Every Thursday during the NFL season, I see all over social media how you should fade the Thursday night game because the fish inflate ownership percentages, as they want to watch their players on primetime television. However, I haven’t really seen data behind how players perform – fading players because of inflated ownership percentage is generally a good idea, but it obviously has to be balanced with value. It’s not a great play to fade the best value running back on the week just because he’s playing on Thursday night.
Using our Trends tool, I looked at each position’s Plus/Minus on DraftKings at each start time in the 2014 season – Thursday night, Sunday at 1pm, Sunday at 4pm, Sunday night, and Monday. I’m ignoring data from Saturday, as the sample size is too small.
| Thursday | Sunday 1pm | Sunday 4pm | Sunday Night | Monday | |
| QB | -2.27 | -0.27 | +0.77 | -0.14 | +1.05 |
| RB | +0.90 | -0.27 | +0.13 | -0.05 | +0.57 |
| WR | -0.98 | +0.09 | +0.15 | -0.24 | -0.26 |
| TE | -0.38 | -0.18 | +0.03 | +0.86 | +0.54 |
| D | -0.50 | +0.36 | -0.63 | -1.17 | -0.78 |
The goal here isn’t necessarily to see the performance of players, although it’s fairly useful, but to try to observe any details about site pricing on DraftKings. As is the case with all data, it could be noise, but I think the Thursday numbers here are fairly telling.
Quarterbacks, wide receivers, and tight ends – all positions that would benefit from a high Vegas over/under – all see negative Plus/Minus’ in Thursday games. I wrote the other day about how Vegas lines are almost completely priced into quarterback salaries (I haven’t done this yet for the other positions, but I would expect similar results), so this could be a matter of the Vegas lines typically being a little too high on Thursday games.
If that’s the case, the DraftKings prices will be naturally higher than they should be – because of the correlation mentioned above – and those players won’t return value as often.
The reason I think this idea has merit is because of the positive Plus/Minus of running backs in relation to the other positions. My theory is that on the short turnaround – these teams are generally playing a game after just three days of rest as opposed to six – teams lean on the run game more than is accounted for by the lines or salaries.
I would keep in mind the ownership issue, of course. I’d guess that Thursday night ownership percentages would be the highest earlier in the season, when DFS sites are the fishiest. However, later in the season, they could potentially become under-owned if the knowledgeable DFS community continues to fade those players and the fish are gone. At that point, running backs could be a value – both in terms of Plus/Minus and ownership percentage.
