NFL DFS Slate Review: Week 6
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’s lazy butt was on vacation this week, so Betz is posting his cash lineup below.
*I just missed the cash line in double ups but was able to win 52% of head-to-heads on DraftKings and 78% on FanDuel. Not the best week on DK, but let’s walk through the process.
*There were really only a few standout plays this week for cash games in my opinion – Bijan Robinson at home against the Bears, Puka Nacua at home against the Cardinals, and Isaiah Likely at home against the Saints.
*From there, I looked at several teams that had different combos – Josh Allen at QB, stone min Tanner McKee, Keenan Allen without Tyler Warren, Drake London in more balanced builds, etc.
*On slate’s like this where there isn’t really a “This is what you should do” blueprint, I usually try to simplify my process – lean into teams, game environments and projections that make sense.
*I don’t think anyone saw the Rams laying an egg against a Cardinals defense that ranked dead last in yards per pass attempt allowed entering Week 6. Because of that, and the Rams’ 32.5 team total, I was fine going all in with Stafford, Puka and Kyren. Ultimately, that game went sideways and really killed a lot of the chalk in both GPPs and cash games.
*I debated getting off Xavier Worthy in favor of Keenan, but at the end of the day, a younger WR running 80+ percent of the routes with Pat Mahomes was the choice for me compared to an older vet catching passes from Daniel Jones…ultimately, that decision didn’t really matter much in the end.
*What really hurt a lot of the chalk this week was Chicago’s ability to control the ball and limit Atlanta’s possessions (thanks Mr. Fumbly McFumblePants aka Zachariah Branch). The Falcons only got off 50 total plays, and Robinson had nine carries. What a wild outcome…
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 $200, 3-Max tourney with 111 entrants.
Slate Context:
*At first glance, you’ll noticed I didn’t play too many contrarian (low owned) plays in this contest. Two things on that: 1) In a 111 person field, the ownerships get inflated and 2) We had our smallest slate of the year with this main slate being just 10 games. As Cash and I noted on the DFS & Betting Pod this week, you were likely to see elevated ownership on the best plays given that we had fewer options from which to choose.
*The top game environments on this slate (based on totals) were CHI/ATL, LAR/ARI and BUF/LV. As you’ll see, I really piled into the teams with the top implied totals on the slate.
*In the early window, the key in my opinion was how to handle the ATL chalk with Bijan and London. On a different team, I played a Caleb double with Rome and Loveland and included a double bring back with Bijan and London. On this team, I didn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket, so I decided to go for a full fade on that game. In some ways, it worked out as Bijan and London both flopped relative to projection and ownership. Bijan ended up at 32% and London came in at 45% here.
*The early window also included a lot of ownership in the form of Braelon Allen (26%), Chuba (24%), Isaiah Likely (51%) and the Panthers DST (55%). In my opinion, it wasn’t good process to be playing Bijan + Braelon + London + Likely + Panthers DST as that was the overwhelming majority of cash builds, and even in small field, I never want to eat that much chalk. As a result, I was fine getting of the Falcons’ Big 2 because I was playing a very popular Likely and Carolina DST.
*Once Germie and Likely smashed and the Falcons failed, I decided to stay with my late window combos even though I knew they were going to be popular. Because half the field was (for all intents and purposes) buried with the Atlanta failure, I was okay playing into a chalk with Kyren and Puka. Man, what a wild outcome as the Cardinals beat the Rams outright as 12.5-point dogs despite scoring zero offensive TDs!
*My Kirk to Bowers stack was one that I felt great about from a process standpoint going into the slate, but in hindsight, I think not playing Tre Tucker or Jeanty was a mistake. I almost always double pure pocket passers who aren’t going to give us anything on the ground, but in this instance, Xavier Worthy projected as a better play straight up than Tucker form a median projection standpoint, so I decided to roll him out there.
*The team ultimately finished 0.16 points out of a min cash (yes, I’m tilting), but if I’m being completely honest with myself, this team never really had a chance to win first. Even though I had planned to play more chalk this week than most given the slate context, I don’t think I played particularly well without a single player (besides Kirk) below 15%. Regardless of how good you think the chalk is or isn’t in a particular week, playing this much chalk usually won’t result in a GPP-winning score. Yes, I think this team could/should have min cashed, but at the end of the day when we look back on our ROI, min cashes aren’t going to be the things that allow us to have a “good” or “bad” GPP season.
*Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this was a slate where going in, you had to play four or five sub-5% guys. Again, I thought the chalk was very strong, but I probably should have at least considered one or two players who were slipping through the cracks a little bit. In small field, I’m usually trying to identify 2-3 guys who could come in below their projected ownership – I honestly was surprised to see Bowers flip at almost 30%, and I thought Chuba could be a guy who was in the 15-20% range. I simply didn’t have the right ownership reads this week.
Cash’s Large Field Review
*Sunday was a rough one. I cashed 30 of my 150 entries in this contest and finished with a -57.1% ROI, with my best lineup landing in 345th.
*Matthew Stafford was my most-played QB, and only two of my 38 lineups with him cashed. Having a quarter of the build tied to that outcome put a lot of pressure on everything else to go right. Man, that game…just like we all thought. The Cardinals would beat the Rams with nothing but FGs. Not sure what the NFL was smoking yesterday, but it was strong.
*The exposure gaps hurt, too. Bijan Robinson was in 46.7% of my lineups against 28.3% field ownership, while Kenneth Walker III made just 10 of my lineups and Tre Tucker made five. I am not upset about that. I made a calculated bet, and Zachariah Branch decided to muff two punts to ensure that I would lose it. This happens and it is why sticking to strong budgeting rules is important.
*Walker appeared in 79 of the top 100 lineups, and Tucker was in 57, so I was light on two players who kept showing up near the top. Having a player in the pool feels a lot different on Monday when you realize how few chances you actually gave yourself to benefit from him.
*There were still some things that worked, with Malik Nabers appearing in all five of my highest-scoring lineups.
*The part I want to review is why I leaned so heavily on Stafford and Bijan, and whether my limited exposure to Walker and Tucker reflected how I actually felt about those plays before kickoff. It is easy to look at the results and wish I had more of the winners, but the useful question is whether I had good reasons for the size of those stands. As for the Stafford and Bijan plays, I am chalking it up to a bad week and moving on.
Comments
This was my worst week in DFS in a long time. I leaned into the chalk that failed. Lots of regrets.