Borg’s DFS Cash Lineup Review: Week 1 (Fantasy Football)

Welcome back to the DFS Cash Lineup Review!

On Mondays, I share my cash lineup process so you can dunk on me or celebrate if you were able to hit the cash line. Every week, I also try to give a candid look at my week’s schedule because I try to tailor the amount of lineups I played based on my feel for the slate and my life happenings that week. My wife and I were in Arizona for a majority of the week to visit our friends, be there for the League of Record draft, Thursday & Friday’s main shows and stay in Scottsdale for part of the weekend. It was great being back in Arizona with the Ballers crew BUT… I won’t lie, I did very little personal DFS research once it hit Friday. Thus, I purposefully played about 50% less than I normally do on a given week.

The goal of this article is neither to boast nor wallow in “shoulda, woulda, couldas” but rather give a transparent look at my thought process for the week. Hopefully, this will help DFS & Betting Podcast listeners and DFS Pass subscribers get a deeper window into the ups and downs of playing DFS and help you in your selections each week. On Tuesdays, Betz and I review our cash lineups, and this week we’ll give some common overreactions we see and hear.

For cash, I specifically play 50/50s, Double-Ups, and H2Hs on DraftKings. I’ll share my unfiltered gut reaction, and the thought process behind this lineup construction, and at the bottom, I will post my weekly results including the cash line and H2H record to stay accountable with you.

If you want to go back to the drawing board, we did an overview podcast before the season on DFS Cash Game Strategy + Creating Player Pools. I also published an article on DFS Strategy for Beginners and another entitled: How to Approach Each Position in DFS & Gain an Edge.

Week 1 Cash Lineup

Draft % and cash lines each week will be from DraftKings’ $25 Single-Entry Double-Up with 4,597 entries. This is a slightly elevated price point from the $1, $5, and $10 double-ups and I think gives a solid idea each week of double-up roster percentages.

The Thought Process

Cash Locks (In My Opinion)

• In our Week 1 DFS Best Plays (which comes out on Saturdays for DFS Pass subscribers only), I shared the pool of players and this week was blatantly obvious who the top plays were.
• Tyreek Hill was a lock from Day 1. I honestly couldn’t fathom making a cash lineup without him and the field mostly felt the same way as he was the most popular play of the week. It took a minute for the big plays to get going but that 80-yard bomb was vintage Tyreek.
• Anthony Richardson was pretty much a non-negotiable for me. His rushing floor is essentially a cheat code and yet he was at least $1,000 too cheap in Week 1. For those that were tempted by Justin Fields at $5K, I never really got there. The game environment of HOU/IND was my favorite of the week making ARich’s projection so strong relative to anyone else at the QB position.
• After those two, the only other player I knew I would be rostering in cash was Andrei Iosivas. At $3K, he was a freebie this week mainly because you were essentially conceding him in H2H matchups. His 5.6 DK points might make you vomit but it is what his salary offered and the fact nearly 70% of the field played him. If you didn’t cash this week, do not blame Iosivas.

Gut-Wrenching Decisions

My goal in this section is to discuss the pool of players I considered for cash and how I arrived at my final lineup.

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• At RB, there were a pool of $6K guys that we highlighted throughout the week. James Cook ($6900), Alvin Kamara ($6700), Rachaad White ($6300), James Conner ($6200), and Kenneth Walker III ($6100) were the guys I preferred. It comes down to managing a balance between projected workload, Vegas totals, and roster percentages. I assumed Kamara and White would be the most popular but I also have an inherent bias against the New Orleans and Tampa Bay run game. They are inefficient and their RBs “get there” usually with PPR dump-offs.
• Bijan Robinson ($7700) was a bit expensive for my taste although he was ranked as RB1 in my Best Plays. I sided with Drake London as the Falcon to roster.
• Kenneth Walker III was always on my short list as a 6-point home favorite and as the cheapest of that group of $6K RBs. I also liked Javonte Williams ($5500) in the same game but Walker’s projection and the implied team total of Seattle at home proved much stronger in my opinion.
• At WR, with Tyreek and Iosivas locked-in, I had 1-2 more WRs to consider in cash. On the high end, Nico Collins ($7000) was the most expensive WR I considered as the Texans passing attack was routinely showing up in optimals. The WRs showing up quite strong in our projections were $6K and below guys: Drake London ($6000), Malik Nabers ($5900), Chris Godwin ($5800), and Tank Dell ($5500) at the top of my list. Honestly, you could poke holes in all of these options so I don’t blame anyone for making the wrong (or right) choices in their swaps. I sided with London based on “this will be the cheapest he’ll be all year” logic. Ouch. Dell was the Texan I circled at the beginning of the week and who I made as my Slate Breaker on Friday’s podcast. Also, ouch.
• One of the ways I sleep at night is siding with the players I miss out on in tournament lineups. In other words, if the final cut of these players don’t end up in the cash lineup, play them in GPPs. Is it an emotional hedge?
• I cannot begin to tell you how much I hated TE this week. There were only a couple of options in my mind for cash: Evan Engram ($5500), Kyle Pitts ($4600), and punting with someone below $3K. With Iosivas as the cheapie of the week, I eventually ruled out punting at TE. For those new to DFS, executing the “punt play” in DFS is a fine art.
• I always try to give share a few texts or Slack convos with Betz just to show you where my head was at building my lineups.
  
• As you can see from that text thread with Betz on Sunday morning, London and Pitts became a true decision point. While rostering two Falcons wasn’t a death sentence by any means, my personal affections with this Atlanta team is something I try to protect myself from in DFS. I sided with London and went with Engram hoping the JAX/MIA game would have some shootout potential. (Spoiler: it did not.)
• DST is usually the last thing I pick and it is 90% of the time irrelevant in cash. However, can I confess a mistake I made? Yes, I am not immune to doing dumb things in DFS. I went with the Panthers as a salary saver as I was toying around with lineups but if you were to add up my lineup, I had $200 leftover. Moving up to the Patriots was in my original lineup (as you can see in my projections comparison) didn’t help me that much.
• This isn’t complicated but when I compared my final two lineups, the projections were much stronger with the first one.

Mistakes Were Made …

Every week I’ll highlight my biggest mistakes which range from not weighing low-end outcomes to assuming, to not thinking, and ultimately moving away from plays I started with. We’ve all been there… stay water. Don’t try to justify yourself or make things sound better than they were. You made a decision, now deal with it.

• The DST mistake cost me 12 points, which still would’ve put me 0.90 away from the cash line. Lazy? Busy? All of the above? It felt weak.
• The 2v2 of Engram + Tank over Pitts + Nabers ultimately led to my demise. That is part of Cash DFS. On the week’s you picked right, you feel like a genius and likely puff yourself up with “I was so right”. Keep in mind the alternative: you were also a decision or two away from being so wrong. I’ve shared that adage before from the book Superforecasting but “we are more open to the fact of being almost right than almost wrong”.
• Engram’s output looks like one of the worst outcomes possible but I want to make sure you survey how TE did across the board.

2023 Results

Each week I’ll post my head-to-head (H2H) win percentage here to give you an idea of what type of week I had. Keep in mind there are varying price points, competition, and players who take my H2Hs in the lobby that have no rhyme or reason. The volume of my H2Hs differs each week due to my feeling of the slate and my weekend activities with my family. Every week I will also post the “cash line” from the $25 Double-Up from DraftKings.