore – generally speaking most chalk is at least a “solid play,” though sometimes it’s quite fragile, but I would argue there are some chalk plays this week that just feel pretty weak (looking at you, Jaylen Warren, Kyren Williams, Tyrone Tracy, and a couple of others). We’ll see if these ownership projections hold up as the week progresses, but I love spots where I think the chalk is really weak.
There are three games on the Week 9 main slate with a game total over 50 points, the first time that has happened this season. This slate carries the highest median game total of the season. There are 11 games on the main slate instead of the 10 we have been used to recently. Pricing appeared to be extremely tight until oodles of value opened up at the running back position. Those four key elements come together to make it highly likely we see increased fantasy scoring this week, meaning we’re likely to see the highest required raw score to ship GPPs of the season. To me, that is the defining aspect of this slate, and we absolutely must be building in a way that gives us a legitimate path to first place.
Beyond that top-level discussion, this is the first slate in a while where we should feel compelled to pay up at quarterback. I am typically a pay-down-at-QB player (most SE/3-Max players are), but this slate dangles Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes in front of our faces in what could be a preview of the AFC Championship game.
There is an interesting dynamic at the running back position now that we have so much value, in that there are numerous pay-up options that project well, there are a couple mid-range options that project well, and there are a few value options that project extremely well. Lots of ways to go with that setup.
And then there’s the wide receiver position, a position that has taken somewhat of a back seat to the others this season based on the current state of the league.
There are a ton of theoretical aspects that make that setup unique, which we’ll dive more into in the End Around!
To me, the unique aspect of this slate is the combination of explosive game environments and clear and massive value options. The cheap running backs cheat code is unlocked by Kareem Hunt, Kyle Monangai, TreVeyon Henderson, Tyrone Tracy Jr., and Jaylen Warren. The fact of the matter is that it is highly unlikely that all of these guys post poor games, with a pretty good chance at least two of them goes for 18 to 22, and a very real path to one or two reaching 25+. This dynamic has a huge impact on the slate. Fitting in perfectly with that is the fact that we have, by my count, four explosive game environments and four other teams who are massive favorites and expected to score a boatload of points. The value options will increase the flexibility of lineups and allow us to play more of the elite options from those awesome spots. It all adds up to a uniquely high scoring slate with a lot of ways to get there.
The Week 9 slate is a juicy one, with several spots that are extremely appealing and have the potential to turn into a shootout. The favorites in this category are::
If building a true game stack (four or more players) around any one of these spots, which one do you prefer and why?
