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 get a deeper window into the ups and downs of playing DFS and help you in your selections each week. On Tuesdays, 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
Coming soon!