Vince Lombardi was obviously a guaranteed prize pool player.
He’s also widely considered to be the greatest NFL coach of all time (pre-Bill Belichick of course).
In his iconic “What It Takes To Be Number One” speech, Lombardi says, “There is no room for second place. There is only one place in my game, and that’s first place.”
The same can be said about GPPs. You play to win the game. Hello? You play. To win. The game. You don’t play to just play it. (Thanks, Herm).
Ownership Isn’t Everything, It’s the Only Thing
In my previous life as a sales trainer, I once tried to get a sales team fired up by recreating Lombardi’s famous speech. I dressed up like Lombardi, came charging into the room, and delivered the speech in some goofy accent that I felt sounded like Lombardi.
Truth be told, I didn’t actually dress up like Lombardi. I wore a Green Bay Packers polo I found at Target and a funny hat from a party store. But you get the point.
At the end of the speech (even though it wasn’t actually a part of Lombardi’s speech), I yelled, “Sales aren’t everything, they’re the only thing!”
The room full of 55-year-old salesmen who had moved to Florida to retire and not to get yelled at by some punk-ass kid in a douchebag hat were not impressed.
But if those old dudes were GPP players looking to win and I had said “Ownership isn’t everything, it’s the only thing!” I bet they would have listened.
Leveraging the Past to Predict the Future
In our Player Models each week you can find our FantasyLabs ownership projections for both the DraftKings Millionaire Maker and FanDuel Sunday Million tournaments.
In addition, we have historic tournament ownership data available in our Trends tool, which you can utilize to pinpoint historic ownership in exact situations with countless filters.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to use our Trends tool to examine past ownership data to see if we can uncover any spots that can give us an advantage when building GPP lineups.
With each piece, we’ll look at specific filters to see what hidden nuggets lie in the data. First up: Vegas spreads and quarterbacks.
Vegas Favorites
DraftKings
I broke down Vegas favorites into four ranges according to the spread. I also set the projected floor of each sample at five points to eliminate the noise created by backup QBs who may not have played in a game. This is what I got.
As you can see in the graph above, the more points the QB is favored by, the higher the ownership becomes. QBs favored by 0.5 to 3.5 points have previously been owned at an average of just 4.7 percent in large DK tournaments. When the spread reaches 10.5 points or more, favored QBs have an average ownership of 10.8 percent.
Importantly, the QBs favored by at least 10.5 points are not just the highest-owned passers in the sample. They are also the least productive on a salary-adjusted basis, with a +2.05 Plus/Minus. In terms of ownership compared to Plus/Minus, QBs playing as heavy favorites have historically been poor GPP investments on DK.
The sweet spot belongs to the QBs favored by four to seven points. They’ve been owned at a relatively low 5.4 percent and provided the highest Plus/Minus of the bunch at +3.13.
Why do these QBs have better Plus/Minus values than the QBs who are heavily favored? Maybe it’s because the -4 to -7 spread spread indicates that these particular QBs, though good enough for their teams to win, must continue to play aggressively throughout the game to secure the win. And maybe the spread of at least -10.5 indicates that the QBs who are heavy favorites are likely to spend a lot of time late in the game handing the ball off to running backs while milking the clock. Whatever the reason, the QBs favored by four to seven points look like good GPP DK investments.
FanDuel
The results on FD aren’t drastically different from the results on DK. The more the QBs are favored, the higher their ownership percentages are. Notable is the massive drop in salary-based production for the QBs playing with the largest spreads. QBs playing in games with a spread of -10.5 or more have averaged just a +0.20 Plus/Minus while being owned at the highest rate (9.1 percent).
Additionally, there is not a big difference in ownership or Plus/Minus in the lower FD spread range. In terms of ownership percentages compared to Plus/Minus, any QB favored by no more than seven points has traditionally been a profitable target. In general, the -4 to -7 cohort is still in the sweetest spot.
Vegas Underdogs
DraftKings
Underdog DK QBs have not traditionally been owned at a high percentage, no matter what the spread is. QBs playing in games with the smallest spreads have been owned at the highest percentage, but that’s just 3.4 percent.
If we’re looking for an ownership advantage among the underdogs, it can clearly be found in the +7.5 to +10 range, where QBs have been owned at 0.7 percent historically while producing a +1.87 Plus/Minus, which isn’t far from the underdogs’ best mark of +2.04.
FanDuel
As you see, the results on FD are eerily similar. In general, underdog QBs aren’t owned at high percentages. Their average Plus/Minus values are relatively static up to spreads of +10. When they are underdogs of +10.5 or more, FD QBs have performed well below salary-based expectations.
Once again, the QBs playing with a spread between +7.5 to +10 have been the most productive when comparing their ownership percentage to their collective Plus/Minus.
“How I Could Just Kill A Man”
When I originally titled this article it was called “Vince Lombardi and Gangsta Rap,” but I got to the end of the article and realized that I had written nothing about gangsta rap. I probably shouldn’t title sh*t before I finish writing it.
So my conclusion’s header is in honor of the 1991 hit from Cypress Hill. Then I realized that Cypress Hill wasn’t really gangsta rap at all. They were just dudes who smoked a lot of weed. Then I gave up because I didn’t think a “F*ck tha Police” header would be appropriate.
This is what the data says: If you are looking for an ownership advantage in tournaments, focus on QBs favored by no more than seven points. When at all feasible, prefer those QBs with -4 to -7 spreads.
Underdog QBs tend to be low-owned in general. If you’re trying to get crafty, search for a dog QB with a spread of -7.5 to -10 points. And probably avoid QBs on either side of a spread of 10.5 points or more.
Next time, I’ll cover running backs, DFS ownership, and Ace Rothstein (if I can think of something cool about Ace Rothstein).
