Hittin' The Nuts - Squirrelpatrol's Top Stacks: Week 5
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, he 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 5
Chalk Stack – Jalen Hurts at Los Angeles Rams
We have a difference in ownership between FanDuel and DraftKings in the Optimal Stacks Tool this week, with Jalen Hurts showing up as the most popular QB on FanDuel (16.5%) and Tua Tagovailoa as the highest owned on DraftKings (15.1%). With Hurts playing in the game with the highest-point total on the week and showing an interesting discrepancy between his leverage on FanDuel compared to DraftKings, it’s worth taking a look at him as the potential “chalk” stack of the week. The Optimal Stacks Tool is showing Hurts as under-owned on FanDuel despite being the highest projected owned QB (1.0% positive leverage), but over-owned on DraftKings where he is projected to be the fourth-highest owned QB at 10.3%.
Salary is one factor in the discrepancy between the sites – Hurts is $8,600 on FanDuel where he is the second-most expensive QB behind Patrick Mahomes. Hurts is even cheaper on DraftKings ($8,200, again the second-most expensive QB behind Mahomes). However, on DK, the salary range for QB runs all the way down to $4,900 for our expected starters this week, and with a tighter salary structure on DK, those cheaper QBs show up as optimal a surprising amount of the time. Another factor working in Hurts’ favor on FanDuel specifically is that his rushing yards and tush-push touchdowns carry a heavier relative weight in a scoring system that doesn’t award a full point-per-reception and doesn’t award bonuses for 300+ yards passing or 100+ yards rushing.
I will likely follow the guidance of the Optimal Stacks Tool this week and aim to be heavier on Hurts on FanDuel than on DraftKings. My favorite teammate pairings with Hurts this week are AJ Brown (the 4th-most expensive WR on FD but just the 3rd-most expensive on DK) and Dallas Goedert (the 7th-most expensive TE on both sites). It’s also an interesting week to form a full game stack with Hurts with uncertainty in the Rams’ receiving corps, and I particularly like putting a low-owned Tutu Atwell into stacks paired with multiple players from the Philadelphia side.
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