NFL Week 10 High Stakes Tournament Lineup Review
Week 10… what a week. Chalk busting, Hail Mary’s, and more in one of the more bizarre slates of the year.
I think a really important part of your DFS tournament process should be reviewing your teams as well as your opponents and other good DFS players’ teams every week. Everyone likes to talk about process over results, and of course that’s true. But I think it can sometimes become easy to fall into the trap of convincing yourself you are just getting unlucky when you’re making mistakes, or alternatively convincing yourself that you’re playing bad even though your process might be spot on. And it goes beyond winning money vs losing money. You can have a profitable week but make terrible mistakes, or have a losing week and be playing pretty well. For me personally, I actually made some of my biggest mistakes this year on my profitable weeks, which can be the difference between a great year and a bad year. In my opinion, understand all of that nuance is extremely important to long term success, and having a strong review process can be extremely beneficial to that.
Week 10 was a very interesting week because we had some super condensed chalk, especially at RB, and we had the largest afternoon slate of games we’ve had all year. That gave us some really unique ways to use optionality to our advantage, which was the focus of my strategy this week. (If you’re interested in even more detail as to where my mindset was heading into kickoff, you can check out my Building a High-Stakes Tournament Lineup article, available only to Premium subscribers.)
As I outlined in my piece heading into the week, my strategy was basically entirely centered around utilizing the afternoon slate of games to give myself as much optionality as possible. More than just being able to use late swap, the most important thing this did was give me as much information as possible about what my opponents are doing, how the early plays performed, where I stood in tournaments and thus what types of lineups I would need to make based on all those factors.
It may have felt uncomfortable for many people to fade those early chalk RBs (Mike Davis, Aaron Jones, Duke Johnson), but I felt that was the cleanest path to winning a tournament this week. Not only do you get lower owned pivots at RB to the chalk, but by only playing 1 early game RB like I did (and only 1 early game player in total) it gave me more information that I could use to create higher win equity teams than my opponents. If the chalk RBs performed well, I can still have a winning day, but I would have had to adjust my strategy. If the chalk RBs failed (like they did), I could essentially just play my favorite plays, regardless of whether they were popular or not.
Of course it would suck if basically all my opponents had strong performances from a cheap chalk RB like Mike Davis, but I don’t think people quite understand how valuable having that information is before you fill out the rest of your lineup. Even if you played Mike Davis and he performed well, you still don’t have much information going into the afternoon games when he’s 76% owned in smaller fields/higher stakes. If he’s just mediocre (let’s say 13 points), you have even less information because you probably don’t even know if you need to be swapping or what type of team you need to be building. So, I personally really just felt that there was significantly more upside in seeing if I could beat Davis (and Aaron Jones / Duke Johnson) with my one early RB play and giving myself as much optionality as possible, compared to playing Davis and hoping I can figure out the ideal path to win equity.
My personal favorite plays were Antonio Gibson and Ronald Jones at RB, and I ultimately decided on Gibson in this lineup because I still (stubbornly) feel he has a level of ceiling we just haven’t seen yet, especially in an elite matchup. Maybe one day they’ll only throw to JD McKissic like 10 times, and they can slide a few targets Gibson’s way. So anyway, the reason why the 1 RB early thing was important was because I built a TON of variations of afternoon lineups that I was considering depending upon how the early games went, and in nearly all of them I needed the flexibility to move around to different price tiers at the other RB spot. Some may have went all the way up to Kamara, used Chase Edmonds if Drake was inactive or expected to be really limited, Josh Jacobs in the mid tier, or a different punt option like Travis Homer, Josh Kelley, Kalen Ballage, etc.
What became the most critical part of my lineup actually was this RB2 decision, but it was quite unexpected. Jordan Howard and Matt Breida were ruled out for the Dolphins, which opened up Salvon Ahmed at the flat minimum at RB. He was sure to be totally unowned, and I expected him to take a massive role in that backfield given what we see in Week 9 and who they had left at RB on the active roster. This also allowed me to get up to several of the “stud” WR plays in the afternoon games that I loved. This is an underrated benefit to the gathering more information/optionality. I didn’t expect Ahmed to turn into the best play on the board (I actually thought that might end up being Chase Edmonds), but the fact that I gave myself the ability to take advantage of this news was a huge weapon and huge advantage over the field when something unexpected like this drops.
So I had to decide on my stack(s), and I was really just considering the chalk Cardinals/Bills game and the Seahawks/Rams game. The field was much higher on the Cardinals game, and it’s possible you might argue with me that I should have just stacked the chalky Kyler/Nuk/Diggs since I had effectively faded the chalk and hit on a low owned Gibson. I can’t argue that, but I personally really try to stick to my guns on my takes/stances, and I was in love with the Seattle game. I know I didn’t NEED to go after lower ownership in this lineup, but I did know that Russell Wilson and DK Metcalf were going to be massively under owned compared to the other QBs and WRs in their range, and they were my personal favorite plays. I didn’t want to move away from the plays I had the most conviction on, and I also loved the Rams WRs with Cooper Kupp being my favorite. I think Kupp’s upside in this spot was massive, as we saw several times last year in shootout games. Of course this game didn’t shoot out, but you get the point. I included Jacob Hollister as my final piece of the game stack because I think there was a path to real upside for him at a terrible position if the game broke into a shootout. He had sort of trended in the direction of being the preferred receiving option of the Seattle TE trio, and he’s also shown upside in the past, so that + his salary savings were the perfect fit in my lineup. It allowed me to fit this final secondary correlation that was also a huge conviction play of mine…
That secondary correlation was Michael Thomas and Brandon Aiyuk. Michael Thomas was 7400 on DraftKings, and last year he would have been about 80% owned at that price. To top things off, the 49ers defense, especially their secondary, was missing several starters. Sure, there were reasons to believe Thomas isn’t going to be the nearly 10k player he peaked at last season, but I thought the ownership he would get at this price tag, matchup, and in the dome was flat out egregious (whoops). On the flip side of that game, I still don’t think people realize the role Brandon Aiyuk has in this offense without Deebo Samuel and George Kittle. I thought he was also going under owned at way too cheap of a price tag in a game that could sneakily have a lot of points, and he was the perfect correlation play with Michael Thomas.
While the results were unfortunately not there for this team, I feel really good about the process of how I got to this lineup. I’m extremely happy with the strategy and process that I utilized to attack this Week 10 slate, and I think that’s the most important part. DFS can just be frustrating at times because even when you make sound decisions that work out in your favor, you can still get cratered by other things. DFS is just hard, and we have to understand that this is a long term game where we’re going to lose a lot. The goal isn’t to win every slate, but it’s to make decisions over and over, slate after slate, that put us in position to win tournaments the times that we are right.
Now let’s see if we can’t get back to winning some tournaments in Week 11.