As one of my many unacknowledged mentors, (fingers crossed one day he’ll be my fantasy football friend), C.D. Carter always say, “TRUST THE PROCESS!” Since my process is just in its infancy, I find it more helpful to look at the receipts. Acknowledging and reflecting on your successes and failures is important in DFS because “the data” is all right there for you to collect and analyze. The ultimate goal being, the refinement and improvement of your process each week. Here are some of the featured players that hit last week and some that look like they came straight from Min Cash Pete’s x-rated DFS “First Look” whiteboard. (If you love DFS and fantasy football, do yourself a favor and subscribe to all of his content. You will thank me later.) So here is the good, the bad and the obvious.
Best Plays of Week 8
Position
Player
Points
Value
QB
DeShaun Watson
27.76
3.3x
RB
Latavius Murray
32.2
5.2x
WR
Cooper Kupp
31.5
4.1x
TE
Darren Fells
20.8
4.1x
DST
Patriots
21
4.2x
Stacking Watson and Fells was a strong play and one that I sadly only featured on a handful of my DFS entries. Like most lineups on Fanduel, the majority of my stacks had Kenny Stills (68% owned of course) and DeAndre Hopkins (9.24% owned) so there’s that. Everyone owned Latavius Murray. Liken him to the bouncer at the club. He got you in the door, but he let everyone else in as well. You still needed a super Cooper Kupp who was otherworldly and caught 220 out of the 372 passing yards that Jared Goff threw for on the afternoon. Graham Barfield from YardsCreated.com tweeted out on Monday, only Christian McCaffery, Dalvin Cook, DeShaun Watson, Michael Thomas, Lamar Jackson, Austin Ekeler and Arron Jones have out scored the Patriots DST this season. They have 169.0 points through 8 games. Pick against them at your own peril.
Worst Plays of Week 8
Position
Player
Points
Value
QB
Russell Wilson
15.68
1.8x
RB
Ty Johnson
4.3
0.8x
WR
Kenny Stills
3.7
0.6x
TE
Hunter Henry
6.7
1.0x
DST
Carolina
3
0.9x
And now the underperformers of the week that sunk any chances we had of grasping DFS glory. This will not be the first time you hear an DFS analyst criticize an NFL head coach (Note to self: That gives me an idea for a new weekly feature. Critical Coaching Collapses with Pete Carroll. Wait, that’s too much alliteration for fantasy football, I’ll table it.). Russell Wilson threw the ball 20 times. In the WHOLE GAME! I mean, it wasn’t the Super Bowl or anything Pete. Moving on, Ty Johnson didn’t even start the game, thanks for playing. Kenny Stills is not Will Fuller. It’s about reps and chemistry for Stills. His day will come later in the season. Don’t sleep on him like he put your cash lineup to sleep. Huntery (Hunter + Henry) had the Bears Linebackers to deal with and Keenan Allen’s presence made him a non-factor. Speaking of Carolina’s DST, I think that Tevin Coleman just scored another touchdown. The 49ers are legit. Establish the Run is real!
Top performers at each position for week 8 (w/value) on Fanduel.
Quarterbacks
Running Backs
Wide Receivers
Tight Ends
Flex
Defense and Special Teams
Perfect Lineup
One of my big takeaways is that, if you have the chalk, you better have the nuts too or your not going to win big. When Cooper Kupp and Latavius Murray are on all the winning teams, you have to back it up with a breakouts like Tevin Coleman. Shout out to Ian Hartitz (Rotoworld) who accurately predicted at least two of those touchdowns. I still believe in the importance of stacking, but it is all about the right match-up. Some of the best stacks this week were QB/RB and QB/TE. So excited to have, what all DFS players should refer to moving forward as, the “Aaron Stack” back in the Sunday main card mix. It is good to see Mike Evans is still alive. He was on all of my winning teams. Thanks for the $7.46 my man!
I’ll be back later in the week to breakdown winning Fanduel lineups from week 8 in order to help us determine what we can learn and apply to our roster construction for week 9 of DFS.
Until then, may the fantasy gods be with us all!
Nimble w/Numbers
Each week I will be highlighting my favorite fantasy football analysts. This week’s spotlight is on Pete Overzet (Rotogrinders) and Evan Silva (Establish the Run). Give them a follow on Twitter and checkout all of their quality fantasy football content.
A Shot in the Dark – NFL DFS Winners for Week 8 (and Origin Stories)
I love football. To be more precise, I love fantasy football. To be exact, I love daily fantasy football. But it wasn’t always this way. I’ve dabbled with DFS over the last few years, but until this year my first fantasy love has always centered around my home league redraft teams. For this story, it might help if I just started at the beginning. I have been an NFL fan since I was 4 years old. My grandmother, who we lived with growing up, was a die-hard Raiders fan and introduced me to the beautiful violence just in time for her Raiders to steam role the hometown Redskins in Super Bowl XVIII. How she came to claim the silver and black in a sea of burgundy and gold, I will never know. I think she liked ass kickers. I, on the other hand, was fiercely loyal to my hometown and firmly entrenched myself as a Redskins fan. No, not those Redskins. The Joe Gibbs coaching, Darrell Green punt returning, Dexter Manley sacking, Alvin Walton spearing, Joe Jacoby mauling, Art Monk gracing, Gary Clark TD grabbing, Super Bowl Fucking Champion Washington Redskins!!!. May they rest in peace (double chest tap, point to the heavens and pour some out for all the good fans lost along the way).
Fast forward to my twenties, my childhood football team is fading into obscurity thanks to boy wander and I was lost. I didn’t renew my season tickets and nothing mattered to me anymore. It was a bad time for the empire. I was just about to give up and become a college football fan (I had already started looking for face paint) when my brother-in-law reached out and invited me to try fantasy football with him. He explained that in fantasy football, we get to pick the players that we liked and thought were good, build our own teams. I was intrigued. Unfortunately, the first time I tried fantasy football, I didn’t feel anything at all. Other people said that I looked like I was feeling something, but I don’t think that I was. I was soooooo disappointed. I thought maybe that fantasy football wasn’t for me. Then some friends invited me over to a live home draft they were having. Everyone there was doing fantasy football and it looked so cool. The next thing I knew, it was in my hand and then I was doing it too, everyone cheering me on. This time, I felt it immediately. I couldn’t stop smiling and just kept saying “Houshmandzadeh” over and over again for no reason. It was one of the greatest days of my life. I started fantasy footballing hardcore. By my second season, I was out of control. What had started as a casual, one team a season standard league side hobby (that I enjoyed recreationally a few times a week, in the comfort of my own home) had now somehow morphed into a three day online “auction style IDP league” that led to a daily addiction that was completely unsustainable. It was too fast, too soon. The league dissolved after one season and I was left to do some real soul searching. My thoughts were everywhere. “Do I really need IDP in my life? Are two QBs better than one? Was staying up for 72 hours to monitor the live auction related in anyway to the nervous ticks I developed and compulsions to start Steven Jackson all season (despite his abysmal yards per carry average)?” I quit cold turkey, for the whole offseason, and then I got back up on the horse and formed a new PPR league. Just one wouldn’t be that bad. I could manage it. And I did. It started off perfectly. I was constantly talking smack and starting arbitrary fights on our league message boards. I rallied the league to veto an obvious attempt at collusion and moved us from two WRs to three. I pulled off the greatest most devastating fantasy football draft day prank ever (story to come, for sure). Hell, Matthew Berry and I even ended up exchanging tweets about the blowup doll that my fantasy football league used as our championship trophy (shout out to “The Ballers League” you are all savages, except for you Vince, you are still you). I sent him a photo of the blowup doll and he asked if her could use the story in his book. I was on fantasy cloud nine. Nothing was going to stop me.
Ten years later and so much has changed. The blowup doll popped without me. In the end, she never made it over to my place. The fantasy football landscape looks a lot different as well. While I spent the last decade consistently falling short of fantasy glory, fantasy football itself had become a multi-billion dollar industry, with the surge in dynasty leagues and the introduction of DFS helping to forge a year long fantasy football season. I ate it all up. My research for my redraft leagues now begins every year on January 1st and runs until late December 31st (I’m great at holiday parties if you want to talk about all the misconceptions surrounding Zero RB). Once my redrafts are completed in early September though, all the research, obsessions with podcasts, player projections, target share data, 1st down run percentage tendencies, it all has to go somewhere. So I decided to put all the time spent to good use and focus my efforts on DFS this season. No better way to jump write in, than to launch a weekly DFS winners article that no one asked for (Yes, I know. It’s a pun. Yes. That’s where we are at right now. Sorry. It will happen again.).
I turned 40 this past April and it led me to reflect on what was important to me in my life and besides the obvious, (incredible wife, two beautiful daughters, my parents, amazing friends) I realized that fantasy football was at the top of the list of what matters most to me. More importantly, it makes me happy. I made a promise to myself then that I was going to do more of what I love with the time that I have left. Fantasy football is what I love. This is my breakaway from the machine. You can fade me or roll with me. Either way, here’s my shot in the dark at fantasy football writing and picking weekly DFS winners. May the TDs be with us both, but mostly with me.
Constructing the Perfect Lineup(s) for Tournament Play (multi-entry)
There are a lot of considerations that go into constructing a potentially perfect lineup. One of the most important is the contest that you are entering. Context matters for lineup construction. If you are entering the millionaire maker, or large tournaments, you are going to approach the contest in a measured and strategic way. Carefully selecting only your very best players to your offer to the fantasy football gods for their humble consideration.
When you enter smaller tournaments you have the opportunity to diversify your approach and expand your player pool to include more variance. It helps to establish a core of potential breakout players that you can build your team around each week. Once you have your core group, you can start to play around with slight variations that maximize your exposure to players that might not be included in a large percentage of the field.
The focus of this article will be how to approach constructing your perfect lineup for multi-entry tournaments ranging from $0.05 to $1. These tournaments often feature an entry cap of 150 entries per contest. If you are starting off your DFS experience with less than $100, I encourage you to maximize your lineup exposure in these types of tournaments. My analysis will focus on the weekly winners from three Fanduel Week 7 contests. We will breakdown their lineups to see where they gained an edge over the field and determine what patterns led to their overall success.
Winning lineup for Week 7 Fanduel $6K Sun NFL Pooch Punt ($0.5 to enter) contest.
Winning lineup for the Week 7 Fanduel $75K Sun NFL Hail Mary ($0.25 to enter) contest.
Winning lineup for the Week 7 Fanduel $150K Sun NFL Dive ($1 entry) contest.
After analyzing these weekly winners, a number of observable roster construction strategies jumped out to me.
All three teams featured a QB/WR stack. Double points are double points.
The $6K winning roster included a QB/RB/WR stack which accounted for double points across multiple positions groups.
The Raiders vs. Packers match-up from week 7 also featured a Raiders pass funnel defense for Aaron Rodgers and company to feast on. Opposing QBs are averaging a QB rating of 115.6 against the Raiders (For reference, Pat Mahomes has a QB rating of 113.1 and Russell Wilson comes in at 114.1). The Raiders also allowed QB’s a 67% completion rating and were in the top third of the NFL in passing TDs allowed.
The $150K weekly winner exploited injuries to stars Alvin Kamara and David Johnson by featuring their backups, Latavius Murray ($5,300) and Chase Edmonds ($5,500). This allowed him to pay up for studs Dalvin Cook, DeAndre Hopkins and Julio Jones to bolster his lineup.
Feature RBs against run funnel defenses. The Lions give up 4.9 yards per carry, 171.8 yards per game, 194.1 total fantasy points on the season and they are giving up an average 32.4 fantasy points a game to RBs. If you didn’t start Dalvin Cook last week, you only have yourself to blame.
All three teams featured Darren “The Walrus” Waller and his 88% catch rate. Tyrell Williams was out during week 7, which meant that Waller was the number one target in a come from behind shootout loss in Green Bay. Look for skill positions that are enhanced by injuries at other positions when projecting a players value.
All three lineups included players who featured prominently in a high scoring games. Using the Vega weekly over/under lines can be useful in predicting increased opportunity for players who are seeking more touches or targets due to positive game flow in their direction. Find out what the team splits are for the game.
Identify undervalued players whose low costs creates the potential for them to well outperform their price tag. Marvin Jones ($5,600) returned 6.8x his value. Austin Ekeler ($6,900) returned 3.2x his value. Darren Waller ($6,200) led all TE with a value of 4.5x his price.
From what I learned in week 7, here are the factors that I am taking into consideration when targeting my players for inclusion in my lineups (all prices are from Fanduel).
QB/WR Stacks with favorable match-ups
QB
Russell Wilson $8,600
DeShaun Watson $8,400
Jared Goff $8,000
Matt Stafford $7,700
Ryan Tannehill $6,900
WR
Tyler Lockett $7,200
DK MetCalf $6,600
DeAndre Hopkins $8,200
Kenny Stills $5,700
Cooper Kupp $7,700
Robert Woods $7,000
Brandon Cooks $6,900
Kenny Golladay $6,700
Marvin Jones $6,300
Corey Davis $5,500
AJ Brown $5,500
*Bonus play QB/RB stack:Tom Brady ($7,900) and James White ($6,000)
Injury/Opportunity Bump
RB
Latavius Murray $6,200
Chase Edmonds $6,100
Ty Johnson $5,200
Jalen Richard $5,000
DeAndre Washington $4,500
WR
Golden Tate $6,100
Kenny Stills $5,700
Mike Williams $5,700
Phillip Dorsett $5,600
Calvin Ridley $5,400
*If Keenan Allen is out on Sunday, Hunter Henry is a steal at $6,700.
High Cost players value plays based on match-up, opportunity and breakout potential.
QB
Russell Wilson $8,600
DeShaun Watson $8,400
Jared Goff $8,000
Matthew Stafford $7,700
Josh Allen $7,700
RB
Saquon Barkley $8,600
Chris Carson $8,000
Leonard Fournette $7,700
Todd Gurley $7,400
Austin Ekeler $6,800
WR
Michael Thomas $8,500
DeAndre Hopkins $8,200
Chris Godwin $8,100
Cooper Kupp $7,700
Tyler Lockett $7,200
TE
Darren Waller $6,800
Hunter Henry $6,700
Austin Hooper $6,600
Evan Engram $6,300
DST
LA Rams $5,000
New England Patriots $5,000
Low cost/high value plays based on match-up, opportunity and breakout potential.
QB
Teddy Bridgewater $7,500
Kyler Murray $7,400
Ryan Tannehill $6,900
RB
DeVanta Freeman $6,200
James White $6,000
Duke Johnson $5,300
WR
DK Metcalf $6,600
Julian Edelman $6,600
Marvin Jones $6,300
WR
John Brown $5,900
Mike Williams $5,700
Larry Fitzgerald $5,400
TE
Gerald Everett $6,100
Cameron Brate $5,200
Darren Fells $5,100
DST
Buffalo Bills $4,300
Carolina Panthers $3,500
In closing, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that there are so many outstanding fantasy football analysists currently producing outstanding daily and weekly content for DFF and redraft leagues. I am grasping at the coattails of true giants in the fantasy football industry and have been inspired to do this because of them. Fantasy pioneers like Dave Richard, JJ Zacherisen, C.D. Carter, Min Cash Pete, Scott Fish, The Football Guys, Brad Evans, Pat D, Pat Thorman, LordReebs, Matt Harmon, Tags and Bobby, the Footballers (not JayGriz, his takes are static), Ian Hartiz, Matt Walden, The Great Sigmund Bloom, Warren Sharp, Scott Barrett and the list has so many more people on it! These are the brilliant football minds that I follow/stalk/idolize on my fantasy twitter each day (sorry for all the fanboying and GIFs gentlemen). They are all my true heroes!
Nimble w/Numbers 