Hittin' The Nuts - Squirrelpatrol's Top Stacks: Thanksgiving Slate
Want to hit the nuts and take down 1st place in these massive contests posted by FanDuel and DraftKings? Who better to walk you through their favorite NFL DFS stacks than Squirrelpatrol! Undoubtedly one of the best DFS players in the game today, Squirrelpatrol has accumulated 90+ Live Final seats, taking 2nd place in the 2023 DraftKings Fantasy Baseball World Championship for a $600,000 prize, and most recently, took down the Milly Maker on the Week 2 MNF two-game slate. Should we roster the chalk stack? How off-the-board should we get in large-field tournaments? Squirrelpatrol answers all of these questions and more below!
As DFS strategies get more advanced, moving from hunch-based decision-making to play-by-play simulations meant to measure how often certain players or stacks appear in the optimal lineup, it’s important to pair both quantitative and qualitative analysis when putting together our NFL DFS lineups. Each week, I’ll be taking a look at our Optimal Stack Tool for both FanDuel and DraftKings and giving some thoughts on what the best NFL DFS stacks will be for different contest types and sizes.
NFL DFS Top Stacks for the Thanksgiving Slate
Chalk Stack – Dak Prescott vs. Washington Commanders
Thanksgiving football is an annual tradition, and this year we can be thankful for soft pricing in a great matchup, as the price on Dak Prescott is $900 lower on FanDuel and $500 lower on DraftKings than it was last week. The pre-Black-Friday price decrease comes despite Dak facing a Commanders defense that has allowed the 3rd-most passing yards per game and the most points per game in the NFL. Dak is projected at 29.2% ownership on FanDuel (31.6% optimal rate) and 25.7% ownership on DraftKings (28.8% optimal rate), and like Kyler Murray last Sunday, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Dak’s ownership come in even higher than we are currently projecting. The pricing on both sites for this holiday slate has been made a touch softer than the recent main slates, and with the recent performance of both the Cowboys and the Commanders defense, I suspect when the turkey comes out of the oven on Thursday, we’ll see Dak north of 30% on both sites.
Over the first 6 weeks of this season, Dak averaged 222.2 passing yards per game on an average of 31.7 passing attempts per game, with 1 passing touchdown per game. Since the Dallas bye in Week 7, Dak has averaged 317.8 passing yards per game on 37 passing attempts per game, with 3.3 passing touchdowns per game. The biggest concern with Dak this Thanksgiving isn’t his price or the Commanders defense, it’s that the Cowboys will take the foot off the gas if they are winning by more than the 10.5-point spread.
I generally won’t avoid going over the field on a player if my biggest worry is that they’ll score so many points so quickly that the opposing team can’t keep up, so I will aim to be over the field on Dak’s projected ownership, with one big caveat. If I am rostering Dak on a lineup, I will want to pair him with at least 1 or 2 lower-owned players to provide my lineup with some differentiation from what could be a field full of duplicated lineups. I won’t avoid a Dak and CeeDee Lamb pairing, but adding 2 more Dallas receivers, like Brandin Cooks, the underperforming Michael Gallup, or back-up tight end Luke Schoonmaker, should get my roster different enough to give me a shot at a solo 1st place win.
One other tactic that I wouldn’t recommend for a regular main slate—but that might work with only 3 games—is pairing Dak with the Commanders D/ST. There would be negative correlation, but defensive scoring can be random to begin with, and with only 6 D/STs to choose from and the Commanders being the cheapest on the slate, the pairing would allow for combinations that the other D/STs won’t allow. Maybe the Commanders will be able to run back multiple kickoffs for touchdowns if the Cowboys are scoring too much on Thursday.
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