Find Your Edge - Week 3: Thursday Night Football Showdown Strategies

Director of Data and Analytics, Kevin Cole, returns with a look at how past DFS slates can yield valuable insights to roster construction, decision making, and winning strategies for the coming slate of games. This is a big deal. We’ve collected a massive amount of data on past DFS slates, and Kevin is going to help you “find the edge” buried deep within them.

Week 3 – Thursday Night Football

Welcome back to another week of insights driven by the boatloads of data we’re collecting on DFS contests. This week, I’m going to pivot away from the type of analysis I’ve done on large, main-slate tournaments with stacking and game stacking and dig more into the new single-game Showdown format.

The idea to do a Showdown piece came from some thoughts I had on last Thursday’s CIN-BAL slate. I saw a lot of chatter and got some private messages on Twitter asking the efficacy about using multiple defenses or multiple kickers. My previous analysis on a similar matchup (kickoff PHI-ATL) showed that ZERO of the 500 optimal lineups based on similar previous matchups had two DSTs or kickers.

I realized that the public may have had a false impression of optimal Showdown lineups based on two main factors: 1) That there had been a disproportionate number of defensive touchdowns, sacks, etc in the few previous Showdown slates, and 2) that defenses were such strong options in the preseason because of limited offensive snaps for individual players. There was also a strong element of faulty narrative-based thinking with Andy Dalton’s struggles in primetime games, which is most certainly not a real thing.

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About the Author

colekev
Kevin Cole (colekev)

Kevin Cole previously worked on Wall Street as an equity and credit analyst before transitioning to data-related sports analysis. For a number of years, Kevin has specialized in creating predictive sports models that includes published work at Pro Football Focus, Rotoworld, numberFire, and RotoViz. He is now the Director of Data and Analytics at RotoGrinders.