Sunday, Feb 11th — Late
Bye Week:
Bears
Bengals
Bills
Broncos
Browns
Buccaneers
Cardinals
Chargers
Colts
Commanders
Cowboys
Dolphins
Eagles
Falcons
Giants
Jaguars
Jets
Lions
Packers
Panthers
Patriots
Raiders
Rams
Ravens
Saints
Seahawks
Steelers
Texans
Titans
Vikings

The Scroll Reflection Edition. 6.21.

JUMP TO

    One Week Season

    Where Sharp DFS Players Hang Out


    Early Bets

    Published Monday Afternoon

    Why does Vegas set lines? What is their goal? Well, Vegas sets lines in an attempt to get exactly half of the action on each side of every line they post. In this case, they take the rake, guarantee a profit, and move on. So, does that mean Vegas lines are perfectly set? Furthermore, does it mean they are always perfectly set early in the week? No! Every week this season (starting Week 2), we’ll be jumping into early-week betting line inefficiencies to take advantage of before they move. This line movement can be caused by a number of factors, but the primary reasons for movements after initial line release are public sentiment and recency biases (shark money typically doesn’t come in until later in the week, when bettors have more complete information). With that, let’s jump in!

    +EV LINES ::

    BUF (-5) @ TeNN

    The Bills come into Week 6 with the number one ranked scoring offense and number one ranked scoring defense, a potent combination against a Titans team allowing 24th-ranked 26.0 points per game. Beyond the analytics, what we want to see out of our early-week bets is expected value, and based on public perception (Bills coming off a lopsided win against the Chiefs), the underlying metrics, and the fact that this is the Monday Night Football game this week (which allows additional time for line movement), it is likeliest this line moves heavier in favor of the Bills as the week progresses.

    DAL @ NEP Under 49.5

    Again, we see a Cowboys line set to cater to public perception, when we know they have shifted their offense to a very run-centric juggernaut. Their opponent, the Patriots, have all but abandoned the run over the previous three weeks with a 63% situation-neutral pass rate, but Mac Jones holds 29th-ranked completed air yards per pass attempt at just 3.5, indicating an offense that is forced to march the field. New England’s defense ranks fifth in the league in scoring allowed per game at just 18.4, furthering the possibility each team sees stalled drives. I would set this line between 46.5-47.0, so take the additional padding and move on!

    CIN (-3) @ DET

    The biggest appeal here is the absence of the hook on the favorite against one of only two winless teams remaining in the NFL. Coming off an overtime loss against the Packers, look for the Bengals to place great importance on this game as they currently sit half a game behind the Ravens for the lead in the AFC North (Ravens are currently down 16-3 on MNF as I write this… ahem, 22-3). It is likeliest this line moves further towards the away favorite as the week progresses. 

    BONUS:

    GBP (-4.5) @ CHI

    Sitting just above the “magic spread range with a hook,” the Packers present a situation where the line is likeliest to move in their favor as the week progresses. I expect to see Green Bay approach six to six-and-a-half-point favorites before Sunday.

    HONORABLE MENTIONS::

    TB (-7) @ PHI (THURSday GaMe)

    Away favorite with no hook, making it likeliest the line moves further in favor of the away favorite. This one falls into “honorable mentions” because of the large spread on an away favorite, which is not typically a situation we like to find ourselves in.

    MIA (-3) @ JAX

    Away favorite with no hook, making it likeliest the line moves further in favor of the away favorite. Jacksonville is in a world of hurt from a leadership perspective and until we see the locker room take the reins in that regard it is likely this team continues to struggle.

    ARI (+2.5) @ CLEV

    This line should be closer to a “pick ‘em” than it currently stands, leaving a good deal of value on the side of the Cardinals. The last remaining undefeated team in the league faces arguably its toughest opponent of the season, but the expected value in the points plus the hook is hard to ignore.

    Process|Review

    In this weekly video, Xandamere reviews his roster-builds & process.


    Maximize Your Builds With OWS + FantasyLabs


    Week 5 Review

    Process Points

    Lesson of the Week: Delicate Balance

    That was a rough one. Across my play on three sites (FanDuel, DraftKings, and Yahoo), I had around a -80% ROI for the week. It was a crazy and frustrating week on many levels. My daughter was sick (so she couldn’t go to daycare, which threw off my process), she struggled to sleep, and there were two nights last week when I actually got less than two hours of sleep because I was up with her. Then I got sick, and I had some commitments on Friday night and Saturday that threw off more of my process from the first four weeks. Just a lot going on — and it showed.

    For those of you who read the NFL Edge last week, you will know my writeup of the Tampa Bay game was pretty much spot on — I talked about how Brady would want a bounce-back game after the clunker in New England. The Miami defense was not one to fear, and I predicted this as an explosion spot, and that “Tom Brady is not one to take his foot off the gas early and will likely stay aggressive deep into this game, even with a lead.” How does someone who wrote something like that then play a large number of lineups across three sites and not have ANY Tampa Bay double stacks with the WRs? Zero. About 1% of my total lineups had Brady, and those were on FanDuel and double-stacked Evans//Brate or Brown//Brate. I played Brown as a standalone play as well at a decent clip, but the fact remains that this is a game I dug deeply into and researched, wrote an article for thousands of subscribers, and then didn’t even follow my own advice!!

    There are many other things I had “right” and “wrong” this week, but I use the Tampa Bay example for the lesson part of the article this week because it highlights something bigger: I was distracted. With everything going on in my life, I still tried to play my normal volume (actually slightly higher than normal after a couple of good weeks). DFS is a huge part of my life and contributes to how I provide for my family — from both writing and long-term profits — yet, somehow, the rest of “life” got in the way, and I didn’t recognize it or adjust.

    There is a great quote from Alan Stein that I often use in my coaching — “how you do anything is how you do everything.” The idea of the quote for players is that if they are sloppy in many areas of their life (routine, schoolwork, sleep habits, eating, etc.), then they will also be sloppy on the court and never realize their potential. They will never have the discipline needed to be great at the thing they really love if they do not also have discipline in other areas of life. On a micro (weekly) level, I think this is an important lesson for us to take into our DFS play. Obviously, DFS is not everything. It is just a part of life that we happen to take pretty seriously and has financial ramifications. There are many other things in life that we must balance, and when that balance is thrown off for a week, we need to recognize that the chaos we are dealing with in other areas is likely to spill into our process. The most +EV thing I could have done last week was simply recognizing what was happening around me, pumping the brakes, and lowering my volume. When most people reflect, they want to focus on the football things they got right and wrong from the previous week, but sometimes it is more important to think about the “why” and be able to zoom out and be honest with yourself. Everything in life is a delicate balance, and when that balance is thrown off, it is hard even to be the best version of yourself — let alone the best out of thousands of people fighting you for first place.

    Lineup Reviews 

    As outlined in my +EV Primer course (you can find in the Marketplace – either by itself or in the bundle with my player pool course), one of my approaches that keeps me from getting too high or low week-to-week is playing consistent contests and approaching them from a season-long perspective and using that to evaluate my play and ROI. This season, in this article, I will be tracking my progress weekly as I play the Single Entry (SE), 3-max, and 5-max tournaments in the $20 to $150 price range on DraftKings main slate for all 18 weeks. Rather than sweating or worrying about my ROI every week and “hoping to cash,” – my goal for the season is to maximize profit relative to that long-term investment total. The results of a given week are irrelevant.

    Each week I will review the best and worst of my 11 lineups from my “Roster Block” of SE/3-Max/5-Max. Below are this week’s results, and you can find more information about my process/theory for this in my Week 1 Process Points article.

    Best Lineup ($500k Spy, Single Entry, $100)

    The “story” I was telling: I really like how this lineup turned out. The core stack here (Lawrence // Laviska // AJ Brown) was a game that I was high on and ended up scoring 56 points. Trevor Lawrence and AJ Brown were both tackled inside the one-yard line. Laviska Shenault was inexplicably ignored for 3+ quarters by a team that struggled to generate offense (then busted a 58-yard play when they finally got the ball in his hands). The ingredients were there; they just needed a couple of things to break differently. As I outlined in The Oracle last week, I was high on Waller this week because he had the potential to lap the field at his position, and getting him in there at sub-5% was a great play I’ll take any day — he had some missed opportunities for big plays and TDs that just missed. I ate the Mattison chalk here, and a big hat tip to JM on the Kadarius Toney play. He’s someone that I was considering throughout the week, but after listening to JM on the Angles podcast, he became more of a staple for me on DraftKings. Finally, the Chubb-Allen correlation was the right play but the wrong Chargers receiver. I played Chubb with Mike Williams on Fanduel and Yahoo but sided with Allen on DraftKings because of the price difference. I thought that game was going to be overlooked and wanted to snap up Chubb’s price decrease. I can’t say that I saw the 89 combined points coming, though.

    Worst Lineup ($200k Three-Point Stance, 5-max, $33):

    The “story” I was telling: I always want to have early exposure to these young rushing QBs with upside. I paired Trey Lance with Brandon Aiyuk because Aiyuk had been playing a lot, and I was hoping there was a connection between them from camp. Remember, Aiyuk was forced to practice with the second team (i.e., Lance) a lot during his stint in the “doghouse” — and a player of Aiyuk’s talent at $4,500 in a game they may have to throw a lot, it just made sense to me. I referenced my thoughts on Hopkins in last week’s The Oracle article, and he made for a great correlation piece with the SF players. Obviously, Barkley’s early injury was bad for business but based on Devontae Booker’s output, I think Saquon also would have done very well. I played Jefferson // Hockenson as leverage off the more popular RB’s from that game — unfortunately, it appears teams are not allowed to score 20 points in games involving the Vikings anymore. Good to know. The Williams // Edwards pairing is one thing I don’t love in hindsight for this lineup. I liked the play, but it really wasn’t necessary with all the other things going on in this lineup — I already had two players under 5% owned, leverage on the chalkiest player on the slate, and no players who were projected over 20%. The risk associated with pairing those two players from a questionable game environment wasn’t worth the “upside” that a best-case scenario would have provided. My thought process was that I liked Waller this week… which led me to play some Fields + Mooney // ARob stacks with Waller… which led me to focus more on this game than it deserved.

    Week 5 Results: No cashes from this roster block this week. Such is life. As outlined above, we just need to get the process back in order and have some more discipline. GPP life is high variance as is, no need to throttle that up from things I can control.

    Week 5 Investment: $792

    Week 5 Winnings: $0

    Estimated Yearly Investment: $14,000

    Yearly Winnings: $1,300

    Bottom-Up Breakdown

    Dwprix breaks down the top lineups in the OWS Bottom-Up Build challenge.

    Week 5 Review

    Each week I will review the Bottom-Up Build contest, looking at how the winner got to the top of the leaderboard. The purpose of the Bottom-Up Build is to put players in that you would feel comfortable rostering in a regular contest (price considered floor and high ceiling) so that when you’re building for these other contests, you’re not struggling with the last couple spots and jamming someone in that you are uncomfortable with.

    Overview

    Rules :: Max $44k Salary (exceeding $44k salary will disqualify entry); must use OWS avatar to be eligible for prizes

    Total Entries :: 197 (155 eligible since 42 didn’t use an OWS avatar and/or went over salary and didn’t enter a lineup)

    Prizes (Edge Points) :: 1st = 100 Edge // 2nd = 50 // 3rd = 25

    Highest Owned Player :: Alexander Mattison – 64%

    Highest Owned Stack :: Trevor Lawrence (22%) // Leviska Shenault (45%)

    See All The Entries :: Contest Link

    Winners:

    1st Place: Abright8

    2nd Place: The_franchise_01

    3rd Place: Dwprix

    JMtoWin’s Bottom-Up Build

    Analysis

    This week I was lucky enough to get 3rd place! I would like to pass along my Edge Points to 4th place finisher, Josahood. If you’re out there Josahood, email support. 

    First place finisher, Abright8, used a QB/RB combination of Trey Lance and Elijah Mitchell. If the 49ers were going to win this game with Trey Lance under center, against the leader in points per game going into the week, it was going to be on the ground and by keeping the total low. The 49ers lost but held the Cardinals to just 17 points, by far their lowest point total on the season. Lance’s 89 rush yards and Mitchell’s 43 accounted for 87% of the 49ers rushing yards.  Unfortunately, the only TD the 49ers scored was a rushing TD from Deebo Samuel. Abright8 took two opposing receivers, Davante Adams and Jamar Chase, from one of the highest total game going into the slate, expecting it to be a shootout. The Packers were also missing their best corner, Jaire Alexander.

    Second place finisher, The_Franchise_01, built around a game with two bad defenses facing one another but with plenty of DFS relevance on the offensive sides.  They used two lower-priced players from the team expected to be trailing to form a stack, Trevor Lawrence and Laviska Shenault, and paid up on the other side, rostering Derrick Henry and AJ Brown.  The lineup was built around one of the sneakier, high total games of the week.

    My third place roster was built knowing I wanted to roster Trevor Lance, assuming he would be able to pay off at his price tag. Stacking him with Ross Dwelley was an unsuccessful way to pair him with a TE who was on the field a bunch while differentiating from the other viable, cheap TEs on the slate. I rostered both Ezekiel Elliott and Ceedee Lamb. I was expecting the Cowboys to be able to put a bunch of points on the board and thought the Giants could hang with them. Daniel Jones left the game and the Cowboys were able to control the game on the ground. The Cowboys rushed 39 times while Dak Prescott threw 32 times. They showed they will keep the ball on the ground if ahead, making it hard for Ceedee and Zeke to hit together. 

    Putting It Together

    Last week, I said it was important to have one player get 30+ DK points in this tournament.  Well, this week the top two lineups had four at 30+ and my third place lineup had three with Ezekiel Elliot also getting 28. It was a high scoring week overall.

    All three of the top finishers played Alexander Mattison, the highest owned player on the slate. He was a smash play being just $5.5k as a home favorite expected to get all the RB carries, while also having a pass game role, and playing against a bad run defense. You just don’t get that anymore on DK. Of course, if you faded him and he failed, you would’ve gained a massive advantage on the field. We also all used Jamar Chase who has shown a very high ceiling for his price and was on a team expected to be trailing in one of the highest total games. Min-priced Curtis Samuel was also on all of our rosters. He saw 25 snaps the prior week but ended up getting hurt after five snaps this week.

    Tournament of Champions

    We are pumped to announce we will be having a Bottom-Up Build Tournament of Champions! The TOC will take place Week 18 and first place will win an OWS Inner Circle-For-Life ⭕️ membership with additional prizes to other qualifiers! All weekly first place finishers will be eligible. Congrats to those who have already qualified: Sgmain18, Spastictoaster, Swench1919, Mikeall65, and abright8. 

    Week 6 :: Bottom-Up Tourney

    Every week, you can click here for the newest contest link for the upcoming Bottom-Up Tourney.

    Rules

    1. Must be using an OWS Avatar to be eligible to win. This can be found on your profile page, or at the top of this week’s NFL Edge!
    2. Single Entry // 200 Entries
    3. Max $44k Salary (exceeding $44k will automatically disqualify your entry)
    4. Prizes (Edge Points) :: 1st = 100 / 2nd = 50 // 3rd = 25
    5. Winners please email support@oneweekseason.com with your DK Screenname

    Missed Opportunities

    Larejo123 takes a look at some of the overlooked plays and “missed opportunities” from the week behind us, identifying the thought processes and approaches that could have led us to those plays.

    It’s tough to gauge how well our OWS family does each week other than through the Discord discussions and Reflection pieces here, but it seems like Week 5 might have been one of our most profitable to date. The Edge writeups last week were on fire, and The Scroll came in hot, leading to some nice takedowns across the community. 

    This is a long NFL season and I’m so pumped we’ll be here together each week. It’s going to be a marathon into January, and I know we’re all here for it. For those who do actually read down to my pieces in the Reflection and the Scroll, thank you! Starting next week, I’m going to try to remember to do a reflection of reflections to build some core principles out for the rest of the season (I could have done it this week, but I can’t even begin to tell you how rough my weekend was traveling on Southwest Airlines), so in weeks 6-18, we’ll be building our best lineups yet!

    As it always seems, this week had it’s good and bad. Let’s dive in!

    Browns & Chargers

    A 47 point total (closed at 46.5 in some places). A run-first team, coming off a 14-point game against an average defense (Minnesota, 14th DVOA) facing up against a team (Chargers) who had put up 30 and 28 points over the last two games, but still had a stigma from its over-owned Week 2 matchup with Dallas. Both teams also boasted top-ten defenses: Cleveland 3rd in DVOA with the Chargers ranked 9th. It wasn’t the perfect setup, but we can see why it wasn’t the attention-grabbing game it should have been right out of the gates. When I replied in The Oracle about my liking this game to go over, the basic angle I saw were these narratives. The recency bias of the stinker the Browns put up in Week 4 at Minnesota, combined with this Chargers team only playing one game on the main slate since their Week 2 debacle. It seemed like this late game just wasn’t getting the attention it deserved, even more so when you consider how potent both of these offenses can be. 

    Imagine being overweight on this game, however, and only profiting $10! While this article is not about my personal results, I rarely cover many squares as a mini-MME player (three to five lineups, usually) so playing a bunch of Keenan Allen and Austin Hooper really canceled out the Nick Chubb, Austin Ekeler, and Justin Herbert lineups I built this week. In hindsight, the two players who I should have had more of were Kareem Hunt and Mike Williams. I talked about how productive Hunt and Chubb have been as a player block in last week’s Willing to Lose, and their combined DK weekly point totals now look like this: 40.2, 23.1, 35.9, 31.1, and now 52.9! Makes you (me) feel really bad about spending a lot of time thinking about playing David Montgomery, Elijah Mitchell, or Chase Edmonds. 

    The other mega miss for me was Mike Williams. He has to be crowned your new alpha WR1 in LAC. DraftKings was telling us something this week when they priced Williams above Allen. They were calling this a changing of the guard. By doing this, it all but locked in Williams as the likely lower-owned player, which in hindsight, should have made us realize how much better leverage he would provide in tournaments. Slotting in any player who is in a full-time (+75% of the snaps for WR) role coming off a one-catch game should also be +EV over time. The signs were there, but I ignored them as I felt Allen’s movement around the formation would pay off better. 

    Two closing thoughts from this game: 1) a 46 to 49 Vegas-implied total range is typically a sweet spot for identifying where the under-owned game environments could be and 2) good offenses will usually prevail over good defenses (a bad offense also beats a bad defense).

    Candidates for next week: Vikings at Panthers, Bengals at Lions

    Avoiding Chalk Because of Play-Style

    If I asked most of you what kind of DFS player you are, I’d be willing to bet most would respond by saying they are a leverage, contrarian, or against-the-field player. And those adjectives would be mostly true. A few years ago, I would have described myself in a DFS sense as contrarian to a fault. I always loved seeing those sub 1% owned plays locked into my lineups and felt like I accomplished something just by identifying those plays. I sometimes led the field in the lowest combined ownership, but I rarely won with that strategy. Fast forward a few years, and I started to realize how to be a smarter contrarian, meaning I embraced chalk here and there to complement my zero-one percent owned players. Then I had more success. This started to prove to me that ownership matters, but balancing chalk and leverage is always the way to go.

    I know I’m stating the obvious here, but moving forward to today, I try to make a conscious effort to ignore ownership. It’s unnecessary sometimes. There’s a reason why certain players will be over 30% owned on an NFL slate: they are good plays. The goal in DFS should not be avoiding the chalky good plays. The goal in DFS should be building better rosters with a shot at first place. Week 5 reminded me why I need to continue to try to ignore ownership. When I was building my rosters this week, I wanted a good chunk of Derrick Henry. He had the road narrative along with the Jags defense, it was just too much in his favor. In his price range, there weren’t many alternatives, so where it made sense, I put him in. I think I played one Alvin Kamara share instead of Henry, but even that share was one too many. After the Dalvin Cook news, I did not play any Alexander Mattison. Why? Because I didn’t really sit down to look at my rosters after inactives before kickoff, and because for some reason, I felt oddly comfortable with Elijah Mitchell, Damien Williams, and Chase Edmonds.

    We’ve talked over and over again on OWS about the importance of late swap. And yet, I didn’t practice it this week. (Technically, I know Mattison wasn’t a late swap but post 11:30 am EST news counts as a late swap in my book). So really, why didn’t I play Mattison? Because of my play style. I knew he’d be high-owned but I didn’t care. I felt a sense of false confidence that more players would jump off the Mitchells, Williams, and Edmonds out there which would drive down my ownership and increase my leverage! Yes, I know it’s a crazy thought. I craved seeing those low ownership percentages enough that I just ignored the most obvious play on the slate.

    I created a blind spot for myself by not playing a good play out of pure laziness and false confidence. If looking closer at my rosters, I would have seen which had the game environments, which could be lower-owned, and then Mattison could have fit right into that roster narrative. I also gave in on my ownership cravings, something I do far too often. Don’t ignore obvious plays just because of your style of play. It’s not sharp to always fade Henry nor is it sharp to play a fourth-string WR at minimum price with a 15% snap share. Find your balance!

    Candidates for next week: Lamar Jackson, Tyreek Hill, Jonathan Taylor, Cooper Kupp

    Confirmation Bias from Week to Week

    Most of us know confirmation bias and what it is. But let me tell you how this affected my play this week. Two weeks ago in Willing to Lose, I highlighted Saquon Barkley and Kenny Golladay as a player block going against the New Orleans Saints. The Giants had a low implied Vegas total but lost two of their top three wide receivers, and with Saquon healthy again, I really liked the volume they could get. That week, Barkley had 29.6 DK points, while Golladay put up 20.6 points in the Giants road win. All of this happened, while Kadarius Toney actually led the Giants in targets with nine. Great confirmation on a great leveraged player block.

    As Week 5 approached, I started to spend some time thinking through how the Giants could keep pace with the Cowboys. And where did my mind go? To Barkley and Golladay, of course. I also went as far as to look into Evan Engram because he’s an athletic freak, and the Cowboys against tight ends has been profitable for years. Still ignoring Toney. Then JM and others went deep on Toney around the tail end of the weekend, and I still played Amon St. Brown (another confirmation bias of mine, two weeks in a row, why?). My point in this is nobody is immune from confirmation bias. I think the most dangerous form is after winning a GPP. If you win, there is nothing stopping you from playing the exact same way for the rest of the season. You’ll be dense to a fault, because you saw it work. But even if you are cashing frequently and making great calls, you’re still likely to go back to those wells. Recognize where you got things right, how you could have been more right, and make notes of that. For me, Toney leading the team in targets even while my Saquon and Kenny G shares were doing well should have been a clear sign. I ignored it out of hubris, and we all saw what Toney did on Sunday. Find your lens and keep it clear.

    Above The Field

    The Squirrely Nature of Shootouts

    Congrats to Milly Winner nkoerner25 for landing one of his two (TWO!) lineups atop all others. A beautiful double-stack (no bring-back) featuring the greatest living human being, Thomas Edward Patrick Brady Jr.

    In The Scroll leading up to this week, I mentioned that I’d be running half of my Brady lineups without a bring-back from the Dolphins. The logic is that Miami didn’t need to keep pace in this game for the Buccaneers to rack up points. Brady and company are in full scorched-earth mode, leaving the pedal to the metal for 60 minutes with little regard for the scoreboard…or the opponent.

    This winning lineup featured four players with ownership at 6.4% or lower and a cumulative ownership totaling 115.9%. This year’s winning scores have had significantly less ownership, but the chalk smashed this week, so the cumulative numbers were buoyed somewhat.

    In case you’re curious, nkoerner25’s other lineup was a Trevor Lawrence double stack that finished in 96,748th place. That 2nd lineup didn’t put too much of a dent in his overall ROI, though. I think he compensated nicely.

    Live it up, brother!

    “youdacao” is the man.

    If you’ve been studying tournament results long enough, you’ve seen youdacao’s name plenty. He’s a Finance/Economics guy that started playing DFS in 2015 and has been wreaking havoc on leaderboards since. In Week 5’s Millionaire Maker, Youda landed 78 of his 150 lineups above the cash line with nine in the top 1,003, including 22nd and 46th place.

    How did he do it? Let’s look under the hood a little.

    He invested significant ownership capital in four QBs. Two of them got there, and two fell short. Imagine the glee when that Chargers/Browns game just kept going berserk like a meth-fueled attack squirrel (google that shit, it’s real).

    As important as who Youda played is who he didn’t play. Fading the 49ers/Cardinals QBs entirely and tossing in only three Daniel Jones rosters put him a cumulative 28.3% below the field on three QBs that died a miserable death on Sunday.

    Looking only at the 22 Justin Herbert lineups, 3-stacks were used exclusively, yet the three players varied in interesting ways. This leads me to believe that Youda likely made a rule that forced at least one Chargers player with Herbert and then threw all of the players from this game into a pool and said… “use exactly two.”

    I haven’t approached it in exactly this manner before, but I like it. It gives you a blend of pieces from a game and provides room for the projections to breathe a little. If you don’t love the pieces on the other side of a game stack…don’t play one! No need to force one in there just because someone taught you to!

    I love the decisions youdacao made at RB.

    Trimming his pool down to 12 probably wasn’t easy this week, with so many viable options available. FOMO is a thing that remains a leak in many DFS players’ games, myself included.

    Getting significantly above the field on the cheap RB chalk (Alexander Mattison) while executing a semi-fade on the expensive chalk (Derrick Henry) was an elegantly aggressive way to handle them. Taking a bold stand on some lessor-owned RBs in D’Andre Swift, James Robinson, and Josh Jacobs was an adept way to gain a potential advantage on the field as well. I loved Saquon Barkley this week and rostered him in about 24% of my lineups, but Youda managed to dodge that injury bullet, getting under the field by about 40%.

    A peek at youdacao’s WR allocations provides further insight into how all of these puzzle pieces fit together.

    To achieve 78% of Davante Adams, an expensive WR, concessions had to be made elsewhere. I believe the difference between good and great players is that guys like Youda can finesse these concessions while increasing leverage elsewhere. The semi-fade of Derrick Henry is one example, and his utilization of the low-owned, inexpensive RB’s is another. The puzzle pieces fit together perfectly then, to stack the shit out of Joe Burrow, who had a talented set of three reasonable-priced receivers and a built-in bring-back in the form of Adams. Worth noting here is that the stack sizes were not treated the same here as with the Justin Herbert stacks. In this case, the Bengals receivers were used solo, in groups of two, and in one case all three Bengals WRs were crammed in there.

    Here’s a look at how youdacao rounded out his allocations at TE and DST.

    I’ve been putting plenty of thought lately into how to approach the highly variant position of DST. Xandamere and Hilow have discussed fading the highest owned defenses in tournaments simply because the degree of variance is so great. Why jump on with everyone else’s guess when you can roster a lessor-owned defense that has just as much chance of a ball being tipped and returned for a score? Makes sense. I’m guessing those guys would agree that this only really matters when a defense is getting really chalky. The other side of the coin is to just roster the cheapest defenses regardless of ownership because since we don’t know what the hell is gonna happen anyway, why not just spend the money elsewhere? At 13.32% and below, I think Week 5 became a “do whatever the hell you want” situation at DST. The possible exception being the WFT defense, and I’m fine with youdacao’s approach of going almost 2x the field on the very affordable yet disappointing group.

    The biggest surprise this week was that the Patriots DST was owned 6.56% despite costing a ridiculous $4900. I hope DraftKings’ little experiment is over. That’s just silly.

    Not quite as silly as this squirrel situation, though.

    Good luck in Week 6, Ladies and Gents. Let’s tilt our faces off in the gameday-chat channel on Sunday.

    LFG!

    Underowned UD

    Lex Miraglia takes a look under the hood of the Underdog Battle Royale tournament: identifying what works, what doesn’t, and what provides our best path to first place in this top-heavy, but ultra-soft tourney.

    Underowned Underdog Will return Week 7

    Deconstructing The Slant