NFL DFS Slate Review: Week 1
After a weekend of NFL action, this article is meant to give you a review of each week’s DFS slate.
It will function like a rolling blog with three of our DFS experts giving you their perspectives:
- Cash Lineup Pool– Kyle Borgognoni highlights how the field approached cash lineups.
- Small Field Review– Matthew Betz breaks down his lineup used in small field.
- Large Field Review– Chris Cash breaks down how the field approached GPPs.
Hopefully, this will help DFS & Betting Podcast listeners and DFS Pass subscribers zoom out to see the ups and downs of playing DFS and help you in your selections each week. On Tuesday’s podcast, Borg and Betz review our cash lineups, and this week we’ll give some common overreactions we see and hear.
Also highly recommend jumping into our Discord if you want to sharpen your DFS skills around a community of people willing to walk every step of the way.
Borg’s Cash Pool Review
Every week, I want to give you a look at what the field did in cash contests.
My goal in this section is to give you highlight pool of players used the most in cash style contests. You can compare the roster percentage, DK outputs, and how much of their salary they X’ed this week.
Betz’s Small Field Review
Each week in this article, I’ll share my small field GPP lineup and discuss decision points along the way. In most weeks, this will be the $100 Spy or the $50 contest on DraftKings.
Slate Context:
*Week 1 was priced a month ago, leading to a lot of potential value and underpriced players in this week’s pool. For example, Jahmyr Gibbs, Ja’Marr Chase and Michael Mayer (with the Brock Bowers injury) were all underpriced for their role in great game environments.
*I was fine eating some chalk there because of the strong projections, but if I was going to do that, I knew I had to get unique with my stacks (i.e. play DET/NO in a different way, fade the ‘cash QBs’ in Goff and Herbert, etc.
*I decided to stack up Tampa Bay and Cincinnati and play it through the Bucs side as I thought they’d be underplayed relative to their ceiling outcomes. Overall, I’m really happy with the ownerships I got on Baker (4.2%), Godwin (9.5%) and Bucky (14.1%), but obviously, things didn’t break my way here despite the game going for 60 points and sailing over the 50.5-point total.
*As noted, I didn’t want to completely fade DET/NO as I thought this game was priced too cheaply for the pace we’d get from New Orleans and the ceiling we know Detroit can give us on any slate. A lot of folks were playing Goff stacks, Gibbs + Amon-Ra, LaPorta or some version of that with Olave, Juwan Johnson and/or Devaughn Vele on the other side. I noted on the Friday DFS Pod that I thought Travis Etienne was a really interesting leverage play as he was essentially the only Saints player not getting steamed up this week. Once Alvin Kamara was ruled out (Knee), I thought Etienne became an even better play given that we could project a bump in his pass catching role. Again, the result didn’t go my way here with Shough passing stacks getting that insane come-from-behind pass volume, but I was really happy with my ownership read, getting him at just 12% in this contest.
*All in all, I’m happy with how I played, correctly identifying lower rostered pieces while not giving up too much in projection. In small field, there’s a balance of playing the ‘best cash plays’ while also getting just a few leverage points in your lineups, and often times, that’s easier said than done. This week, I definitely accomplished that, but results weren’t in my favor. On to Week 2!
Cash’s Large Field Review
Each week, I will break down a large field tournament, looking at:
- How the field built
- Which decisions paid off,
- Where my own lineups landed.
This week, I entered 10 lineups (max) into the 5,881 entry 1st and 10 and finished with a +70% ROI. None of my lineups were duplicated, and my best scored 212.6 points, finishing 45th for $75.
That is a top 0.8% finish, which I will gladly take it to open the season. Overall, I finished -31% ROI, which is fine considering I maxed the milly and expected most of those to fail (and they did). The scoring was insane and I saw lineups with 260+ points.
I do not hate this lineup. I am never going to be too upset about scoring over 200, but the winning score of 234.96 shows how much more we needed this week. There is a meaningful difference between having a good afternoon and getting the ceiling outcomes required to win a tournament.
The part I liked most was playing DET/NO through Tyler Shough, Chris Olave, and Devaughn Vele, with Jahmyr Gibbs coming back. Those four combined for 117.9 points. I did not need to fade Gibbs at 56.1% to make that game stack work. NO’s passing game let me benefit from multiple players scoring on the same plays and the OT certainly did not hurt.
Outside that stack, Nico Collins at 3.9%, Ashton Jeanty at 9.3%, and the Bengals DST at 1.2% combined for another 74.9 points. Those were meaningful scores at ownerships I would happily take again. I had popular production plus three lower-rostered pieces that delivered. This lineup did not need another random punt to get different.
Achane was the miss at 10.6 points. My concern moving forward is whether Malik Willis’ scrambling changes the receiving floor we have grown accustomed to, particularly when he can finish drives himself. But I do not want to turn that concern into a conclusion after one game: Achane still caught four of five targets, while the rushing production was just 36 yards on 11 carries with no TDs. Willis scored Miami’s only TD on a scramble, so I want to monitor this rather than write Achane off immediately.
Where the Field Was Right and Wrong
Gibbs was the most popular player at 56.1%, and he appeared in nine of the top 10 lineups. Olave was rostered in 26.7% of the field but made eight of those 10. The lesson was not to avoid the obvious plays. It was to recognize that eating the right chalk still left plenty of room to separate elsewhere.
The expensive mistakes were painful. Lineups containing Ja’Marr Chase returned an actual ROI of -84.7% at 35.7% ownership. Saquon Barkley came in at -74.4%, Achane at -73.5%, and Omarion Hampton at -66.1%. These are the returns of the lineups containing each player, not an isolated grade of the player, but they show where substantial portions of the field struggled.
Michael Mayer is worth separating from that group. His 9.2 points were not exciting, but he appeared in the winning lineup and five of the top 10, while lineups containing him finished almost exactly break-even at -0.1% ROI. For large field, surviving Mayer was much easier than surviving the wrong combination of expensive players.
The lower rostered winners were not all desperation plays, either. Jalen Coker was 8.2% owned, and lineups using him returned +255.8% ROI. Derrick Henry was 8.1% owned with +229.1% ROI, while D’Andre Swift was 8.0% owned with +189.5% ROI. Henry and Coker each appeared in half of the top 10 lineups.
What the Winning Lineups Did
The winning lineup paired Justin Herbert with Ladd McConkey, included Gibbs and Olave from DET/NO, and separated itself with Henry, Swift, Coker, and the Raiders DST. It spent $49,900 and still played Mayer. There was no requirement to fade every popular player or leave a huge amount of salary unused.
Shough accounted for five of the top 10 lineups, and all five paired him with two Saints pass catchers. Three other top-10 lineups used Bryce Young, and each included Tetairoa McMillan, Coker, and Luther Burden III. The common thread was concentrated exposure to specific games, not simply collecting nine players who looked good individually.
Here is another useful comparison: the winner’s combined ownership was 185.5%, almost identical to the 185.0% in my best lineup. All 10 highest-finishing lineups were unduplicated.
Looking Beyond My Best Lineup
My 10 entries averaged roughly 169 points. The user who finished second, quigs345, also entered 10 lineups and averaged roughly 168, yet returned +2,570% ROI compared with my +70%. That is the large field payout structure in one comparison. Having the slightly higher average score did not come close to matching the value of one lineup reaching 233.4.
For Week 2, I want to keep building around correlated ceiling outcomes and stop short of treating ownership as a score I need to minimize. I am comfortable with the construction of my best lineup. The Achane role deserves another look, but the answer is not to tear everything down because a top 1% finish was not first place.
Comments
Agreed with feedback above. Cash review with lineup was very valuable
Where is Borg’s Cash lineup? I always liked to compare my cash lineup to Borgs. Please bring that back.