NFL DFS Slate Review: Week 7
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.
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:
*We had another ‘late window owns the slate’ type of DFS slate in Week 7. Over the last couple of weeks, the theme has been 1-2 high total games with the best DFS plays in the late window with plenty of low scoring environments in the early window. This week was no different with DET/GB as the game of the week. Jordan Love was the cash QB on both sites, Matthew Golden was in play for cash on both sites, and Jahmyr Gibbs and Amon-Ra St. Brown were both in play for cash as well.
*I really couldn’t poke any holes in those guys as I thought they were all awesome plays in a game that had shootout written all over it. The total closed 55.5, and when Borg and I recorded the DFS pod late in the week, the total was at 53.5. With so much market movement towards the over and the Lions very likely to speed up the Packers, I did want to lean into this spot even though I knew it’d be very chalky.
*In order to play GB/DET and eat that chalk, I had to get some early information in the form of some lower owned plays and/or different combos. For cash, I played CMC + Bijan (like most of the field), and on DK this week, 2TE lineups were going to be very popular with Kittle and Cade Otton. Knowing that, I definitely didn’t want to play that specific combination of players, especially since I played Fred Durst at the stone min.
*Okay, now the fun part. Hello, Tony P! Obviously, I got a 99th percentile out of Pollard here, but the process is what I want to hit on. First off, Pollard was right in that same price range as Woody Marks and Braelon Allen, both of which were very popular this week and in the cash conversation. Don’t get me wrong, I definitely liked those players more, but when we got the late news that Tyjae Spears was ruled out, I thought Pollard was at least in the same conversation as Marks and Allen as a cheap workhorse. Of course, I never actually want to click Pollard, but that’s the point – nobody wants/wanted to, and I completely understand why.
*In DFS, however, I think we can get in trouble saying “I know better” when trying to forecast player performance. What I mean by that is the entire field (myself included) said “yeah he projects well, but I know he won’t win me a GPP. The Titans stink!” We as fantasy/DFS players aren’t always great at identifying floor/ceiling plays. In this instance, I’m glad I plugged my nose and used ownership as the decision point. With Pollard at just 8%, Marks at 33% and Allen $23%, I don’t need to be right very often for Pollard to be a “good” GPP play. We are, after all, playing a peer-to-peer game of probability and chaos.
*My other two lineups in this 3-max contest did not cash. On one team, I went all in on TB/CAR, playing the Bryce double with the double Hurst and Otton bring back…you can probably guess where that one finished. The other lineup was a Jordan Love triple with Golden, Savion Williams as a cheap pivot off Ted Hurst and Tucker Kraft with Amon-Ra as the bring back. That lineup did well, but I decided to go for the Woody Marks + HOU DST correlation, and shoutout to JJ McCarthy…that was flopped. All in all, happy with my ownership reads and ability to think through player combinations for small field, and of course, thankful for a Sunday sweat. Onto Week 8!
Cash’s Large Field Review
Ted Hurst? Psh, more like Ted Busted [insert audio clip for main show].
Week 7 was a rough one. Thanks a lot, chalk. I entered 150 lineups and finished with a -47.2% ROI. Only 32 of my 150 lineups cashed.
The Players Were There. The Combinations Were Missing.
Tony Pollard appeared in all 10 of the top lineups, and TB DST appeared in nine. I used Pollard in 17 lineups and TB in 15, but they appeared together only once. That was also my best lineup, which used all $50,000 and had zero duplicates.
That pairing stands out with the benefit of hindsight. It does not give me a reason to start forcing unrelated RB/DST combinations, but it shows why individual exposures only tell part of the story. Having several useful pieces spread across 150 lineups can still leave very few entries with enough of them together.
The passing-game combinations deserve a closer look, too. I played Joe Burrow five times and Tee Higgins 10 times without pairing them once. I ended up with that combo in my 20 max sets and went with Chase Burrow skinnies in this one (whoops). The winning lineup used Burrow with both Higgins and Ja’Marr Chase.
That is bad use of the optimizer. Honestly, I did not plan my morning accordingly and my results paid for it. I played bass in church on Sunday and I should have considered taking the week off if I can not dedicate the two full hours before lock to, well, lock in. I did not do my usual amount of runs to check exposure and combos.
Review the Entire 150
Jordan Love appeared in 61 of my lineups, and Bryce Young appeared in 35. That put 64% of my entries on two QBs, with only one of those 35 Young lineups cashing. Chalk is not always good chalk.
That is a substantial amount of the day riding on two players. I am comfortable taking a stand, but the size of that stand needs to have purpose. Especially at QB. But having 150 different lineups still leaves plenty of room for the same decision to hurt repeatedly.
There were better results elsewhere. 12 of my 15 Deshaun Watson lineups cashed, but those entries could only do so much against the losses across the rest of the set.
132 of my 150 lineups had no duplicates.
My takeaway:
- Check how much of the entire build depends on the same QBs.
- Review the stacks alongside individual player exposures before uploading.