NFL DFS FanDuel Ownership Projections: Week 7 Preview
In this space, we’ll preview FanDuel ownership projections for the Sunday main slate of Week 7 of the NFL DFS season. We’ll look at chalk. We’ll look at contrarian plays. We’ll look at plays that should be owned more than they will be. We’ll look at plays that should be owned less than they should be.
This isn’t a comprehensive look at ownership throughout the slate, but a peek into what stands out. The reasoning behind the analysis can be applied to dozens of other players on the slate.
NFL DFS Week 7 FanDuel Ownership Preview
- Stefon Diggs ($9,000) – 24.04%
- Josh Jacobs ($8,000) – 36.07%
- Cooper Kupp ($9,700) – 11.69%
- Christian Watson ($6,600) – 17.04%
- Travis Kelce ($8,500) 28.12%
Week 7 NFL DFS ownership projections for FanDuel are accurate at the time of publication and subject to change. Sign up for Premium to get updated ownership projections all the way to kickoff.
FanDuel Ownership Notes
Spending Up to be Contrarian
There are two great spots where we can spend up to be contrarian. Josh Jacobs and Stefon Diggs are pretty big-time chalk (especially Jacobs). They also project better than everyone else. But Cooper Kupp and Keenan Allen are projecting similarly to Diggs for fractions of the ownership. Kenneth Walker is a distant second in projection from Jacobs, but he is second for about 55% of the ownership.
The catch: these alternatives to the chalk cost a lot more.
But ownership is a cost, so ranking them as plays evens out a lot. Roster construction is not simple this week because there isn’t an abundance of value. but without an abundance of value, the field will flock to the same spots for saving salary. Where we choose to spend up is probably where we wanna pivot toward ownership discounts for a few hundred more.
Absorbing Ownership
How to absorb ownership is tricky. I hate to be reductionist and oversimplify the issue, but if this is something with which you struggle, we can build up from this starting point: if we’re absorbing ownership, we should be saving money, making the inverse true that if we’re spending high dollars, we should be getting ownership discounts. Of course, we shouldn’t apply this as a universal rule, as there are plenty of “good chalk” spots on every slate in the form of Jacobs or Diggs — where the projection legitimizes the ownership.
But when value is scarce, it’s more prudent to avoid expensive chalk unless we can surround it with leverage. On a slate where surrounding the expensive chalk with leverage is difficult, we can just choose to save money on chalk rather than spend on it.
Darrynton Evans is the lone ranger in the Chicago backfield at a punt price is a prime example of where we can do this: gain leverage and savings at the same time. To a less extreme degree, Jahmyr Gibbs and Isiah Pacheco are top-five projections. Gibbs is cheap, and Pacheco is slightly underpriced. Jerome Ford is in a dome against a bad defense in a run-heavy offense.
The key takeaway to apply to this slate isn’t that we shouldn’t play Jacobs, but that we don’t have to. And where we lose in projection, we can gain in value to spend elsewhere and in leverage over the field’s Jacobs-Evans pairing.
Anyone but Kelce and Andrews
Travis Kelce and Mark Andrews are combining for ~46% of TE ownership. A position at which no one else is projecting for more than 7%.
Don’t overthink TE. We can play Kelce or Andrews or we won’t. But there’s no reason to get stuck in the weeds on where to go after them with defense vs. position or whatever else you use in your process, as everyone else is a contrarian play. The leverage play at TE is to just play anyone but Kelce or Andrews. Use the projections to spend efficiently at the position.