Noto’s NFL Positional Breakdown & Expert Plays: Week 2
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Week 2
Happy Week 2 everyone! We have a lot to cover, but let’s start with a quick recap of last week. It wasn’t a perfect outing by any means, but Saquon Barkley, Justin Jefferson, Michael Pittman, and Christian Kirk carried me to a profitable week. It’s always nice to get off to a hot start, but mistakes were made. The natural tendency is to assume you didn’t make mistakes if you made money, but the goal should be to improve your process each and every week. The biggest leak for me in Week 1 was not paying up for Travis Kelce. It wasn’t just the fact that he was the clear top wideout for the Chiefs or that he had a dream matchup against the Cardinals, but that he was such a strong play relative to his position. I forced Christian McCaffrey into my main lineup, even though running back was loaded with options. This led me to the value tight end options and they weren’t pretty. I got away with the mistake, but I should have put more thought into my overall roster construction.
Now, let’s turn our attention to Week 2. As noted last week, the best two slates of the season to avoid groupthink are the first two main slates. After spending the entire summer reading camp reports and drafting hundreds of best ball teams, we have natural biases that creep into our lineup building. Additionally, you have a lot of DFS players that weren’t prepared for the start of the season that jam in plays that projection models spit out or that their favorite expert suggested. Luckily for many, the chalk did quite well in Week 1. Now that we have some data to work with, many think they have these teams and players figured out. However, this isn’t how the NFL works. Many teams will look much better or much worse than they did in Week 1. This is an extremely difficult sport to predict on a weekly basis and the chalk doesn’t always smash. Don’t be afraid to have conviction on players that may not be getting a ton of attention.
Before we get to the positional breakdown, I have a few housekeeping notes. I have my five best bets for the week posted on ScoresAndOdds. The best bets were 4-1 last week and I’m hoping to keep the momentum going. If you have time for another podcast in your weekly routine, the NFL OG Week 2 pod is up. We focus more on betting than DFS and have a lot of fun with it. You can catch this week’s episode on YouTube: or Apple Podcasts. And finally, I made a slight tweak to the format of the article this week — I will break down each position into three tiers again, but they won’t be broken down by price range. Tier 1 will be my Expert Plays that I have tagged in LineupHQ, Tier 2 will be my second favorite set of plays, and Tier 3 well, you get the idea.
Quarterback
This is one of the strangest quarterback slates we have seen in quite some time. Most of the big names (Patrick Mahomes, Justin Herbert, Josh Allen, Jalen Hurts, and Aaron Rodgers) are playing in the primetime games, which leaves much to be desired when it comes to the expensive plays. On top of that, there aren’t a ton of obvious values at the moment (this could easily change depending on a number of injuries we need to monitor). This will lead most to spend down at quarterback.