DFS Building Blocks – Week 17

Welcome to the new year! I hope you ate all the black-eyed peas and find yourself rolling in DFS money tomorrow. This is the first week where we start to look at playoff scenarios and how they impact the slate. Fortunately, not much of an impact this week, but we’ll still take a look. We should have a lot more playing-time considerations to think about next week.

The table below shows each game and says whether each team has something to play for or is eliminated. Next week we’ll have a few more categories to consider.

Dallas	something to play for	Arizona	something to play for
L.A. Rams	something to play for	Baltimore	something to play for
Tampa Bay	something to play for	New York Jets	eliminated
San Francisco	something to play for	Houston	eliminated
Philadelphia	something to play for	Washington	something to play for (technically, but not realistically)
Atlanta	something to play for	Buffalo	something to play for
New Orleans	something to play for	Carolina	eliminated
Chicago	eliminated	New York Giants	eliminated
Seattle	eliminated	Detroit	eliminated
Kansas City	something to play for	Cincinnati	something to play for
Tennessee	something to play for	Miami	something to play for
Indianapolis	something to play for	Las Vegas	something to play for
New England	something to play for	Jacksonville	eliminated
L.A. Chargers	something to play for	Denver	something to play for

Like I said, not much of an impact. Most teams still have something to play for. And the teams that are eliminated shouldn’t have a lot of playing-time decisions. Perhaps D’Andre Swift for Detroit who is expected back doesn’t play much with the Lions eliminated. Some talk of Kyle Allen at QB for Washington, not that we were targeting Washington anyway. And the eliminated vs eliminated games should play out as we’d normally expect, with none of the teams needing to try out players for next season.

We started our article last week talking about returning to our fundamentals of building correlated game stacks. We definitely need to remember that, but… we should also note that on a week with 14 games on the main slate it’s more likely than usual that a lineup of a bunch of good individual plays wins as there are more chances for individual players to boom. Said another way, it’s less likely that a single game outperforms while all others disappoint. So we’ll attack this week with that mind.

First, let’s look at the teams with the highest implied team totals and see if we can build a lineup that maximizes exposure to those games. We’re not forcing team stacks, but, where possible we would still like correlated min-stacks from the same game.

	Player	Implied Team Total	Spread	Over/Under	Opponent
Tampa Bay		29.5	-13.5	45.5	New York Jets
Buffalo	Singletary	29.5	-14.5	44.5	Atlanta Falcons
New England	Harry	29	-16.5	41.5	Jacksonville Jaguars
Dallas	Gallup	28.75	-6	51.5	Arizona Cardinals
San Francisco		28.25	-12.5	44	Houston Texans
Kansas City	Hill	27.75	-4.5	51	Cincinnati Bengals
Chargers		26.75	-8	45.5	Denver Broncos
Rams	Stafford	26	-5.5	46.5	Baltimore Ravens
Indianapolis	Taylor (+Moreau)	25.75	-7	44.5	Las Vegas Raiders
Philadelphia		24.75	-4.5	45	Washington Football Team
Seattle		24.5	-7.5	41.5	Detroit Lions
Cincinnati	Mixon	23.25	4.5	51	Kansas City Chiefs

We can’t hit every game obviously, but that’s a pretty good list of players we can fit into one lineup on FanDuel. Add a cheap defense and we’ve hit a lot of the top team totals with some pretty talented players.

Stafford gives us exposure to “any team playing against the Ravens secondary” and playing him alone gives us the added benefit of leverage on all the individual Kupp and Michel lineups. Although Kupp being the highest priced player on the slate has dropped his ownership to lower than what we’d expect this week. You can easily rework the names above, adding Kupp, dropping Hill, and playing Mahomes naked. Then can add Ronald Jones to get exposure to another team on the list. (Update: It’s looking like Michel’s ownership is just as high as Kupp’s. With the Ravens tough run D I’ll be looking for ways to fit Kupp into my lineups at lower ownership than what he should have.)

Taylor is the highest priced RB and, in my mind, the player most likely to lead the slate in points and most likely expensive player to hit 3x. We add Moreau as a cheap correlation play to allow all the other studs to fit into our lineups.

Tyreek Hill gets us exposure to the Chiefs and we know the upside he brings. We come back with Mixon on the other side, who routinely gets lower ownership than he deserves.

Gallup is almost always the cheapest and lowest owned Cowboys QB, who almost always gets a few deep shots a game. Exactly the type of player we want to target.

Harry is our flier in this lineup but he’s getting playing time and targets with Agholor out and is on the team with the third highest implied total.

And we can add Singletary from the Bills who has a higher than usual chance at being part of the scoring because of the large spread expected. In other lineups, I really like pairing Singletary and the Bills D but that doesn’t fit here.

Use this framework to play around with different lineups. Play Kelce instead of Hill and Renfrow instead of Moreau. Try Hurts at QB who should get a bump with Sanders out. Try Hunter Henry at TE. Try Burrow instead of Mixon (although I’m bracing for a Cincinnati letdown this week). You get the idea. You can build a surprisingly good lineup this way.

Now, back to our traditional correlated lineups. Let’s look at our betting odds to find the best game environments.

Dallas Cowboys	Arizona Cardinals	51.5	-6	28.75
Kansas City Chiefs	Cincinnati Bengals	51	-4.5	27.75
Los Angeles Rams	Baltimore Ravens	46.5	-5.5	26
Tampa Bay Buccaneers	New York Jets	45.5	-13.5	29.5
Los Angeles Chargers	Denver Broncos	45.5	-8	26.75
Philadelphia Eagles	Washington	45	-4.5	24.75
Buffalo Bills	Atlanta Falcons	44.5	-14.5	29.5
Indianapolis Colts	Las Vegas Raiders	44.5	-7	25.75
San Francisco 49ers	Houston Texans	44	-12.5	28.25
New England Patriots	Jacksonville Jaguars	41.5	-16.5	29
Seattle Seahawks	Detroit Lions	41.5	-7.5	24.5
Tennessee Titans	Miami Dolphins	39.5	-3	21.25
New Orleans Saints	Carolina Panthers	37.5	-6.5	22
Chicago Bears	New York Giants	36.5	-6.5	21.5

Three games clearly stand above the rest with high totals and close spreads. You can expect players from these three games to get a lot of public ownership. We’ve already targeted these games in our non-correlated lineup, but we can also target these when building game stacks.

We can build pairs of correlated plays from these games. Stafford + OBJ + Andrews, Edmonds + Gallup, Mixon + Hill, throw in Miami D and then we’re left with a near min-priced flex and we find Mo Allie-Cox with Doyle banged up. Not bad.

Another route is to overstack one of these games and hope the others disappoint. To me, Chiefs and Bengals are the likeliest letdown spot, with the Bengals more likely to disappoint on their side. Could take a Stafford + Kupp + OBJ + Andrews core. Could take a Dak + two WR core. Or a Kyler + Edmonds + two Cowboys WR. Lot of different ways you can go with that type of build. Pick your game, overstack it, then add in the best (most likely) pieces of individual games we talked about – Singletary, Moreau, Cox, Harry.

The other route we need to talk about is taking an entirely different game to stack. The one that stands out to me is Indy and Las Vegas. We already know we’re targeting Jonathan Taylor. And we know the Colts are monsters against the run, so we can expect Carr to pass all game long, whether in a surprising shootout or just in garbage time. On a slate like this, with a few obvious games, but also a large slate where we can expect some unexpected players to boom, we can find players at extremely low ownership.

Right now, Carr and Moreau are both expected for under 1% ownership. That’s the perfect situation to target with a correlated play. If one does well, the other likely does well too. And add in Taylor and we have a third of our lineup attached to getting just one game script right. We can add in Mixon + Hill for a mini-stack. We can add Gallup and Harry as cheap exposure to high team totals. And we can add the correlated Singletary + Buffalo D play. This is where I’m likely to go, but it’s late in the season and you may not feel comfortable putting the last couple weeks of your DFS bankroll on Carr when players like Stafford, Dak, and Murray are in such great spots this week as well.

Let’s talk about another end-of-season angle. Maybe you’ve had some bad weeks or maybe you’re in a league and you’re looking for some homerun plays this week. You can use the player grid to find players that will give you the most leverage this week – players that may not be likely to hit their ceiling, but if they do, they come at low ownership. Players like Devontae Booker, Javonte Williams, Rex Burkhead, Saquon Barkley, Josh Jacobs. Think of popular games and players and find the alternative. What if Carr and Moreau bust and Jacobs has unexpected success against the Colts D? What if a player in a timeshare gets the bulk of the work (Williams/Gordon, Barkley/Booker, Gaskin + Dolphins D, Ke’Shawn Vaughn)? Zay Jones, Allen Robinson at WR? Perriman? What if McLaurin’s talent wins out in a tough matchup with poor a QB? Hurts + McLaurin could win you a lot of money. You get the idea and you can play around with the Player Grids to see which of these low-owned fliers you can fit into your lineup.

In general, here are some players and stacks that I’ll be targeting in these deeper lineups.

Perriman, Berrios, Vaughan, Fields (great pivot from Montgomery), Fields + Robinson/Kmet, – UPDATE: Dalton starting instead of Fields – Falcons stack, Boston Scott (in case Howard is limited or leaves the game), Gainwell + McLaurin (making the case that Washington somehow makes a game out of it), Howard + Eagles D, Henderson (pivot from Michel), one of Javonte Williams or Melvin Gordon, Chargers passing game + Sutton, Lock + Sutton, Darnold + Moore/Anderson, Ingram + Saints D, Kamara + Moore, Darnold + Kamara, Antoine Wesley, Boyle + Swift + St. Brown, Wilson + Swift + Lockett.

Those are some situations I’m targeting, but remember, with 14 games we can find plenty of “good” plays at low ownership without needing to dig too deep into the hail-mary list. Keep our principles in mind – correlated mini-stacks, RBs as heavy home favorites, opposing WR from underdog team – and you’ll find yourself with a good lineup and a good chance at making variance work in your favor.  

One last note for the week – Miami D really stands out for their combination of upside and price. We talked about fitting a lot of studs into our lineups, this would enable it.

Check back in Sunday morning for any changes.