Hittin' The Nuts - Squirrelpatrol's Top Stacks: Week 12
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 2-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 Week 12
DraftKings Chalk Stack – Trevor Lawrence vs Houston Texans
We have a large enough difference in projected ownership between FanDuel and DraftKings at the QB position that for the first time this season (and because I agree with the ownership projections), I’m splitting up my “chalk stack” section to be site specific. Trevor Lawrence has the highest projected ownership on DraftKings at 16.2% with a 16.4% optimal rate that gives him slight positive leverage for the slate. Lawrence and the Jaguars are 1.5-point road favorites in Houston this Sunday in a game with a 47.5 total, and this is the third week in a row that the QB facing the Texans is our highest projected owned QB (after Kyler Murray last week and Joe Burrow the week before).
A big factor driving Lawrence’s projected ownership on DraftKings this week is his price – at $6,400, the Jaguars QB is approaching value territory, and he is $1,300 cheaper than C.J. Stroud on the other side of this game. On FanDuel, Lawrence is priced at $7,800 – still reasonable but $100 more expensive than Stroud. This makes Lawrence a fine selection for cash games, but I am skeptical of his ownership in tournaments and will likely be under the field.
Breaking this week down simplistically, there are four games with higher game totals and relatively close spreads – JAC / HOU, TB / IND, LAR / ARI, and BUF / PHI. I could see any of the eight QBs involved in those games (including Lawrence) being a tournament-winning QB this weekend, with a reasonable shot of a QB outside of those games also rising to the top (particularly in the KC / LV game where Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs have the highest implied point total on the week). I’d rather spread out my exposure to those other QBs (or just pick another one if making one lineup) than devoting about 1/6th of my rosters to a QB with only one game over 20.7 DK points this season.
If I am using Lawrence in a stack this Sunday, I would make a point of over-stacking this game to get my rosters slightly different from most of the field. Christian Kirk, Calvin Ridley, and Evan Engram are all well-priced on DraftKings, and I would use at least two of them (or Zay Jones, assuming he is active) paired with Lawrence. Adding a Houston receiver like Robert Woods or Tank Dell makes sense as well, and Travis Etienne gets enough receiving work at the RB position to make for a full game stack.
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