Larejo is a mid-stakes tournament mastermind who specializes in outmaneuvering 150-max players with a small number of entries
Eighteen weeks, including Thanksgiving and Christmas slates, a Wild Card round, and now a Divisional round write-up, and this is it for Willing to Lose in 2025 (now 2026). What started as a fun concept back in 2021 has become a real part of me over the past five seasons. If you read one word this season, thank you. If you scrolled quickly past this on The Scroll, thank you. If you are one of the brave souls who spend 12-15 minutes each week reading these words in this space, thank you. Onto the next one is the right mentality for football players and DFS players alike, but there’s a time and place for appreciation. And beyond those introductory words, that time isn’t now! We have money to win…
The easiest research you can do this week is to look at last week’s results. It’s also the laziest and most common approach. So we aren’t going to do that here. Last week’s results are going to dictate the chalk build in tournaments, and I know Hilow will unpack that well. But without getting repetitive, recognizing the fact that the last few weeks of the regular season, to some extent, and the Wild Card round, to a large extent, are going to dictate where comfortable rosters will sit this week. The important note here is that I’m not advising you to ignore last week’s results, but when we see the Josh Allen, Puka Nacua, Colston Loveland, Khalil Shakir, Christian McCaffrey, and Demarcus Robinson-based rosters, just know why.
For most reading this, it’s likely your brain is wired in one of two ways. To lean into these results and start builds with four or five of these players, or to feel like you want to zag across it all and ignore this pool. Don’t do either of these things. Instead, settle at two or three from this group, and jump from there. We always talk about mixing up the randomness with the expected, and with the recency bias coming in from Wild Card weekend, we must accept that some outcomes will likely be repeated, and some were flukes. As always, however, the right approach is the balance of two extremes.
