Last weekend, four of the six highest-owned players in DraftKings’ Millionaire Maker tournament — Adam Thielen, Dede Westbrook, Leonard Fournette and Chris Godwin — all scored fewer than 15 points at ownership percentages that ranged from 24.4% all the way up to 28.45% (per our FantasyLabs Ownership tool).
It was a good early season reminder that while eating the chalk (especially the good chalk) is often a necessary strategy for winning games in daily fantasy football, when playing in ridiculously large field tournaments like DraftKings’ Millionaire Maker and FanDuel’s Sunday Million, one of the easiest ways to rocket past others on the leaderboard is to pivot from the highest-owned chalk players in favor of other high-upside plays who for whatever reason may be flying under the radar.
Using FantasyLabs’ Leverage score, I’ll dig through the data to identify those contrarian plays for Week 2.
Loaded Leverage: Week 2 GPP Targets
Quarterback
Hammering the Leverage bell pretty hard this week on DraftKings is Tom Brady ($6,100), who is currently coming in with a 97% Leverage score. It’s well documented that Brady has historically struggled on the road in Miami — per our Trends tool, Brady has scored fewer than 13 DraftKings points in three of his last five trips to Miami and averages just 16.81 DraftKings points per game there since 2014.
QBs in general have also scored 0.96 fewer DraftKings points per game when playing in division games compared to non-division games. Further, Brady is currently a massive 18.5-point favorite, and in the few games recorded in our database with spreads of more than 15.5 points, QBs have produced a dreadful -4.28 Plus/Minus and have met or exceeded their salary based expectations in only 9.1% of games.
All that said, this ain’t your grandfather’s Tom Brady armed with the likes of David Givens and David Patten.
