Fantasy Football Millionaire Review: Week 11
The Millionaire review series will provide the reader with a breakdown of the exposures of “top of the leaderboard” players, the top single-entry lineup, and a comparison between all single entry lineups and professionals for the weekly DraftKings Millionaire Maker GPP.
This week, we looked at the $4M Fantasy Football Millionaire [$1M to 1st!] on DraftKings with a buy-in of $27 and maximum entry limit of 150 lineups per person.
Multi-Entry Grinders of the Game
Assani followed along with the field consensus on a number of stud QBs. Tom Brady had been lights out returning from suspension and has been an early MVP candidate. When he isn’t getting vultured by Blount on the goal line, he has been putting up some of the highest QB raw point totals. Kirk Cousins was playing at home where he sees a decent boost to his passer rating, in their short to mid-range passing game, and was relatively unaffected by the moderate wind. Blake Bortles had been the garbage time king and was a huge dog to Detroit in the dome at Ford Field against one of the league’s worst defenses. Luck & Mariota each were slated to be in gunslinger-mode against one anothers swiss-cheese secondaries. Many of his other plays coincided with his QB strategy, but where he zigged when others zagged was his exposure to David Johnson in a perceived poor match-up. Since breaking out late in 2015, David Johnson proved to be one of the best athletes in the entire league and had been able to carry the team in tough match-ups. His high numbers of targets raised his fantasy floor and heavy usage in the red zone kept his ceiling high. The vikings defense was running on fumes of their early season dominance as they had been a poor showing against Jay Cutler of all quarterbacks and just had 3 combined sacks over their last 3 games.
In a slate dominated by nasty weather, Papagates leaned heavily on the JAC@DET matchup inside the dome which was poised to be a high scoring affair. Matthew Stafford has been approaching Drew Brees territory with his home/road splits and oddly enough, Blake Bortles features reverse splits. Although that game ultimately disappointed, papagates had a copious amount of Kirk Cousins to propel himself into serious contention. He featured seven lineups within the top-60 places, all of which included Cousins/Garcon as well as Bell/Johnson. Even with the Stafford baggage and a so-so game from Bortles, papgates still featured a 62.7% cash rate.
Themasterson’s graphic will jump out to you as it is very short and concise compared to the others (which still featured 150 lineups). He played similiar QBs to the other pros, but cut out the limited lineups (1-10) to a handful of others and instead, rolled those into more potential combinations to his core plays. Now normally when you play such high exposures, a 46% ownership of Golden Tate or 33% ownership in Allen Hurns would sink your day. Yet, themasterson hit on so many of his other plays and at such higher exposures, that he still had a significant number of lineups that featured neither of those players while keeping together his core that hit. Rob Kelley was such an amazing play at low ownership and salary as he played the part of the Sunday night hammer and scored twice late to secure the Redskins lead. Rashad Jennings on the other hand, spearheaded the hydra backfield (3-4+ heads) and ran often and well against the pitiful Bears defense as Metlife stadium was experiencing heavy winds. The all-or-nothing strategy allowed themasterson to land six lineups inside the top-40 and finished with a cash rate over 80%.
Single-Entry Winner of the Game
Nbowers75 came out firing with the ever popular QB/RB/WR1 stack that caught fire after 2015 Ben/Bell/Brown showed that powerhouse offenses can provide plenty of fantasy goodness across the board. With Le’Veon Bell and David Johnson posting two of the biggest raw point totals on the slate, they were obviously part of his lineup (as well as the majority of the top lineups) and continue to show their ability to be virtually matchup-proof. Meanwhile, Rishard Matthews had been seeing a resurgence of late, equaling the type of numbers he saw in Miami, under the supervision of the white-hot Mariota. Steve Smith Sr. was the dark horse of Nbowers’ lineup as he had been seeing a heavy number of targets, but had a relatively lower aDOT. The under-performers of his lineups came courtesy of the Miami defense just doing enough against the rookie Jared Goff and Martellus Bennett falling flat and disappointing cash lineups everywhere. Unfortunately for Nbowers, it also contributed to him missing out on the $1m 1st-place finish and threw him down the 85% cliff to 2nd place ($150k). Still, I think Nbowers has been fist pumping since the clock struck 0 last night.
Single-Entry vs. Assani/Papagates/Themasterson
Out of 166,641entries in the Fantasy Football Millionaire, 29.4% of those entries were entered courtesy of players using a single bullet. The table below compares the exposures of those single entries to the exposures of Assani, papagates, themasterson, and 80 other top professionals picked off of RotoGrinders’ leaderboard:
