NFL DFS Slate Review: Week 3
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.
I received some feedback about posting my cash lineup write article as I have for years. Apologies, but my Monday responsibilities for Footballers have shifted where I simply do not have the same available time to give a full write-up as I did in the past. For transparency purposes, I can post it here and talk through my decisions at the beginning of Tuesday’s podcast. I must confess I do not play near the same cash volume as in the past. I help coach my 10 year old son’s travel baseball team and our tournaments are usually every Sunday. Life changes, but apparently the edge in cash doesn’t!
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 on DraftKings. For this week, however, I played the $200 3-Max $20K Touchdown to great success!
Slate Context:
*The reason I love playing these small field GPPs is because you don’t have to be perfect to win. This contest is only 111 entrants, so you’re really only trying to get a few things correct. In other words, you don’t need to hit a 9-leg parlay that you do in order to win the Milly. Most of my lineups in these fields will feature a ton of correlation and some ‘cash plays.’
*For this week’s slate, I really liked the DET/NYJ game environment. It’s one that Kyle and I talked about on the DFS Pod, and the reason it was so appealing was two-fold: 1) The ceiling for guys like Jahmyr Gibbs and Amon-Ra St. Brown were massive and 2) the Jets side was very cheap with AD Mitchell (finger) ruled out.
*Once we got the Mitchell inactive news, I decided to lean into the cheaper Geno stacks. I debated a Geno double (Wilson + Sadiq) or a triple with Isaiah Williams. Ultimately, I decided that because Williams was so cheap and because there weren’t any amazing cheap WR plays in other games, I might as well tack him on and hope that this game turned into a shootout.
*Obviously, very fortunate to get the runout I did from Geno (300-yard bonus), Garrett Wilson (100-yard bonus) and Kenyon Sadiq (100-yard bonus), but this is what can happen when we minimize the number of things we need to get right in order to cash. More or less, this cash lineup is likely to cash if Lions/Jets turns into a high scoring affair.
*For pivots, I knew the Gibbs/Walker/Warren combo would be insanely owned in these small field contests (that’s what I played in cash), and because I was game stacking NYJ/DET, I decided to keep Gibbs and pivot off K9 for James Cook, who was just 16% here.
*At DST, the Titans were the top play from a cheap salary-adjusted perspective, but I didn’t think Cleveland was that far off. The Titans actually outscored the Browns by one point, so it didn’t really matter here, but considering I was paid off with 6% ownership versus 43% (!), I’m really happy with that read, regardless of the results.
*I did have one other lineup that performed well, with my Purdy team coming in 12th. I gotta tip my hand to Chris, who was all over ARI/SF in Best Plays this week. His conviction there got me onto this game, and because I already wanted to play my slate breaker, George Kittle, getting some exposure there made all the sense in the world.
*My biggest takeaway through three weeks for small field tourneys: The best plays are the best plays. We can confidently play them in GPPs as long as we’re building smart lineups around those plays.
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
C’Mon Muth, get more LUUTTHHH. Frustrating week because I did well with multiple TE lineups, but I picked the wrong TE. Pat Freiermuth, Mark Andrews and Hunter Henry all snowflaked and that kept me from breaking the top 100.
As long as I keep sneaking in some 200+ lineups, better days are ahead. My best lineup scored 202.10 and finished 238th. I cashed 35 entries, but that was not enough to push me into profit land. With the 150 sets being so top-heavy on payouts, you have to hit the Top 10 to really make some dough.
My best lineup spent the full $50,000 and paired Tyler Shough with Juwan Johnson without a LV runback. The winning score was 228.32, leaving me 26.22 points short. A respectable finish, but this is not a horseshoe-and-hand-grenade situation; close does not cut it.
Where the Field Was Right and Wrong
Gibbs was rostered in 32.7% of the field and appeared in all 10 highest-finishing entries. Garrett Wilson came in at 29.8% and appeared in eight, while the Titans DST was 25.6% owned and appeared in six. There was plenty of popular stuff worth playing. Fading all of it would have made winning much harder.
Kenneth Walker was the most popular player at 37.2%. Lineups containing him returned a -41.5% actual ROI, but he still appeared in three of the top 10 entries. All three were the same lineup tied at eighth.
Dalton Schultz and Amon-Ra St. Brown were more costly misses. Schultz was 24.1% owned and returned -57.4%, while St. Brown was 17.7% owned and returned -65.0%. Neither appeared in the top 10. As always, those returns belong to the entire lineups containing each player, not the player in isolation.
Kenyon Sadiq provided the biggest separation at TE. He was only 5.5% owned but appeared in nine of the top 10 entries. George Kittle was 9.3% owned and appeared in seven. The field had plenty of interest in playing TEs, and for good reason. DK simply will not adjust the WR prices and we can get guaranteed opportunity from cheap TEs.
What the Winning Lineups Did
The winner, outofthewoodwork, spent the full $50,000 and paired Sam Darnold with Jaxon Smith-Njigba. Gibbs and James Cook filled the RB spots, with Michael Wilson, Devaughn Vele, Sadiq, Kittle, and the Titans DST completing the lineup. Darnold at 2.1%, Michael Wilson at 3.5%, and Sadiq at 5.5% supplied differentiation without requiring a fade of Gibbs or Tennessee.
Darnold won the tournament, but Geno Smith accounted for eight of the top 10 entries at just 7.0% ownership. Seven of those entries combined Geno, Garrett Wilson, Sadiq, and Gibbs. Garrett and Gibbs were popular individually. Adding Geno and Sadiq gave those lineups a much different look than simply plugging the two stars into another build. Remember, good leverage comes from unique combinations of good players NOT one off dart throws.
Nine of the top 10 entries used two TEs, including the three entries tied at eighth. Six paired Sadiq with Kittle. This was not a case where the winning lineup found one unusual construction that nobody else near the top used. That combination kept showing up.
The winner entered just 16 lineups and cashed seven. That does not make a smaller portfolio inherently better, but it is another reminder that maxing a tournament does not entitle us to anything. Their best lineup did what my 150 could not.
Looking Beyond My Best Lineup
Last week, I used an RB at FLEX in 135 of my 150 lineups and had just seven double-TE builds. This week, I had 97 double-TE lineups, or 64.67% of my set. The construction was very different. The result was not.
I had Sadiq in eight lineups and Kittle in 18, but never played them together. Not once in 97 double-TE builds. I am not going to pretend that pairing was mandatory before kickoff, but it is worth examining which TE combinations I was getting instead. Exposure to both players did not help vault me up the leaderboard with what they did together.
The QB pool deserves the same attention. I used 20 different QBs and had zero Geno Smith. Meanwhile, Garrett Wilson appeared in 37 of my lineups, and Sadiq appeared in eight. I had room for their individual outcomes, but none for a stack built around their QB. That is a more useful question to review than simply telling myself to play Geno next time.
My larger stands also hurt. I played De’Von Achane in 38 lineups and Tetairoa McMillan in 34, putting both well above their field ownership of 7.4% and 9.6%. Across the contest, lineups containing them returned -82.2% and -80.9%, respectively.
For Week 4, I want to spend more time reviewing the actual stacks and pairings in my final set, not just whether each player reached an exposure target. I am not making Sadiq/Kittle a rule because it worked this week. But checking the double-TE box clearly was not enough. I still needed to get the players inside those builds right.