NFL Week 8 High Stakes Tournament Lineup Review
I’ve been meaning to get this lineup review article going the last few weeks, so I apologize for the delays. Turns out that getting all these sports back and trying to plan a wedding during a pandemic actually takes up a lot of your time. But here we are, the first lineup review of the season.
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 dive into this Week 8 lineup where I missed cashing the $1,000 Mega Millionaire Maker by 4 points, but I actually felt it was one of my stronger tournament lineups of the year. (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, that was published on Saturday.)
Week 8 was a really interesting week where we had very, very few appealing games for tournaments due to just overall matchups as well as a lot of bad weather. We also had really minimal value options. All that led to some super condensed ownership on a few different players and a few different game stacks for tournaments. The 49ers game was the clear chalk, and the Jets WR “value” was very popular, especially Denzel Mims, while the Chiefs pricing was very affordable in a smash spot. We had tough weather in some other somewhat appealing spots, so most folks gravitated to those 2 games, along with some collection of Jamaal Williams, Kareem Hunt, Derrick Henry and Alvin Kamara at RB.
With ownership so condensed on those couple games, and with the value being very thin plays like Denzel Mims, Kendrick Bourne and Braxton Berrios, I wanted to swerve onto lower owned games that still had slate breaking upside even if they were also fragile. Where I ultimately landed was the Ravens/Steelers game, for a few different reasons. Even for the first few weeks this year, people have been jamming Lamar Jackson (and sometimes his weapons) into their lineups, and to a lesser extent the Steelers WRs as well. Both of these defenses are obviously very good, but both offenses also offer a ton of big play upside with Lamar, Marquise Brown and Chase Claypool. If you want to really get your hand in the dirt with me, both teams also have been susceptible to big plays given the way they play defense, and on a slate like this, I really wanted to target that kind of big play upside at lower ownership because you can more easily separate yourself from the field on a slate like this as opposed to say Week 7 where there are so many underpriced guys with such high floors and ceilings.
The other factor I thought was important in that big play upside of both teams is that’s the kind of game environment that can win the slate. When you get these huge plays and long touchdowns, especially by both sides, it really starts to speed up the game and take the ceiling of the game to a whole different level. So, with all that being said, I felt great about Lamar Jackson, Hollywood Brown and Chase Claypool at essentially no ownership as an incredibly high upside game stack that also allowed me to do some other great things with my lineup.
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In tournaments, there’s obviously a combination of ownership, leverage, upside and projections in your decision-making. So once I landed on this 3-man stack, I wanted to jam in as much RB upside as I could. That came down to Kareem Hunt, Derrick Henry and Alvin Kamara for me. I wasn’t worried about ownership at this point because my stack was so off the board, I only cared about ceiling. It’s possible I overvalued Kareem Hunt’s upside in a total slog of a game, but I felt he was the highest upside per dollar option at RB, and I ultimately decided on Derrick Henry over Kamara, but I think that was largely personal preference. Obviously, these 2 plays didn’t work out, but I feel generally good about the process of trying to just capture as much ceiling as possible here.
Since I had just a 3-man stack as my main game stack, and it was a very low owned stack, I really wanted to get pieces of the Seattle game. Brandon Aiyuk was basically my favorite play on the board, and I knew he would come in pretty owned, but I decided to pair him with DeeJay Dallas in the flex as a secondary correlation. I felt pretty strongly coming into the week based on practice reports that DeeJay Dallas would be essentially the only RB on the field for Seattle, which is a dream at 4k despite a somewhat tough matchup against the 49ers. The most important part to me was that I knew that Lockett, Metcalf and Russell Wilson would come in very highly owned, so Dallas provided leverage off those chalky teammates while also projecting extremely well himself and being very low owned (due to the nature of the official news on Carson, Hyde and Homer being late). If the 49ers can keep Lockett and Metcalf in check, but Dallas catches a few balls and happens to steal the TDs, I’m flying past a ton of lineups.
Finally, the last piece was a critical piece of leverage for me. I typically prefer to use a TE in my stack, but since I was fading Keenan Allen as the likely chalkiest WR on the slate, I wanted to leverage against him with Hunter Henry at TE. IMO Hunter Henry was very underpriced himself, but coming in at a fraction of the ownership of Keenan (or the expensive TEs).
Nothing really special about the Dolphins D play, and they actually came in a bit higher owned than I expected, but they were my favorite DST play on the board. They gave me the savings I needed to fit the plays I wanted (I left $0 on the table), and they’re a defense I still don’t think the public understands is very good both from a pressure and coverage perspective. Plus, Jared Goff stinks.
So, to summarize, while I didn’t cash this team in this contest, I actually feel really happy with the lineup construction process. I was able to get onto a super high upside stack that was both affordable and no one else was playing, while still getting my favorite secondary correlation on the highest scoring game of the week. I was able to find leverage on some of the chalkiest plays and also build in what I think was the highest ceiling possible.
This type of build obviously is just one example of a way to construct tournament lineups, and it didn’t quite work out for me in the results this week, but I think consistently building these types of teams is going to be successful over the long haul in tournaments.
Remember, you can get my pre-lock thoughts in my weekly high-stakes strategy series, as well as on the Q Hunting: DFS Live Final Qualifier show with squirrelpatrol, both available only to Premium subscribers. Catch y’all next week!
Image Credit: Imagn