Stuff Happened - Week 9 Edition

by Luke Louison (GiantBallofOil) Last Updated 2016-11-11 03:03:15

“Thanks, but no thanks.”

Well, not exactly. How about “I appreciate the effort, but you still have work to do.” Still too harsh? Maybe, “Good try. You’re getting there.” A little belittling, yes? Hmmm. You know they teach classes on how to acknowledge progress, when the person is still a ways away. Maybe I need to look into that.

I’ve been playing more slates this year, diversifying my weekly buy-in, and giving myself more varied data sets on which to make decisions. It’s been working too. It is the best solution I can find to the issue of “I liked him, but unfortunately I liked him more.” By allowing yourself to make decisions with different players in the pool, you can still profit when you have pin-pointed the right set of players, but selected the wrong one from it.

That gets me back to Sunday. Quarterback was hard for me this week. My #1 guy was Drew Brees. Yet, he was the second most expensive, and the home/road stuff wasn’t nothing. I loved Aaron Rodgers’s weapons, but I loved him slightly less, as his lower drive totals had been deflating his yardage. Still, he was in play. I was in the minority that liked Marcus Mariota more than Colin Kaepernick, but I liked them both. The main reason I liked Mariota was that I was very high on Philip Rivers and figured Mariota would need to score to stay caught up. I had more Week 9 quarterback variation across slates and sites than in any other week this season.

After I got all my main slate decisions made, my DraftKings Thursday action set (no M. Ryan or J. Winston for me), and my Sunday-Monday lineups locked in, I flipped over to the 1 pm only slate. I figured I’d get some natural diversification on this slate, but was sadly mistaken, as all the QBs I could have taken were sad. No Brees. No Rodgers. No Rivers. No Mariota. No Kaepernick. No Luck even. Just no luck.

It wasn’t just the quarterbacks either, as you can see. The later games produced a 35-point higher lineup, with a higher scoring player at six of nine positions. I’ve included the optimal lineups for the 1 pm-only slate and the afternoon + night slate below.

(NOTE: I’m writing this Monday morning. The afternoon + night slate includes the Monday night game, which could factor into the optimal lineup, namely at tight end.)

That brings me back to the NFL. In a week with six teams on bye, and of course a Thursday night, Sunday night, and Monday night game, they split their 10 remaining games up: six early and four late. That is the highest percentage of Sunday games in the second slot this year and is significantly better than they’ve done in prior weeks:

Now, we’ve come full circle. How do we say ”NFL, thanks for evening out the games. Now could you even out the fantasy players and points?” diplomatically? Let’s workshop it for next week.

Stuff Happened, Week 9 Edition

As you can see from the Week 9, main slate, optimal lineup above, it wasn’t Week 8, but it was close. It might be time to start looking at that “blip,” as I called it last week, as something more than that. Here is the list from last week, updated to include this week.

Week 1 – 281.40
Week 2 – 269.32
Week 3 – 300.38
Week 4 – 275.92
Week 5 – 277.70
Week 6 – 303.04
Week 7 – 268.22
Week 8 – 254.62
Week 9 – 258.92

The three lowest optimal lineup scores have come in the last three weeks. Before we declare the NFL as changed, this point should be made: we’ve had less games from which to choose. Over the last three weeks, the main slate has consisted of 12, 10, and 11 games, thanks to byes and the time zone difference between the UK and USA. When you compare that to Weeks 1 – 6, where we had 13, 14, 14, 12, 12, and 13 games, you can explain away part of that discrepancy.

Let me present an alternate hypothesis, that we can monitor over the next couple weeks. The NFL has turned back into a running back league. Gone were the days of LaDainian Tomlinson, Marshall Faulk and Larry Johnson touching it 30 times. Zero RB had won. Then, a funny thing happened on the way to a five-wide base-set: backs started catching the ball. That allowed smart offensive coordinators to get “run-type action,” but without those pesky linebackers running downhill at your backs.

In the first five weeks of the season, we had two 30-point backs on the main slate. In the last four, we’ve had 10. Why would increased running back scoring lead to lower overall scoring? Well, I’m not positive. My hypothesis is that these plays, runs and passes to running backs, fall incomplete much less, running the clock, extending drives, and shortening games.

Of course, I could check the average number of drives at the beginning of the year versus the last couple weeks, but I’m not going to do all the work right away! Let’s put a bookmark in here and pick it up next week.

Those running backs did anchor the optimal lineup again this week. With three 30-point scorers, M. Gordon, L. Murray, and M. Ingram, a running back easily won the flex position for the week. Frankly, it wasn’t close, as the high wide receiver for the slate had only 25.4, and the second-highest tight end didn’t even crack 20. Jay Ajayi’s 25.0 was fourth among running backs, yet it was bested by only a single receiver score. It’s probably good that he didn’t make the optimal lineup for his third consecutive game, as it would have sent me down a research rabbit hole I might never have survived.

As I detailed here and here, wide receiver was atrocious last week. It was worse this week. Mike Wallace’s 25.4 led the position, and 19.5 of those points were tallied on one play. After Wallace, trailing by less than five points, were eight more receivers (G. Tate, M. Thomas, R. Matthews, J. Nelson, S. Diggs, A. Brown, O. Beckham Jr., & A. Robinson). There were four 100-yard bonuses on the main slate last week and one-less than that, this week. What’s worse is that two of those three, those of Quinton Patton and Eli Rogers, were achieved with less than seven grabs and no score, at 0.1% ownership each in the FF Millionaire. And so, I ask you this:

If a wide receiver gets 100-yards and they are unowned, do they get the bonus?

At quarterback, unlike last week where three signal callers crossed the 30-point threshold, we had a single passer pass the line. Marcus Mariota (31.92). From there, it was a four-point fall off to D. Brees, C. Kaepernick and A. Rodgers, who all tallied 27-and-change. Then, there was another slight cliff down to Eli Manning and Dak Prescott, who had matching 23.88s.

Tight end, per usual, was a barren wasteland of production, but one dad-running Cowboy saved the positional day. Jason Witten, coming off a game where he had one catch for 11 yards in the first 60 minutes, went off to the tune of eight receptions on ten targets, good for 134 yards and a TD, notching just the fourth TE 30-point game of the year (30.4). He not only had the only 30-point game of the week at the position, he had the only 20-point game as well. Come back, Gronk and Reed. We need you.

Lastly your DST probably didn’t win you a tournament this week, with how tightly bunched the top defensive scores were. The Chargers’ two-TD week led the way with 14 points, but eight of 22 teams had 9-or-more points, representing 59% of the FF Millionaire’s lineups.

Making a Millionaire

Do we think Ph was born in 1982 or graduated from something then? If he graduated, he could have gone with “PhD” and had us call calling him “Doctor Millionaire.” As it is, his second of two lineups bested his first by 97 points, and the rest of field as well, capturing one-quarter of the money in play.

The magic number has been 89% in four of eight weeks prior, meaning that the winning FF Millionaire score had been 89% of the optimal score. This week, his 225.32 was only 87%. He hit the top scoring quarterback, the two highest scoring running backs, and the highest scoring tight end, or 4/9 of the optimal lineup. Despite there being nine 20-point receivers to choose from, he hit only one.

Here were his “misses,” with his player, followed by the optimal player and the scoring difference.

Jay Ajayi / Mark Ingram – 9.1
Jordy Nelson / Mike Wallace – 3.0
Cole Beasley / Golden Tate – 7.4
T.Y. Hilton / Michael Thomas – 10.1
Panthers / Chargers – 4

Total Deficit – 33.6

Well, Doc, you got a million bucks. You’ll just have to find a way to live with only hitting 87%!

Grout for a Shout

We’ve had people winning in chunks lately. Back-to-back weeks, a cheap tight end has taken home the crown for a five-pack of pickers. This week, we get some distinction back into the Shout.

garrigou needed not one, not two, but three one-yard TD plunges from Latavius Murray to hear his Holla echo through the rafters, which is exactly what he got. Murray’s final line, 20-for-114 plus 1-for-13 through the air, was accented by three scores for a total of 34.70 DraftKings points at a salary of $4,000. The 8.675 PT/$K just nipped the three people who picked DuJuan Harris’s 8.067 PT/$K. For you, garrigou:

Also, JMToWin got his pick in at the 11th hour (well, maybe 12:15 if we’re being technical), and like 49.7% of FF Millionaire lineups, he picked Charcandrick West. I bested him with Dontrelle Inman, to close the gap to one, 5-4 him.

SwaguarsFan is back! The most important thing he did was make a pick at all, to satisfy the two-thirds threshold. That his pick was Charcandrick West doesn’t matter much. He had the best PT/$K by a good margin coming into this week. Today, he holds the top spot. Also making big leaps this week were geoffoz, JGroove5, and TherealTG, while ggman0831, Peaches13, and dethdealers really took a tumble.

Lastly, theseige joined us for the first time this past week. His Jesse James pick left something to be desired, but in this same week, he punched his second ticket to the King of the Beach. I think he’ll be okay. Maybe better. Welcome CJ.