NFL Week 11 High Stakes Tournament Lineup Review
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.
Let’s go ahead and get into Week 11 where the Joe Burrow injury torpedoed my main team, and my main team couldn’t quite hold on to a min cash. That’s kind of been the story of my season so far, but thankfully there’s still more than 1/3 of the season left!
(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.)
I felt this was a pretty wide open week, but there were a few spots I was particularly drawn to, especially for tournaments. One was the Bengals-WFT game, which flamed out after the Burrow injury. The other was the Steelers-Jaguars game. A trend that we’ve seen from the Steelers the last couple games was how incredibly pass heavy they are in basically all game scripts. Even when they are up several scores, they continue throwing the ball, and they have multiple incredibly high upside WRs. Diontae Johnson is seeing as much volume as anyone in the league, and Chase Claypool is a budding star who has as much upside as any WR in football with his big play ability and TD equity. Given the matchup with the dreadful Jaguars defense (and with the Jaguars secondary missing multiple starters), the Steelers WRs seemed like arguably the highest upside plays on the board. The trend with these guys, however, is that the ownership often remains in check on them because their QB does not present the upside we look for given the lack of rushing equity. So we often see these pass catchers and stacks remain low or neutrally owned because of this. On top of that, the Steelers have one of the best defenses in the league, so their opponents are never popular. Especially with a team like the Jags, the field is not interested in bringing it back with a poorly projected player in a bad matchup. So you get the game as whole remaining largely under-owned relative to the upside and/or projection.
I actually largely agree with the field in the assessment of Ben Roethlisberger. He’s not the type of QB I want to play at his prices either, but this week was a very unique circumstance. We had Taysom Hill at $4800 on DraftKings, and while we didn’t really want to stack Taysom with his receiving options, he brought a ton of upside (and floor) due to his rushing and TD upside. So the strategy I was extremely high on this week was stacking the Steelers-Jags game, but substituting a naked Taysom Hill in at QB over one of the QBs from the Steelers game. I still get all the benefits of the Steelers stack, but I get a high upside running QB for a very cheap price in place of the overpriced Big Ben.
I understood that the Jaguars players were tough clicks, but if the Steelers had as much success throwing as I expected them to, the opportunity was going to be immense for the Jaguars receivers, and their ownership was basically nothing. We’ve also seen the likes of DJ Chark show huge ceilings in an alpha role on the Jags, and the Steelers have shown the propensity to give up big plays and big games to opposing WRs, despite their overall strong defense. With Chark’s volume and air yards upside, I felt he was the perfect bring back at minuscule ownership in this game stack. Chark didn’t quite get there, but he had ample opportunity that I ended up pretty happy with.
I was stubborn on Terry McLaurin in a smash spot against the Bengals, but I decided to correlate him with Gio Bernard at RB. Unfortunately Gio also fell off after the Burrow injury, but a cheap pass catching RB that was catching very little ownership + correlated extremely well with McLaurin was great. There were very few pass catching backs with solid volume and TD equity on the slate, and if the Cincy game produced some points and got pass heavy, these two really had the opportunity to crush their prices. It was just a couple weeks ago that Gio was massive chalk at a similar price in an even worse matchup/game environment.
Finally, I was extremely high on Derrick Henry in this spot against Baltimore. With Dalvin Cook coming in as the chalkiest player on the slate, I thought Henry presented the perfect sky high upside pivot that we are looking for in tournaments, and the matchup was sneaky good. The Ravens run defense was vulnerable without Calaias Campbell and Brandon Williams on their defensive line. The perfect cherry on top was how well Henry correlated with my favorite TE play, Mark Andrews. Andrews was sure to be popular, but correlating him with Henry was the perfect way to capitalize on a script that created a ceiling game for Andrews while also capturing a ceiling from Henry. If Henry has one of his monster 200 yard multi TD performances, the Ravens will be forced to throw, which meant a big day for Andrews, especially with the injury to fellow Ravens TE Nick Boyle. This was nearly an absolute smash if the Titans didn’t go away from Henry at the goal line, not once, not twice, but three times.
The final piece to the lineup actually created a little extra leverage as well. The Cowboys defense is not good, but squaring off with Dalvin Cook (and even some chalky Vikings WRs), the Cowboys defense had a chance to bust multiple pieces of chalk by having a strong performance. They were almost min priced, they’ve started to get healthier and the Vikings OL was down multiple starters.
Ultimately, this lineup came up just short, but I think it was one of the stronger tournament teams I’ve made this year. A few plays like Taysom, McLaurin and Andrews were popular, but the correlations and leverage provided this team the paths to winning tournaments with just a few things breaking the right way.