Analyzing the Top 10 Lineups From 2019 DraftKings NFL Millionaire Makers
With the 2020 NFL season looking like it’s moving full speed ahead, I figured it was time to get moving on the updated version of last year’s big review piece. I would encourage you to read last year’s article if you are new to this series as it still contains plenty of relevant statistics on what it actually takes to get to the top of these enormous field size contests. Most large field contests you try to beat 40,000- 60,000 other lineups to take down the first-place prize.
The Millionaire Maker series last season kicked off at nearly 300,000 entries at the $20 buy-in level, and with the Week 1 Millionaire Maker set at the $5 buy-in level, you have to beat over 1 MILLION other entries if the contest fills to take down first place. Creating lineups by hand or in LineupHQ that look like other previous Top Lineups over the years is one of the better ways to give yourself a chance at the big score this season, so let’s start analyzing what has happened in these contests last season Weeks 1-15. I choose not to include Week 16 or 17 since Week 16 was an extremely large buy-in tournament at $1,500 and Week 17 was excluded because well… it’s Week 17.
Don’t forget that while this study looks at the very specific Millionaire Maker tournaments, the data within can be applied to many of the large field tournaments around the industry where you are attempting to beat 100,000+ entries.
Stacking
If you aren’t stacking, you are likely wasting your time trying to take down the first-place prize in the extremely large field tournaments across the industry. You need to embrace the positive correlations that a Quarterback has with his pass-catching options as well as embracing game stacks as it becomes nearly impossible to win these contests if a game ends up being 42-35 and you don’t have that particular game stack.
Of the 150 Top 10 Lineups from Weeks 1-15, 143 of them or 95.3% used some form of a Quarterback based stack. This was up from 89.4% from the 2018 season. Outside of using Lamar Jackson on his own with no other players from the Ravens, I don’t see how you can reasonably expect to compete in these contests this season without including a stack on every team you build. I don’t have the actual numbers but I can assure you that the field is stacking at a rate much lower than the Top 10 lineups are.
Here are two views of how stacks were used on a basic level for the 2019 season.
Of the 143 stacks that appeared in Top 10 lineups, 133 or 93% of them came from 4 types of stacks.
33 from 2-man Team Stacks
25 from 3-man Team Stacks
36 from 3-man Game Stacks
39 from 4-Man Game stacks
Game stacking made up a noticeably higher percentage of Top 10 lineups in 2019 than it did in 2018, which is a trend I expect to continue as players become smarter and realize in order to capture the most upside possible in a stack it makes sense to use a quarterback with two of his pass-catching options while also bringing it back with someone from the other team in the same game.
Flex Usage
The next lineup construction technique I want to look at is what are the Top 10 lineups doing at the flex position.
— 51.33% used a RB in the Flex
— 42.67 used a WR in the Flex
— 6% used a TE in the Flex
Here is what the field did as a whole at the Flex position:
— 50.71% used a RB in the Flex
— 36.28% used a WR in the Flex
— 13.01% used a TE in the Flex
The main takeaway from this is that using a TE in the flex position generally seems to be a bad idea in these extremely large-field tournaments. You are better off allocating the higher end skill positions of RB and WR to your flex position if you are trying to get into the Top 10 from everything I have seen over the past two years collecting this data.
Another note is that after looking over the past two years of data at the RB position, the lineups that use a RB in the flex generally consist of three typical workhorse RBs from that week that were in line to garner the majority of the touches that week. You don’t have to hunt for the seven touch running back that breaks two big plays to win these tournaments.
Total Lineup Ownership
Factoring in ownership into your lineups either by hand or in LineupHQ is something that is EXTREMELY important when attempting to take down one of these large field contests. The Week 1 Millionaire Maker on DraftKings will have nearly 1,200,000 lineups you are competing against if it fills. You have to do things in your lineup much differently in that contest than you would normally do in a 100-man contest or even a 10,000 person contest in an attempt to win in my opinion.
First, let’s start with the (AO) or the Average Ownership. This is the sum of each individual player’s ownership on each lineup you make. Here are the Weeks 1-15 (AO) of the Top 10 lineups.
This averages out to an (AO) of 114.32% per Top 10 lineup for Weeks 1-15 of last season. Let’s get one step deeper and head to ResultsDB and take a look at Week 9 ownership which had the second-highest (AO) of the season to show you why it’s sometimes ok to play a lineup that has a higher (AO).
This week saw a 50% owned $4,000 RB in Jaylen Samuels get there along with CMC scoring 40 FPTS at 24.5% ownership. Two players made up 75% of the ownership on most Top 10 lineups this week. This illustrates weeks when it’s ok to have a higher AO in your lineups as an underpriced RB that is expected to get the majority of touches is usually too good to pass up most weeks. Keep the AO of each team you make in mind when hand-building or use the Total Ownership Min/Max tool in LineupHQ shown below to keep you on the right track if multi-entering.
Low Owned Players
In order to beat the entire state of Montana’s population in terms of entries in the Week 1 Millionaire Maker, you need to incorporate players into most teams you make that the rest of the field simply aren’t interested in. Football has more variance than you probably think it does, and you should be embracing that in the extremely large field tournaments throughout the season. Here is a week by week distribution of how many low owned players each of the Top 10 lineups had in 2019. I consider a 5% owned or less player to be low owned in my analysis.
If you total up all the Top 10 lineups Weeks 1-15, we had an average of 2.2 low owned players per Top 10 lineup over the course of last season. In 2018 this was 2.39 low owned players per lineup. It seems like incorporating 2-3 low owned (5% or less) players per lineup is a strong trend to follow if you attempting to compete in the extremely large-field tournaments.
Low Owned Players by position
Now that we know the inclusion of unpopular players is an important lineup construction technique, the next step is to look at exactly what position those players come from. Here is a graph of where all 330 low owned players came from last season.
— 44% of all Top 10 lineups used a QB that was used at 5% or less. This is a notable trend that has continued to rise from 2018 and allows you to really shoot up the standings when utilizing stacks. If a QB that no one is really using is having a big game, his receiving options are also generally going to be under-owned as well. This correlative low owned combination is one of the easiest ways to diversify yourself from the field and can give you a competitive lineup if it works out. To show you an example I’m going to look at Week 4 from last season from ResultsDB, a week in which nearly everything that was high owned busted.
My personal opinion is that a variety of injuries to players like Patrick Mahomes and Ben Roethlisberger plus others led to the QB position being slightly less predictable than the year before, but I fully expect to see at least 35%+ of Top 10 lineups using a 5% owned or less QB this year.
Here we have busts all over the board for the highest owned players that week. (We will talk about bust rates later in the article). The ownership on Keenan Allen is sky high as he had 13 receptions for 183 yards and two touchdowns the week before. As a whole, the field is rather comical in chasing these outlier games, so use that to your advantage this season. Let’s take a look at the $1,000,000 winning lineup from “fourdouble” that week.
Imagine looking back and seeing Chris Godwin less than 1% owned on any given week! Like I said as a whole the field makes some very comical choices. This is a great example of how to utilize low ownership by fourdouble. He 4-man game stacks the Rams/Bucs game that for some reason no one is interested in…remember I mentioned earlier that 4-man game stacks are gaining in both popularity and hit rate of Top 10 lineups. He brings back his Rams stack with Chris Godwin who after a dud in Week 3 and a questionable injury designation going into a 4pm game was JUST $6,000 AND WE USED HIM IN LESS THAN 1% OF LINEUPS. Recency bias at it’s finest. Mixed in with some low owned RBs that were in line to get the majority of the work and you have great lineup construction for these large field tournaments like the Millionaire Maker.
Low Owned Running Backs
Running Back is generally not the place to go searching for low ownership as just 55 of the 377 running backs (14.5%) in the Top 10 lineups in 2019 came in at 5% or less ownership. The RBs that are likely to get the majority of touches on a given week are one of the more stable and predictable assets we have in fantasy football. These players typically come in fairly heavily used by the field as they tend to have the lowest bust rates of any position among the highly owned players. The only situation I am really looking for low owned players at the running back position is when we have a workhorse running back that is going to get the large majority of work that is simply going overlooked by the field for one reason or another. Let’s go back to Week 3 of last season and take a look at Alvin Kamara and try to figure out why he was just 3.4% owned.
Here is the RB ownership for Week 3
Get ready for more recency bias! Kamara was the highest owned player on the slate the week before at nearly 40%, and put up a complete dud with just 7 fantasy points in Week 2 as the Saints got beat easily by the Rams. The field felt burnt by this and decided Kamara was a chump and not worth his $8,000 salary. Spoiler Alert: He was! Drew Brees was hurt in Week 2 which derailed the Saints offense, but we failed to think Kamara could bounce back in Week 3 with Teddy Bridgewater under center. This type of situation is the only time I am actively searching for low owned RBs to use in a given week. It’s the stud players that burnt us the week before that have been cast aside for the shiny new objects in the current week.
Low Owned Wide Receivers
In 2019 36% of all WRs used in Top 10 lineups came in at 5% ownership or lower. This was a noticeable uptick from 2018 which was somewhere close to 30%. This goes hand in hand with the uptick in low owned QB spike we saw last season as when a low owned QB has a big fantasy performance, his typically low owned receivers also do well. Let’s take a look at the Week 14 winning lineup from gsh1963 to see an example.
A game between two of the best teams in the league in the Superdome at the end of the season and BOTH QB’s in this game come in under 3% each! Both teams had horrible fantasy performances the week before..SURPRISE…the recency bias strikes again, and this game had a total of just 45 which BOTH teams surpassed. These circumstances saw Emmanuel Sanders come in at just 2% owned and also had an $8,300 Michael Thomas come in at just 10% owned after he let us down the week before. The winning lineup didn’t have Thomas but he was all over the other top lineups that week. Even late in the season the field is playing the recency bias card heavily and will allow you to capitalize if you think outside of the box just a little..I mean how hard was it to think a game with Drew Brees in the Superdome could shootout?
For one more example lets take a look at the Week 11 winning lineup from “nhpain”. This lineup is one to pay attention to as it looks like a great example of a large field tournament build from a variety of angles.
nhpain starts the team off with a 4-man game stack of Buffalo at Miami, a game that had a total of just 39 points in Vegas. He gets Josh Allen, John Brown, and DeVante Parker all under 6% owned and brings Devin Singletary along for the ride in the stack. The lineups that use the low owned QB game stack with low owned WRs are one of the easiest ways to create leverage against the field as just 97 of the 176,470 lineups or .05% of lineups had the 4-man game stack that nhpain used as the base of his lineup here. If that is the game that ends up high scoring, you are competing against so fewer lineups for the top spot. The highest owned 4-man game stack this week for instance was Kyle Allen, Christian McCaffrey, Julio Jones, and Brian Hill. That particular 4-man game stack was used by 2020 lineups or 1.14% of lineups that week. Would you rather try to beat over 2,000 lineups if your game stack hits or just 97 by searching for l some low owned stacks? I’ll choose the low ownership nearly every time.
Low Owned Tight Ends
Looking over the past two years of top lineups it seems obvious on the usage of low owned tight ends. You should try to use the studs at the position like Travis Kelce, George Kittle, Mark Andrews, Darren Waller, Zach Ertz etc. when they are not garnering much ownership by the field for one reason or another. Using Mark Andrews Week 1 last year at 3% ownership when he puts up 27 fantasy points is what a low owned tight end looks like in top lineups. You can look for the Week 8 Darren Fells at 2% ownership for 24 fantasy points, but generally those teams are far and few between over the past two seasons where we see a random performance spike at the position end up being the must-have play of the week.
Tight End is also the one position you can actually miss on and still compete for a top lineup as there are many occurrences of top lineups over the past two seasons with tight ends scoring under 10 fantasy points. I typically try to play the known quantities at the position and let others waste teams trying to find a needle in the haystack with players that typically see little volume on a week to week basis.
Low Owned Defense
51 of the 150 Top 10 lineups tracked last season or 34% of them used a defense that was 5% owned or less. To be one of the highest-scoring defenses of the week you generally need 3+ sacks with a turnover or two and a defensive or special teams touchdown. Trying to predict which defense is going to be the one that scores a touchdown on a week to basis is nearly impossible, which in turn leads to more variance at the position than you likely think there is. We will go over bust rates in just a bit, but in 2018 the defense position had the highest bust rate outside of the WR position and it was tied for 2nd highest bust rate last season when it once again was just behind the WR position. Let’s take a look at Week 13 from last season in ResultsDB and go over what may have happened to cause ownership to go one way or another.
As you can see nearly every high owned defense busted this week while the lower owned teams gave you a big advantage. The Browns were on the road against a depleted Steelers team while the Ravens hosted the 49ers. Over 30% of the field was on these two teams and after they failed to perform, those teams were nearly eliminated from having a top lineup this week. The Buccaneers were on the road against Jacksonville and somehow came in as the lowest owned defense of the week at $2,900…WHAT! Minshew and Foles combine for two interceptions, get sacked five times, and the Buccaneers return a fumble for a touchdown. It seems impossible to me that they were the lowest owned defense of the week looking back, but as I have said a few times so far, the field generally does some strange things on a weekly basis. Don’t be afraid to fade the highest owned defense or two in these extremely large field contests around the industry as it can give you a big edge on the field if those teams fail to perform.
Ownership and Low Owned Plays vs. The Field
I was able to get some help with big data files from ResultsDB and wanted to give you some new information this year compared to previous versions of this article. Let’s go over a few charts on what some key differences of what the field does, what Top 100 lineups do, and then finally what the Top 10 lineups do.
First, let’s look at what the field does against what the Top 100 lineups do in terms of both overall and positional ownership from last season.
The (Y) or Yes field is a Top 100 lineup while the (N) or No is what the field does. The first thing to notice is that a Top 100 lineup on average has about 3.5% less actual ownership than what the field uses. A Top 10 lineup uses 1.7% less actual ownership than a Top 100 lineup. The clear trend here is aiming for a slightly lower total ownership than the field correlates with outperforming the field in results.
A Top 100 Lineup used less ownership at QB/WR/TE/DST while going with higher owned players at the RB position. Play the stud RBs with big workloads and get different elsewhere.
The next thing we want to look at involves low owned players. Here are three charts that show the number of low owned plays per lineup of the field, the Top 100 lineups, and the Top 10 lineups.
Deep Breaths!….Let’s go over what is happening here.
— 43% of the field uses 1 or fewer 5% owned plays, 44% of Top 100 lineups do the same, while just 29% of Top 10 lineups do this.
—44% of the field uses two or three 5% or less owned plays, 34% of Top 100 lineups do the same, while 47% of Top 10 lineups do this.
—13% of the field uses 4 or more 5% owned or fewer plays, 22% of Top 100 lineups do the same, while 26% of Top 10 lineups do this.
This should help you understand that utilizing low owned players in your large field NFL tournaments is one of the biggest advantages I have seen over the past two seasons. Make sure to think about this section when building either by hand or in LineupHQ this season. Utilizing stacks correctly while including low ownership in every lineup you make will have you far ahead of whatever the field is doing on a week to week basis in NFL large-field tournaments. My personal plan is to use somewhere between two and four low owned plays in every lineup I make this season for the large field contests and sometimes branching out as far as five or six low owned players in certain stacks.
Bust Rates
Everyone thinks they know the exact players that will have a good game each week. The reality is that we are actually horrible at predicting this. Here are the bust rates for the top three highest owned players at each position over the past two seasons. I don’t have a strict definition of what a bust is, but I consider a player to be a bust if they have a performance that is unlikely to give you a shot at having anything resembling a top lineup on a given week based on the salary.
Bust rates ticked up slightly at every position but WR last season, but the key takeaway of us not being able to predict that the highest owned players will give us contest-winning performances remained or strengthened across the board basically.
QB Bust Rates
Ownership never really gets too high at the position outside of a few weeks, but generally, if there is a QB that is going to be owned at 15%+, you should start to consider being underweight or fading them. There are a few occurrences of the highest owned QB of the week ending up in first place, but not often enough where I am thrilled being close to the field or even worse over on that particular player’s ownership. If the highest owned QB busts, it’s also very likely that a highly owned receiver or two also busts, which can knock close to 25% of the field away in one swoop from having a chance at a top lineup. After two years of looking at this data, you won’t see me using the projected highest owned QB of the week anywhere close to what the field does, while also having a good chance of just simply eliminating that player from my builds. There is too much leverage to be gained by being different at the position due to a high bust rate and the correlation to highly owned receivers also underperforming if the high owned QB underperforms.
RB Bust Rates
For two years in a row, we have the RB position having the lowest bust rate of the five groups, but it’s important to note that we also saw just over 50% of the top three highest owned players at the position every week end up as a bust. It was also the only position all season last year that didn’t have a singular occurrence of all three of the highest owned players bust in a particular week. So while we are better at predicting RB fantasy output better than the other positions, let’s try to figure where we get it wrong. Here is a portion of the Week 10 RB ownership.
The David Montgomery week! Why was Montgomery so high owned this week? He had 22.6 FPTS the week before! Recency Bias strikes again. Looking under the hood this was a rather fluky performance as he had 14 carries for just 40 yards but found the endzone twice. At $5,300 salary he just had to repeat that right? He rushes for just 60 yards and doesn’t catch a pass Week 10.
We also see Devin Singletary as the third-highest owned RB this week. You won’t believe this…but he ALSO had a good game the week prior! He had 20 carries for 95 yards and a touchdown against Washington in Week 9 at home and was a TOTAL lock to reproduce that game Week 10 on the road in Cleveland. The Bills running backs ran the ball a combined 14 times in Week 10 and the offense as a whole struggled.
Neither of these players were what I would consider to be surefire locks for production or in Singletary’s case at that point in the season, even a lock to get the majority of the teams touches with Frank Gore still lurking.
These are the times when you want to fade the high owned RB for the week and look elsewhere as these profiles have high bust rates.
WR Bust Rates
In 2018, 69% of the Top three highest owned WRs busted over the season. In 2019 64.44% of the highest owned WRs busted over Weeks 1-15. The WR position is the most volatile spot in your lineups every week, and with us needing to use at least three of them in every lineup, it makes sense to get different at the position in these extremely large-field tournaments. This goes hand in hand with the strategy I talked about at the QB position as the use of a high owned QB typically leads to the use of a high owned WR or two.
Here is some WR ownership from Week 9 to show you what happens to cause so many busts at the position from a game standpoint.
All three of the highest owned WRs busted this week, so I’m going to piece together the how and why of what happened. In one of the rare feats of the season, Chris Godwin actually performed horribly the week before and ended up still being the highest owned WR of the week in Week 9. This week the Buccaneers played in Seattle in a shootout that went to OT in which they lost 40-34. So we got the game script we wanted for Godwin but the performance of 7 receptions for 61 yards did nothing to help us win.
Danny Amendola WHAT! is the second-highest owned WR in Week 9 after a good showing the week before and came in with a very reasonable salary. Newsflash….the Danny Amendola archetype is very prone to busting as he is a slot WR that is dealing with two alpha type receivers on his own team. Again we get the good gamescript as Matthew Stafford throws for 400+ yards but it all goes to Kenny Golladay and Marvin Jones.
Keenan Allen was supposed to be in a shootout at home against the Packers this week, but instead catches just three passes as the Chargers run 37 times and win the game easily.
So even though we were correct in getting two of the three games correct in terms of game script, the individual players at the WR position failed to come through. Selecting the best WRs each and every week is a very tough task in DFS and I generally lean towards being underweight or close to completely fading the highly projected owned players at the position each week. Two out of three of the highest owned WRs are very likely to fail each week based on two years of data…use that to your advantage when making lineups in these extremely large-field tournaments.
TE Bust Rates
In 2018 nearly 50% of the Top three highest owned TEs busted each week. In 2019 that number jumped up to 55%. It’s safe to assume we can expect around 50-55% of the highest owned TEs to bust over the course of the season. You can actually win one of these large-field tournaments with a bust at the position as the highest-scoring player at the position generally isn’t the must-have player of the week as TEs don’t really put up 30+ fantasy points very often.
That said, in the extremely large field GPPs I generally go by the following rule: Use the elite TEs when others are not, or use the TE position as part of my team/game stack. I am generally not attempting to use a mediocre at best TE that is not expected to see a reasonable workload as a one-off on my teams. Think about someone like Darren Fells, or possibly a team’s second-string TE that somehow managed to have a good performance the week before and may be garnering some ownership. These are the types of players I usually exclude from my lineups.
Instead, I use the studs that are in line to receive good volume, and specifically seek out someone like the Travis Kelce or Mark Andrews archetype when the field is drawn to underpriced TEs on any particular week.
Defense/Special Teams Bust Rates
Over the past two seasons, we have seen the Top three highest owned D/ST each week bust just over 50% of the time. Last year we had the Patriots run at the start of the season which was unbelievable as they racked up big defensive performances week after week, which is something that is generally unsustainable. On the flip side of that unbelievable run, we also had each of the top two highest owned defenses from Weeks 9-14 all bust last season. I’d also argue that Defense is the most likely position to have the lowest owned play of the week end up being the highest-scoring play at the position on any given week. We saw that with the Buccaneers earlier in this article, so don’t be afraid to mix it up at the position in the large field tournaments with some defenses that are projected to be low owned.
Secondary Correlations
Last season I started talking about Secondary Correlations, which is the use of an additional non-QB based game stack in your lineups. For those of you new to the term here is the Week 11 winner from last season as an example.
The main stack in this lineup is the 4-man game stack of the Bills/Dolphins game. The secondary correlation is the use of Christian McCaffrey and Calvin Ridley from the Panthers/Falcons game. The use of an additional game stack in this particular lineup allowed the winner to make just two correct assumptions and fill up six of the nine roster spots with correlated plays. By assuming that both the Bills/Dolphins game and the Panthers/Falcons game would be good for fantasy, 66% of your lineup is now made for you. All you need to do now is fill in the other three spots with good plays and you can rocket up the leaderboards should your assumptions prove correct.
Here are the full lists of secondary correlations that appeared in Top 10 lineups in 2018 and 2019.
Here is 2018
Here is 2019
Some terminology
— RB/OppWR means a RB from one team and a WR from the other team in the same game…this is the CMC and Ridley Combo from the above example
— RB/WR means a RB and WR from the same team….this would be CMC and D.J. Moore as an example
Some of the secondary correlations don’t make much sense, like using a WR with the opposing defense, so when we strip away all of the ones that don’t correlate we are left with 134 secondary correlations from last season in Top 10 lineups from Weeks 1-15.
If we add in last year’s numbers, over the past two seasons the average Top 10 lineup contains .91 secondary correlations or just under one per lineup. We did see a small drop in secondary correlations last season, which looks as if it’s directly related to more players using 4-man game stacks than ever before. When you have a 4-man game stack there are simply less roster spots to use overall for secondary correlations. I still think you can use secondary correlations in 4-man game stacks, as we just went over the Week 11 winner from last season, but I would be much more likely to use secondary correlations if I was two or three-man team stacking, or three-man game stacking in large-field tournaments as you need to squeeze every ounce of correlation you can out of those teams.
Here are a few more examples from last seasons Top 10s to give you an idea of what some good secondary correlations look like.
Week 4 winner
The use of a 4-man game stack of Buccaneers/Rams with a secondary correlation of RB/OppTE in David Johnson and Will Dissly from the Ari/Sea game. The RB/Opposing pass catcher stack is one of the stronger secondary correlations you can add.
Week 6 Winner
A 3-man game stack of the Packers/Raiders leads the way, but notice the pairing of Stefon Diggs and Marvin Jones as the WR/OppWR secondary stack along with a Bills domination tertiary stack of John Brown and the defense. What a lineup!
Week 9 Winner
A 3-man game stack of Seattle/Tampa Bay starts it out but the inclusion of Jaylen Samuels and the Steelers defense helps lock in the win.
Week 10 Winner
A 3-man game stack of KC/TEN starts the lineup with two secondary stacks rounding out the lineup. The WR/OppTE stack of Michael Thomas and Austin Hooper from the Saints/Falcons game and the RB/OppWR stack of Ronald Jones and Christian Kirk give the lineup enough correlation to bring home the million.
The inclusion of secondary correlations is something I don’t think the average player really considers when building lineups; using these examples above should give you a good idea of what you should be attempting to create either by hand or in LineupHQ with our secondary correlation tool shown below.
Conclusion
Hopefully you are now armed with some solid knowledge of what it takes from a lineup construction standpoint to create teams that can compete at the highest of levels in large field NFL tournaments around the industry. If you have any questions or comments I will check in from time to time in the comments and try to respond as needed. Keep an eye out for the bi-weekly version of this article after Week 2 as I will be doing in-season articles to discuss what trends are continuing and what new ones have emerged.
Good luck this season and if I can’t win the million I hope one of you can!