Noto's NFL DFS Core Plays: Week 18
Week 17 Recap
Last week was one of the finer weeks for the core plays. Darrel Williams ended up being a little more popular than expected, but he ended up having a huge game and was a big difference-maker in tournaments. Trey Lance had a very solid outing and it could have been a whole lot better if his rushing touchdown wasn’t called back due to a penalty. Cooper Kupp and Jonathan Taylor both had sold fantasy outings and Braxton Berrios was a key value play across the industry. It ended up being a profitable week overall and I hope that was the case for many of you as well.
Week 18 Breakdown
Every NFL article and podcast this week is required by DFS laws to say, “I can’t believe it’s already Week 18.” Honestly, I really can’t believe it is Week 18. The two sports that never feel like a grind to me are football and golf. This is likely because they are weekly sports. We get a few days of no football and golf each week to make us miss the sweat. Don’t get me wrong, I still love baseball and basketball, but those can turn into a grind in the summer months of baseball or when half the NBA is listed as questionable each slate. I’m getting off on a tangent here. To the NFL regular season, we are going to miss you. We’ll see you again in nine months.
We usually call the last week of the season an information slate because there are a lot of teams with nothing to play for and a lot of key players getting the week off. This leads to a lot of backups getting extra playing time and trying to decipher where the carries and targets are going to go on each team is most of the battle. However, this week feels a bit different than most final weeks of the season. We have very little value on the slate, we have teams with nothing to play for expected to go all out, and we have teams that can’t improve their playoff positioning expected to give their starters some playing time.
If anything, this is good news. I’ve had a terrible DFS track record in the last week of the regular season.