NFL DFS Slate Review: Week 4
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 will NOT be posting my cash lineup next week as I will be off on annual beach trip.
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 one of the $50 or $75 single entry tournaments on DraftKings. For this week, I decided to focus on the $75 End Zone, which has 454 total entries.
Slate Context:
*I didn’t have a ton of angles I really loved for small field tourneys this week, so admittedly, I wasn’t expecting great results overall. I did min cash one of my three entries in the $200 3-max, so nothing to write home about there. In my single entry lineup (see above), I thought one of the interesting ways to attack the slate was to play a completely different construction.
*As I just mentioned, I didn’t love the ‘cash’ build this week – Lawrence + P Wash + the mid range WRs + TJ Hockenson. I thought those lineups were fine from a median perspective, but not as much upside (relative to cost) with Washington and Garrett Wilson all getting a price bump after their big Week 3 performances. The other issue with playing Washington is that just about every one of those teams was likely to have Trevor Lawrence (the cash QB). For this build, I decided to go against the field and completely fade JAX/CIN.
*The top RBs in the cash pool this week (and therefore likely to steam in small field) were CMC, Aaron Jones, Chase Brown and Jeremiyah Love. I could feel the Love steam coming after hearing him get talked up on multiple shows this week, and I’m really happy with my read there. He came in at 46.5% in this contest! With that ownership read in mind, I decided to go for the Love leverage play with the Jacoby double.
*From an ownership perspective, I’m really happy with this play, getting Brissett (8%), Michael Wilson (12.8%) and Trey McBride (8.6%) at really low roster percentages compared to Love. Obviously, the result wasn’t good enough to win a tourney. I debated late swapping off the Vikings chalk, but with Ja’Marr Chase (30%), Parker Washington (39%), Dontayvion Wicks (23.5%), and Garrett Wilson (16%) all failing in the early window, I thought my Puka 30-ball was enough WR leverage to stick with Hock and Aaron Jones in the late window, especially with half the field buried because of the Jeremiyah Love snowflake.
*Speaking of Puka, what an unbelievable spot to ‘play it before you see it’ as we’ve said many times on the podcast. Was there risk in his first game off injury? Of course…but when you’re likely to get that player at low ownership with a massive ceiling below $8K, that’s a play I’m willing to make in tournaments more often than not. I had him on three of my four small field teams this week, but unfortunately, I didn’t have the right combos around him to have a real sweat.
*All in all, I feel great about my small field ownership reads so far this season. Understanding which players are likely to steam and which players are likely to squeeze is such a huge factor in building good small field tournament teams. We’re not going to always be correct here from a results standpoint (i.e. Jeremiyah Love and Parker Washington could have buried me), but if we make enough smart teams in the long run while understanding how ownership moves in small field contests, we’ll hopefully run into more positive ROI outcomes than our opponents. Onto Week 5!
Cash’s Large Field Review
Three lineups inside the top 25, and still a losing day. That was my Week 4 in the $22K Flea Flicker. I entered 150 lineups, cashed 34, and finished 15th, 17th, and 22nd with my best three entries, but did not profit. Those 34 cashes look better until we account for what they paid. Twenty-three returned just 1.6 times the entry fee, which did little to cover the 116 lineups that returned nothing. My cash rate actually beat the field, 22.7% versus 20.1%, so I’ll be sure to call my Mom to brag about that.
That is something to understand before clicking the MAX ENTER 150-entry button. A few strong finishes can keep us interested all afternoon without covering the cost of the entire set.
Dak and CeeDee gave this lineup direct QB/WR correlation while Hockenson and Addison kept some popular pieces in the build. It carried 148.7% combined ownership and had zero duplicates. I spent every dollar and still landed on a combination nobody else played. This is why I want to look beyond an ownership total. Adding nine ownership percentages together does not tell us how often those nine players appear together. The complete lineup matters, and this one found differentiation while keeping players the field also liked.
Did My Final Set Reflect My Strongest Opinions?
In Tournament Takes, I identified Dak/CeeDee/Pickens as one of my favorite stacks because the projection stayed competitive with the more popular combinations. My final set included 15 Dak lineups, but only six paired him with CeeDee, and only two included Dak/CeeDee/Pickens together. That trio appeared in 1.3% of my entries versus 2.0% of the field. I actually had less of one of my favorite combinations than the field did. Gotta calibrate the optimizer a bit better to get what I want.
20 Dak and C.J. Stroud lineups generated 55.9% of everything I got back, while Kyler Murray, Trevor Lawrence, and Josh Allen accounted for nearly half my entries.
The Second TE Still Has to Earn the FLEX Spot
I used two TEs in 109 of 150 lineups, or 72.7%, compared with 42.6% of the field. My best lineup and the winning lineup both used that construction, but only five of the top 10 entries did. The other five used an RB or WR in FLEX.
Before committing nearly three-quarters of a set to two TEs, I want to compare that second TE with the available RBs and WRs in the same salary range. His role and the upgrades he allows elsewhere should justify the spot. Hockenson appeared in nine of the top 10 entries, including lineups with different FLEX positions. Getting a strong TE play right does not automatically make a second TE the best use of the remaining salary.
Getting the Stack Right Still Leaves Work to Do
The winner paired Stroud with Nico Collins and Dalton Schultz, then added CeeDee and Javonte Williams from DAL. That created a five-player bet on one game. I also had a Stroud/Nico/Schultz lineup. Mine finished 2,063rd. Selecting the right passing stack still leaves six roster spots to fill. Pull up the actual lineups attached to a stack and examine what the rest of those builds needed to happen.
Lessons Learned
- Check the actual combinations before exporting. If a stack is one of my strongest positions, I want to see how often it appears and understand any change from the original plan.
- Make the FLEX decision earn its place. Compare the second TE with similarly priced RBs and WRs, including what each option allows elsewhere.
- Review the full set alongside the best lineup. Track payout size and the reasons behind those allocations. That gives us something concrete to work on before the next slate.