Reviewing good lineups is so 2015. I thought we could bring in the New Year by reviewing one of my poor lineups this past week. Obviously, I had a whole bunch of really awesome, totally sharp, mind-blowing lineups. I’m talking Kirk Cousins exposure all over the place, but you guys will have to take my word on that. What is the point of a reader-writer relationship if we can’t build trust?
I have learned a lot in the few years I have been playing DFS. My thoughts about lineup construction have changed a ton and continue to change as the landscape of DFS changes. I think examining some of the mistakes I made in the beginning and continue to make are a valuable aspect of becoming a more profitable player.
This weekend I exclusively played tournaments. I am a big subscriber to the contrarian approach, often asking myself “How can I profit the most if the public is wrong.” When I first started playing DFS and using a contrarian lineup construction, I went about it in a very singular way: fade the chalk. This led me to make some very poor lineups. In the past, an ideal week for my old contrarian approach would have looked a little something like this…
- Identify the chalk.
- Find super smart ways to pivot off of said chalk.
- Win all the money.
But most of the time it went a little more like this…
- Identify the chalk.
- Blindly pivot off of chalk.
- Watch chalk go off.
- Be sad.
I am not saying that fading chalk is a bad thing, but I am not sure if the contrarian approach should have any hard and fast rules. Thinking of that, take a moment to look over one of my lineups from this past week. This was a single entry into the NFL 300K Game Changer on DraftKings.
I know what you are thinking. “How did you not win?!” I don’t know either.
It is more likely that you are thinking, “Dude, what happened to contrarian life?” Well, that is what I want to talk about.
I am always exploring new ideas concerning how to be contrarian and new ways to think about ownership. These are unproven theories I have been playing around with. One thing I have been looking at recently is how I go about differentiating myself from the field.
Take a look at my two highest owned players: Zach Ertz (60%) and Odell Beckham Jr. (54%). In the past, if I had known a player would be this highly owned it would almost certainly be an auto-fade. Now I look at them a bit differently, and more independently.
Zach Ertz came in to a great matchup on the heels of a two-week span where he saw 30 targets. That, combined with the salary flexibility he gave, put him in play regardless of ownership. Odell Beckham Jr. was a different story. There were a few high-priced WRs with relatively equal upside that I liked this week. Here are some of the top WRs I thought would be highly owned and their ownership percentage across a few different buy-in levels.
The top three were very highly rostered across the different stakes. If Julio Jones, Odell Beckham Jr., and Antonio Brown all had poor games and you faded them, than you were going to be in a good spot. The problem is, however, the likelihood of them all having bad games is very low.
This is where my thought process has to change a bit. I wanted to play at least one of them. I settled on Odell and played him in a large percentage of my lineups. I thought he had good upside.
Just because I ate the chalk there does not mean (to me at least) that I can’t still differentiate myself from the field – I just look at it as a different field. I didn’t take Odell because I like his hair (I do); I took him because I liked his upside. I hoped for him to score a lot of points, and if that happened, the question I asked myself had to change. It now goes from “how do I differentiate from the field?” to “how do I differentiate from lineups that are also going to have OBJ?” One easy way to do that is to not roster Eli Manning, who I thought would be a popular play. He came in at 28.7% ownership.
There was a lot of QB value this week, so I thought paying up would be a sharp move. Cam Newton went underowned again with only 5% of the field rostering him. Pairing him with the 1% owned Devin Funchess in a game where Ted Ginn would not be playing was a move I was bullish on this week.
My next highest-owned player was DeAngelo Williams at 32.3%. A lot was made of Pittsburgh’s poor home-road splits this past week. DeAngelo’s splits were not nearly as bad as the passing game. My next thought was to take underpriced Martavis Bryant (19.3%) to get a little separation from the other DeAngelo owners.
News that Bilal Powell would not play on Sunday and the weather forecast for the Jets game led me to predict a lot of touches for Chris Ivory. I was wrong. I still think I was right, though. However, the 30% ownership came in higher than I had expected.
A.J. Green is in play for me almost every week. He is big and fast, has big-play ability, and he is top 20 in red zone targets. I did not think he would be nearly as highly owned as some of the other number-one receivers this week. This I did get correct as he was only 6.7% owned.
I also played the Cowboys D/ST. That is pretty much all I want to say about that.
I ate chalk in this lineup. Some of it was purposeful and some came at a bit of a surprise, but I do think I still had some of the right ideas in differentiating myself from the individual pieces. I think dedicating some of my focus to this could be an interesting way to go about lineup construction in the future.
