Borg’s NFL DFS Cash Lineup Review for Week 14 (Fantasy Football)

Sometimes my wife will check in and ask how things are going with DFS. If I give a quick answer, she knows things are going well. If I don’t respond immediately, she knows that, well, things could be better.

She got a little of both this week. Through the 1st two-quarters of the early games, you would’ve thought I’d be swimming in cash Scrooge McDuck style. I got three early TDs from my RBs and Jared Goff could do no wrong.

But the journey isn’t about where you started…

Let’s turn to Week 14’s cash lineup.

The goal of this article is neither to boast or wallow in “shoulda, woulda, couldas” but rather give a transparent look at my thought process for the week. Hopefully, this will help DFS 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, my thought process behind this lineup construction, and at the bottom, I will post my weekly results including ROI and H2H record to stay accountable with you.

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

Week 14 Cash Lineup

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The Thought Process

Let’s work from early week locks to where I made my final decisions.

Cash Locks (In My Opinion)

• In our DFS Best Plays article (which comes out on Saturdays), I shared the pool of players that were basically locked from the beginning of the week.
• I never really wavered from Jared Goff. While Joe Burrow was tempting and Geno Smith projected well with the Seattle RBs out, the matchup mixed with the salary was too good to pass up. Obviously, most of the field felt the same way which I felt was good to chalk to eat.
• Most of the field felt the same way that Amon-Ra St. Brown and Garrett Wilson were locks. It almost felt like cheap analysis because these two have been in my cash lineup for multiple weeks in a row.
• The Steelers DST was pretty much locked in from the beginning of the week. The more expensive options (DAL & SF) never really were in consideration. The Steelers underwhelmed given the matchup against backup QB Tyler Huntley. At home, they had two total sacks, zero turnovers, and ultimately lost.

Gut-Wrenching Decisions

• My RB pool was fairly diverse this week: Christian McCaffrey ($8600) and Derrick Henry ($7900), Joe Mixon ($6900), Tony Pollard ($6700), Miles Sanders ($6200), D’Andre Swift ($5800) and D’Onta Foreman ($5400). You could make cases for all of them but the makeup of the other pieces helped inform my decisions.
• I never really considered the super cheap options this week (Travis Homer or Zonovan Knight) just because I was afraid of the reporting being off or not helpful for DFS purposes.
• Once I moved off Burrow, Mixon felt like the Bengals player I had to have. I wrote: “I wrestled earlier in the week over this decision but Joe Mixon is firmly in my cash lineup. I’m not too worried about his workload being managed with Zac Taylor making it clear who the lead back is for this offense. The matchup is jooooocy. The Browns are dead last in schedule-adjusted fantasy points to RBs and 31st in EPA per rush attempt. Put simply, there are one of the true run funnels in this league as PFF grades them 30th in rush defense grade and Football Outsiders claims they are dead last in rush DVOA. Any way you look at it, they’re bad.“
• Pollard also became a must to me given the Cowboys team implied total. I wanted a piece of this offense and after two early TDs, I thought I was cruising.
• At TE, Greg Dulcich was pretty much in the whole way. Fellow rookie TE Chig Okonkwo was the only other one who made sense given the rest of my lineup construction. I loved the Broncos’ passing attack this week versus KC and figured that Dulcich’s roster percentage was something I was willing to eat.
• With the Sun God and Wilson early week locks, the 3rd WR spot was not so easy. I loved, loved, loved Justin Jefferson ($9000) and Jerry Jeudy ($5400), Zay Jones ($4700), and Philip Dorsett ($3000) all looked like they could fit my builds. Zay was in for most of the week until I started seeing I needed to go lower in order to pay up for a stud in the FLEX. Dorsett was cheap, I could see 5+ targets, and the Texans would be battling back in my mind.
• Honestly, the hardest decision of the week was Derrick Henry. The matchup against the Jaguars and those monster games in his past against them loomed large in my psyche. You can look at the results and say I made the right call but we always ask ourselves the question: what is the opportunity cost? 
• The only other high-priced option that I wanted so badly was Jefferson. Henry and Jefferson were the final decision point of the week for me. Jefferson was the most expensive player on DraftKings making it a bit cost-prohibitive to get there. You can see my final two lineups I considered included Jefferson and dropping down at TE & DST to make it work.

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 Philip Dorsett punt play was not something I was proud of. He simply made the lineup work budget-wise. If I did it again, I might try to play around with other combinations.
• Normally, I don’t pay attention to roster percentages for cash. We don’t estimate them as they are field specific and hard to gauge. However, you can usually get in the same ballpark for certain players. The only true differentiators in my lineup were Dorsett and Henry but even they were over 30 percent. It was one of the chalkier constructions of the week including other respected people in the industry ending up in the same exact boat.

2022 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.

I gave an asterisk* because I decided NOT to include some ties in my record. The chalky lineup you saw above was used by multiple opponents in H2Hs and thus we had to split the winnings.