NFL DFS Slate Review: Week 8
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. However, this week, I played the $25K Goal Line, which is a $75 entry, 5-max contest with 378 entrants.
Slate Context:
*This slate was particularly interesting because it was dominated by the depth of elite priced-adjusted RB plays. Once TreVeyon Henderson (Illness), Breece Hall (Quad) and RJ Harvey (Knee) got ruled out, we had somewhere between 6-8 unreal RB plays when you accounted for price, usage and matchup. Given the strength of the RB slate, I knew I wanted to lean into a 3RB build in smaller field contests as I thought that was “right” this week.
*Trying to figure out the combos was my main focus in small field. In DK cash, I played Rhamondre, Braelon and Chase Brown. Given the Rhamondre was the cheapest and very likely to be played at the highest rate (given how well he projected for cash), I decided to get off him here in small field and simply get leverage by not playing him. He did come in at 46% in this contest, the highest owned RB here, so I’m really happy with my read there.
*In DFS, I think sometimes we get too carried away with the idea of leverage. When you look at my lineup, I played five players (including DST) that were 20+% owned. My leverage here was two fold: 1) Fading Rhamondre and avoiding the chalky Rhamondre + Braelon build and 2) Playing Bengals onslaughts with Chase Brown and without Wan’Dale Robinson. I used the cheap and low owned Gunnar Helm here given the DVP matchup with the Bengals. Getting onto a cheap, stone min Helm also helped me get a different roster build with the vast majority of the field playing the $3.5kish TEs and Hunter Henry.
*With this lineup, I really was just betting on Cincy to roll and put up a big number on the scoreboard. When/if that happens, multiple pieces can eat. The Chase Brown box score unfortunately wasn’t amazing, yet the usage was great, and in this contest, only a few teams played all four of Burrow, Brown, Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins. Now, in large field GPPs, I generally don’t do this where we need every player in our lineup to hit a huge ceiling to win. In small field, simplifying our bets and correlation (when projections and pricing make sense) in an effort to avoid having to be perfect is a sound strategy that can work.
*I noted on the most recent DFS Pod that it really felt like some chalk was going to smash soon after the chalk failing a few weeks in a row, so I decided to play a lot of the ‘best plays’ this week while sprinkling in just a couple of contrarian options. Shoutout to DK Metcalf for being the Browns’ best CB Sunday.
*All in all, I’m pretty pleased with all five of the lineups I built. I cashed 2/5 in this contest for another +ROI.
Cash’s Large Field Review
The most frustrating part of this gig is getting the right DFS plays, but having the wrong combos. That is how Sunday’s large field went for me. Luckily, it was a good cash week at House Cash, and a friendly reminder why going all in on GPPs is tough. Having to score 250+ points is ridiculous, but that is the world we lived in Sunday afternoon.
I remembered to pair Joe Burrow with Tee Higgins this week. Personal growth.
Week 8 was another losing week in my 150s, finishing with a -28.0% ROI, with 44 of my 150 entries cashing.
The Combinations Were Better
I played Burrow with both Higgins and Ja’Marr Chase in 14 lineups, and all 14 cashed. That trio appeared in all 10 of the contest’s top lineups and 96 of the top 100. After leaving Burrow and Higgins completely separated last week, getting those combinations together was a welcome improvement. My six best lineups all used that CIN double stack. Those three combined for 120.08 points.
The best lineup used $49,800 and had zero duplicates. There was plenty to like, but Jakobi Meyers and LAC DST combined for just 7.4 points. I got too cute. Apparently, watching the Chargers offense was not enough punishment. I needed them to let me down in my best lineup, too.
I shared six players with the winning lineup, which scored 254.48. Even with that much overlap, I finished 33 points behind it. The remaining spots still mattered quite a bit.
26 of my 27 Burrow lineups cashed. Only 18 of my other 123 lineups did.
That explains the day better than the screenshot of my best entry. Burrow represented 18% of my lineups but produced $380 of my $540 in total returns. His group was profitable. The losses elsewhere more than erased it. Dak Prescott appeared in 32 lineups, Lamar Jackson in 22, and Trevor Lawrence in 20. Those three accounted for 74 entries and only eight cashes. All 22 Lamar lineups missed the money because of the injury, that’s just a sad tax we pay in this silly little game.
I used 14 different QBs, but nearly half my entries still depended on those three. The question before next week’s upload is whether each QB’s share of the portfolio matches the stand I actually want to take. For this slate, that was intentional, so the process was right, the results were not.
143 of my 150 lineups had no duplicates. I am happy with the improvement in my stacking combinations, but the full set deserves the same attention as the lineup at the top of my results page.
My takeaway:
- Keep reviewing complete QB stacks and player combined pOwn alongside individual player exposures.
- Do not get too cute. The Meyers and Tuten overlap made little sense and Meyers is not a ceiling type player. Simply jamming a player in because salary works and ownership is low is not good process.