NFL DFS Week 5 Lineup Review
A review of the NFL DFS lineup I put out for this NFL week
The Lineup
It was pretty easy to build a confident lineup this week. I once again made the final wrong decisions and had a losing week. I even made a Sunday morning swap that cost me nine points and took me below the cash line in double ups. So that hurt. I went from Lawrence/Pittman/Walker to Smith/Wicks/Williams. The reason for that was because I had those threesomes basically dead even anyways, and then there was some rain and wind in the Jacksonville game so I let that push me to the other side. Bad decision, and we should never take weather too seriously - but since I thought it was a pretty even move (the projections actually had the group I swapped onto projected significantly higher), I went for it.
I was hurt bad by the Deebo Samuel play. He scored just three points at $6,800 and was not highly owned (Jordan Mason busted too, but at least it was 87% ownership). I was probably a bit too locked onto Samuel there with Kittle and Aiyuk healthy, but the role this year was so solid and you had to like the fact that he’d get 3-5 rush attempts as well.
Tyrone Tracy is a good lesson here. A lot of these backup RBs are priced in the $5000 range just in case the starter gets hurt. DraftKings tries their best to avoid the spots where a play is super obvious. But they didn’t cover their basis there with Tracy, who was a lock for me at $4,300. The field didn’t think so at just 29% owned, and he certainly could have busted given the fact he had just one catch - but he busted a long run and got the 100-yard rushing bonus, making for a successful day.
Ending up on three Packers pass catchers was also interesting. I didn’t have a problem with that because I figured that play as a block would have to have a pretty good collective score. And they did. Kraft had the big game with two touchdowns, Reed wasn’t what we wanted but not a total lineup killer, and then Wicks was a bust. 43 points from the three of them is shy of what I expected, but not a total disaster. Playing three guys from the same team does limit the ceiling substantially. Maybe I should have let that fact take me from Wicks to Josh Downs for just the $100 more.
It’s another losing week. I don’t think there are any major lessons to be learned here other than be really careful who you spend the big salaries on. I got murdered by Breece Hall last week at the big tag, and then again this week on Deebo.
There was no cash anywhere except for 33% of the head-to-heads. It would have been a much better week without those poor last-minute swaps, ten points makes a big difference in this world.
Weekly ROI Results:
Week 1: +215%
Week 2: +6%
Week 3: -6%
Week 4: -49%
Week 5: -59%Overall: +8%
Weekly Head-to-Head Results
Week 1: 58/58 (100%)
Week 2: 44/51 (86%)
Week 3: 43/59 (73%)
Week 4: 20/58 (35%)
Week 5: 22/66 (33%)Overall: 64%
I looked like a freakin’ genius after week one, but since then I’m not looking too good. The one silver lining here is that eventually we will cash in these Hundos again (we’re 0/4 since being in the top three in week one), and that gives us the upside for more than a 100% ROI. The bottom ROI is always 0%, but if I have another week or two where I get lucky to make all the right selections at the end, we could take down one or two of those $10 Hundos and post a huge ROI number. So let’s hope that comes soon.
Thanks for following along - I’m still enjoying the full process here of writing the games up, and then checking on what other people think, adjusting to injury reports, putting together the final lineup, and then reviewing the results. I just want this to turn out with a positive ROI so I don’t feel like I totally wasted everybody’s time.
Until next time!