NFL Week 9 High Stakes Tournament Lineup Review
Fresh off a wild weekend, both personally for me and in these NFL games, we are back with another GPP lineup review for Week 9.
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 9 lineup where I finished anywhere from 3 to 12 points out from the cash line depending on the contest. I took a bit of a different approach this week compared to a normal tournament slate, so I think it should be an interesting discussion. (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.)
First things first… I got married this past weekend so I didn’t really have any time to dedicate to a normal DFS process from Thursday through Sunday. Due to that, I wanted to stick to some of the plays I felt strongest about, and my initial gut takes from my research that was mostly conducted early in the week. I didn’t want to be making swaps just for the sake of making swaps, and I felt it was important to stick with my gut, and that was 3 things that ended up pretty popular:
1) Josh Allen & a Bills game stack
2) Secondary correlation with Julio Jones and Noah Fant
3) Chase Edmonds
The one thing I logged on to check on Sunday morning was ownership since I knew it likely shifted since earlier in the week, and it turned out that those 3 were going to be pretty popular plays. I could have swapped to a different game or a different build, but I felt it was important that I stick to my gut and utilize my remaining roster spots to create a strongly correlated and unique tournament lineups.
Quick side note, but I think that general concept of sticking to your initial takes from early in the week can often be a super strong strategy for attacking tournaments. Especially this year, we are getting so much news later in the week that drastically shifts the public perception on games, specific plays, etc., that taking a step back and remembering what your favorite games and plays were before reacting to any of the late news can allow you to analyze whether or not any changes you’re thinking about making are truly warranted. I hear many people talk about how they don’t build lineups or think about a slate until the weekend, and I get that thought process, but I think for me personally it can be really advantageous to get your early thoughts “on paper” to have a baseline that you can reference before news starts to impact your thoughts later in the week. I think there’s a fair amount of times where we overreact to later week news because it just so happens to be what is freshest on our minds. Anyway, back to this lineup…
So I have this chalky core that I have decided to stick with, which means I need to really be smart about how I’m filling out the rest of the lineup. I had a RB spot to fill, and Justin Jackson was going to be massively owned, and to a lesser extent so was David Johnson (I couldn’t afford Dalvin Cook, so that wasn’t a consideration). I was also going to need another cheap play in my flex. Here’s where I landed –
In general, I am a huge proponent of correlation, especially secondary correlation. By now everyone knows to stack, but I think one of the best ways to capture correlated upside with ownership leverage is through secondary correlation. So, I was all in on Chase Edmonds this week because I am a huge believer in him as a player, and I expected a true workhorse role in a great matchup. If I am expected Chase Edmonds to have a huge day, it would benefit me more to correlate one of my remaining roster spots with someone who stands to gain from Edmonds’ big day, and interestingly enough the Dolphins just had a lot of touches leave their lineup with the trade of Isaiah Ford and the injuries to Myles Gaskin and Matt Breida. While you could make a case for one of the 3 Miami RBs (and I don’t think it would have been terrible to pair them with Edmonds actually), Jakeem Grant was the guy who really stuck out to me. It was uncertain about who would step into the Ford snaps, and I felt it was probably going to be somewhat divided up between a few guys, but Grant was the one who I believed had big time upside if his role grew. We know he’s one of the biggest home run threats in the league, and I thought the Dolphins would be in dire need of some playmaking. I thought they’d manufacture Grant some touches, and the huge benefit was that even if I wasn’t even really right about his role growth, he is the type of player who could pay off in one play (plus he returns kicks and I could get lucky that way as well).
I felt pretty good about Grant as a correlation with Edmonds, and I knew he would be extremely low owned. I had one RB spot and my defense left, and given the other popular plays I was on, I definitely couldn’t be playing any of these popular RBs, and ideally I would also add in some additional correlation. I landed on the combination of Wayne Gallman and the Giants defense. The Giants defense was actually my favorite play on the slate, and it worked out perfectly where I had the exact money left for Gallman. Was I super high on Gallman? Not exactly, but I expected the Giants defense to play well, and Gallman has been pretty darn good in the times he’s been used both this year and in previous years. The only issue was the sharing of workload with Alfred Morris and Dion Lewis, but Gallman was still the lead back, and I think he clearly had the upside to beat any of the cheap RBs. Plus, he could blow them out of the water if something changed and they stopped giving Alfred Morris so many carries. I knew he would be virtually unowned and the perfect pairing with my Giants defense.
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So, to sum it up, I think you could absolutely argue I should have made a pivot or two to get away from one or two of the chalkier pieces I was playing and I wouldn’t argue with you at all. But I also think this was a good example of a case where you handle every slate and your feelings on certain plays a little bit differently. I felt extremely passionate about the 3 bullets I mentioned above, and those turned out to be pretty popular. I usually prefer to pivot away from that, but in this particular week I felt so strongly about the ceiling probability of those plays that I think it was better for me personally to find a super unique path to sticking to my guns.
You also see the extreme lengths to which I think you should go to incorporate correlation into your lineups. This team had the Bills/Seahawks game stack, and 3 other secondary correlations which means I am kind of turning this lineup from an 8 leg parlay in to a 4 leg parlay. Other people are trying to just pick out all the best plays, but I’m narrowing it down to just getting 4 things right for the entire week. And while it didn’t quite work for me this week in terms of the fantasy points results, I actually think the theory of it did work out perfectly from a game perspective.
Bills/Seahawks was a massive shootout. The Falcons got up huge mostly through the air with the Broncos smashing garbage time. The Giants defense was extremely effective, and the Giants running game was able to smash with 35 carries for 166 yards. And finally, Chase Edmonds was the biggest volume workhorse on the slate in a shootout with Jakeem Grant seeing a solid target share.
The fantasy points didn’t align perfectly, but that type of outcome is exactly what you’re looking for when building a DFS tournament lineup. Over the long haul, we’ll come out way ahead.
Let’s get it in Week 10.
Image Credit: Imagn