NFL DFS Slate Review: Week 5
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
*Note – Kyle is on vacation this week, so he did not play is usual volume.
Hi, I’m Chris Borgognoni today.
This year, I am not blindly following the chalk on every play in cash. With so many double up lineups being trains, I am embracing the fact that the field does not do its research and struggles to think on its own (what a bunch of mouth breathers). That process has led me to four straight weeks of cash since I was correct on those pivots but I understand the risk by not using the same lineup the train is. Negative regression is likely coming to bite me in the tail soon.
Gibbs deserves his credit before we get to the less popular plays. His 40.7 points did a lot of the heavy lifting, and being popular did not make those points any less useful. I was actually in shock he was only 64.2% owned. Michael Wilson was in the opposite situation. His 7.28 points were disappointing, but more than 84% of this field was dealing with the same disappointment. That is what I want to drive home on your pre kickoff process:
When you roster chalk in cash and fail, so does everyone else.
Likely was where things changed. He scored 32.4 points, giving me a 10.8-point advantage over McBride at TE. McBride did not even have a bad game with 21.6 points. Likely simply gave me a much bigger result at a position where the field had overwhelmingly landed somewhere else since I wanted to attack that matchup (WAS was 28th in TE fantasy points allowed).
Golden added another 23.3 points while appearing in just 20 of the 542 lineups. That was a meaningful score to get from a player almost nobody else in this contest had. However, the takeaway cannot be that we should go hunting for a 3% WR in cash next week. His ownership tells us how much the result helped. I really liked Rome this week and I wanted a runback in that game. I just got lucky with Golden being in the right salary range when it came down to my final three plays (Rome, Golden, LAC).
Odunze and LAC DST combined for nine points. Meanwhile, nearly half the contest got 16 points from NYJ DST alone. Likely and Golden gave me enough to absorb that difference, but I am not handing out gold stars to all nine roster spots because the lineup cashed.
That is how I want to review the less popular selections. Did the expected roles and salary tradeoffs justify them, or did the Sunday results make those decisions look better than they were? Golden scoring 23.3 does not automatically make him a better pregame cash play than every receiver who scored less. The same goes for calling Odunze a mistake simply because he finished with six.
I will happily take the result. The useful part is figuring out which decisions deserve to come with us into next week, rather than trying to recreate the lineup that just won. My note on the week? If you like a matchup or a play it is ok to get different in a spot or two and include them in cash.
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 $200, 3-Max tourney with 111 entrants.
Slate Context:
*Yikes! I wanted to use this space to highlight what can happen on certain DFS slates and explain process versus results. Obviously, finishing dead last (shoutout to me) is a tough pill to swallow. In hindsight, ya just have to laugh sometimes at this silly game we’re trying to solve. The results this week were not great – I had three entries in this contest. One finished dead last (Again, shoutout to me), one finished 97th and the other finished just outside the cash line on that final McBride TD. Brutal!
*It’s easy to come into this article and highlight how well I played when you cash and hit a big score. These weeks are equally (if not more) valuable for trying to learn DFS concepts and refine our skills.
*The lineup you see above is not what I started with. Like everyone else, I started with a Jacoby team that had Trey McBride and Jahmyr Gibbs. However, when I lost both KC Concepcion and Roman Wilson to injury within a matter of minutes, I knew I had to late swap.
*Could I have kept my same lineup and gotten a min cash? Gibbs was 40%, Brissett was 45% (!) and McBride was 57%. In other words, even if I kept my original lineup, I would have just been holding hands with over half the field. In those instances, you’re blocked from moving up the leaderboard.
*Once I lost two of three players to injury, and Chase Brown flopped, I knew late swapping was necessary if I wanted to try to recoup some of these losses. On Chase Brown, I am really happy with getting him at 14% ownership as I knew he’d squeeze in small field with so many awesome RB plays this week. I noted on the DFS Podcast this week that because the late window had all of the chalk, I wanted to try to get ‘early information’ in order to try to figure out how to play DET/ARI. Even though this didn’t work, I accomplished that goal with a low-ish owned Brown.
*Okay, so late swap. The combo I went with here basically had to completely fade DET/ARI with the hopes that the game would fail. I’m happy with the process in getting CMC at just 2.7% and JSN at 14.4% as my goal was to shoot for the moon and pray (I had no choice after the 1 pm slate). I also pivoted onto a DEN/LAC game stack with ultra contrarian options, and well…
*These situations are always tough. The lineup looks egregious in hindsight with the final results, but I think it’s important to understand what you’re trying to accomplish when late swapping. In this instances, I was way behind the field and had to throw a Hail Mary. Mission accomplished on that I guess, right? Onto Week 6…
Cash’s Large Field Review
Cash’s Large Field Review
I entered 150 lineups in the Flea Flicker, and ended with a +371.5% ROI, led by an eighth-place finish at 232.66 points. A good Sunday, but the useful part is understanding how the lineups got there.
Popular Players, Different Combinations
Jaylen Warren appeared in all 10 of the top lineups, and Jahmyr Gibbs was in eight. However, only 3.7% of lineups paired them, compared with 22.7% of mine. Neither player needed to be a secret. Playing them together created separation without sacrificing players we liked.
I liked Warren alot and min capped him at 40% so that was a key driver of the successful day.
My best lineup combined those RBs with Drake Maye, DeMario Douglas, and Hunter Henry for a nice double stack. I wanted a story that had NE without Bowers so if they beat LV handedly, I could get some leverage. In hindsight, having Bowers in this lineup and dropping down from JSN could have done better.
It used $49,800 and had zero duplicates. That is the construction lesson: find a different passing-game combination and mix in guaranteed RB production.
Review the Entire 150
The winning lineup does not give every allocation a pass. Likely appeared in nine of the top 10 lineups, but I used him only 13 times, compared with 38 for Gadsden (oof). He goosed.
This reflected my pregame opinions . It was a bet that the Chargers would need Gadsden with no real WRs on the field (shots fired at you, MVS and Theo Wease) so I knew what I was getting into before kickoff. Chargers hurt everywhere, because Tre Harris could have been the piece to get me to the top for $50k.
The payout deserves the same honesty. My eighth-place finish returned $3,000, accounting for 84.8% of the total return. The other 149 entries returned $536 against $745 in entry fees. Remember: you need a top 10 finish to really pump up the ROI numbers in MME.
My takeaway:
- Check the combinations, my RB pairings were more intentional this week.
- Make sure the exposures reflect our opinions that are backed by research.
- Review the biggest decisions even after a win.