Heading into Week 15 I found myself oddly intrigued with the impending Thursday night matchup between the St. Louis Rams and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. An over/under of 41 points and the short week are two components that should generally equate to a situation that any level-headed DFS player would fade without much extra thought. Yet the allure of rostering Mike Evans in a decent matchup with Vincent Jackson sidelined – Evans has been targeted heavily by Jameis Winston when Jackson is absent from the lineup – stuck with me all week. Eventually I allowed the more-rationale portion of my brain to take over and followed protocol, staying far away from this contest as usual.
As I watched Evans rack up 17 targets on his way to 9 receptions and 157 yards, I began to wonder how much merit auto-fading Thursday nights really had. Was I giving in to groupthink and just following the consensus among much of the DFS community? Sure, many of these games are ugly, but are all of them? Or are the ugly ones simply standing out to us? With the power of our Trends tool available to me, I decided now would be as good of a time as any to delve into this idea a bit further.
Before we move on, I want to give a bit of context to the information you’ll be reading below. I’m not implying that we all actually auto-fade every Thursday night game – there are obviously situations in which many of us have deviated in the past. Additionally, much of this research is in regards to performance and production in relation to the pricing of the player; no consideration to potential ownership has been included in the research. Due to the increased ownership we generally see associated with Thursday night players, this should always be factored into the equation when you’re constructing your lineups. Again, this doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily need to auto-fade these players because you believe their ownership will be inflated, but it does mean that you should be doing the proper research in advance to determine if you still want to gain exposure to the player(s).
Also, I’ve only included players with at least a minimal weekly projection as a baseline – I’m not particularly concerned with the weekly production of a player that is receiving one or two carries at most in a game. With these players removed from our population, the information we are able to extract should provide a more accurate picture of the night-to-night comparisons.
Quarterbacks
The common consensus has certainly fallen on the side of fading the signal-callers and passing game as a whole in Thursday night contests, but our research doesn’t necessarily support this theory 100%.
As we see above, looking at the quarterback group as a whole actually does lend credence to this popular sentiment, with Thursday night quarterbacks producing an average Plus/Minus of only +0.78. But should we really be comparing players like Brandon Weeden to Cam Newton when making lineup decisions? I think this is where things fall apart a bit for this argument. Many of the studies and statistical comparisons have factored in the total statistical output of position groups as a whole. When in reality, I don’t care all that much if Austin Davis struggles to perform on Thursday slightly more than he does on Sunday.
Breaking the quarterbacks into groups by price, we see a clear separation between those priced under the $7,000 threshold and those above it. While we lose a bit of the upside, we are gaining consistency – 61% of passers priced at $7,000 or above are hitting value.
The lack of time to game plan is often cited as one of the key reasons that passing games tend to struggle; this argument goes both ways though. It’s true that when facing a younger/lower-tiered quarterback, a defense is likely at an advantage on a short week. They can get by playing a very vanilla base defense, as the opposition is apt to struggle without a proper week of planning and film study.
When we take an elite player at the position and thrust them into a similar position, the balance seems to shift. The lack of preparation by the opposing defense can be exploited by these passers and offset their own shortened study time over the previous week. Case in point: Peyton Manning has played three Thursday night games over the previous few years (well, actually four, but one of which occurred during the first week of the season when he had plenty of prep time). Over these three contests, Manning has averaged 277 passing yards and 2.67 touchdowns. In Sunday contests, he’s averaging 297 passing yards and 2.37 touchdowns. DK bonuses aside, a quick calculation show us that he’s averaging essentially ~21 DK points per game, regardless of whether the game occurred on a Thursday or Sunday.
Because the sample size isn’t huge – some quarterbacks have played only a game or two on Thursdays, while others have played none – we could pick and choose quarterbacks to make the case for both sides of this argument. You’ll find plenty of bad games from great quarterbacks and an almost equal amount of nice games from lackluster quarterbacks. Cumulatively though, we can see that erring on the side of playing a quarterback priced at $7,000 or higher has been the correct decision more often than not over the past c0uple of years.
Running Backs
If there’s been any group of position players that has been given some reprieve from the TNF stigma, it’s the running backs. The reasoning isn’t all that complex – we assume that a stripped down game plan is likely to feature the running game to a greater extent than normal. And it seems that this basic thought process isn’t necessarily wrong.
Running backs on Thursday nights have been great (oddly enough, they’ve killed it on Monday nights too) over the past few years, boasting an average Plus/Minus of +2.47 points. Let’s perform the same test as we did with the quarterbacks, splitting out the running backs by pricing tiers.
Once again, the rich get richer. The pricier options are playing at an elite level – a crazy +4.12 Plus/Minus – while the more budget friendly options are operating below their Sunday baseline levels.
Wide Receiver & Tight End
I’m lumping in the receiving options together, because in case you haven’t noticed, a bit of a trend has been developing here. Higher priced options have actually performed better from a Plus/Minus aspect on Thursday nights than they have on Sundays.
Wide Receivers
Tight Ends
The wide receiver group as a whole keeps with the trend, as our premium-priced options perform better on Thursdays than Sundays, while the cheaper-priced options have underperformed on Thursdays. We do see the tight end group break this trend though, as the budget-friendly options are actually amazingly consistent across all nights of the week. The elite manage to keep with the earlier established trend, producing a far better average Plus/Minus on Thursdays.
Conclusion
Thursdays can certainly offer more value than initially thought, though it may not be the best time to go bargain hunting – and the inflated ownership levels will likely push you towards using these players in cash games over GPPs. Regardless of your platform, if you’re considering one of the big names on Thursday night slates and find yourself fading them for no other reason than that TNF stigma, it may be time to take a step back and reconsider your process.
One of the most alluring aspects of DFS, to me at least, is that there is no one certain way to approach the game. With more and more information flooding into our Twitter feeds every day, it’s easy to fall into groupthink mode from time to time – I know I definitely do. While it may be a bit late in the year to use this information for NFL DFS, the premise can be applied to your DFS process as a whole. By taking the time to re-evaluate specific players, teams – even entire slates of games – it makes it tougher for biases to work their way into our process and may even help overturn a few details that we’ve been overlooking previously.
