The Daily Spin – NFL Cash Game Edition – Week 1

Where were you 19 years ago today?

As this strange year wears on and the 9/11 anniversary comes and goes, I can’t help but to reflect back to where I was the last time the country was truly in crisis. Most of you know my story or have picked it up in bits and pieces over the years. In a previous life, I was a pilot in the US Air Force after having graduated from the Air Force Academy in the summer of 2000. I had no idea where my career would take me as I tossed my hat into the sky as the Thundebirds roared over a cheering stadium. I knew I wanted to fly airplanes and coming from a family of entrepreneurs, I was as young and patriotic as could be.

After a casual 9 months after graduating, I entered Pilot Training down in the not-so-lovely city of Del Rio, Texas. Being a Minnesota kid, I immediately appreciated the warm weather in March, but quickly wilted when the temperatures hit 115 degrees out on the ramp during the summer. The old T-37 aircraft did not have the best AC system, essentially nothing until after takeoff and by the time we rolled down the runway, my flightsuit had turned color from drab to dark green from sweat.

Halfway through training, everything was going along well. I passed through the first training aircraft and moved on to the T-1 in preparation for flying heavy aircraft. On the morning of Tuesday, September 11th, it seemed like my career could go any number of different directions as we sat studying computer courses on our aircraft. By the time the day was over, I had a clear vision of how my military career would proceed having studied and traveled to the Middle East while in school.

The years ahead were long and exhausting. I spent much of the next few years deploying for 60-70 days at a time, flying nearly every day around the world, returning home for a few weeks of rest and then turning around to go back out on the road again. Physically and mentally I gradually wore down as the wars stretched on year after year. I was tired and unhappy. The years away were slowly eating away at my soul and I knew I needed a change before I burned out entirely so I went back to school and studied finance and earned my MBA. I started my second career as a financial advisor and have been working at it successfully for the last ten years. However, that was only the beginning of my second act.

Back near the end of 2014, Jeff returned from a vacation to St. Martin and called me up to go grab a drink. He told me over the phone that he had an idea for me and I could hear the excitement in his voice. He told me to keep an open mind and not to say no right away and I agreed. Jeff and I have been best friends since kindergarten. He’s always been the smart money, the good decision maker and a total workhorse so I knew if he had an idea and he was excited that I better be ready for the opportunity.

We sat down for about 3 hours drinking the various specialty versions of Long Islands that they serve at Joe Senser’s and he opened a notebook full of ideas for what became Fantasy Golf Insider, the first DFS site devoted completely to PGA DFS. After several years of growth, we made the decision to expand into covering the NFL, our first love when it comes to sports and in particular fantasy sports. Jeff and I have been playing fantasy football together since he first introduced me to it at age eleven. The NFL season complements the PGA season quite well so it was an easy transition for us. In a normal season, the PGA finishes up its playoff events right before the NFL kicks off its season and though the PGA does have a fall season, it is usually filled with weaker fields and smaller tournaments (though COVID turned the schedule on its head this fall).

I bring this origin story up to share with you just how grateful I am to be working on this site, in a business with my best friend and with a community of incredible subscribers. Though this year has been challenging and we are again facing hard times as a country, I am fortunate to have a place here where I get to write about sports each week and share my thoughts with a group of subscribers that I consider friends. When there is so much negativity in the news each day, we need to have sanctuaries of positivity in our lives and this site is all about creating a community built around that concept. Reading your e-mails about winning life changing money or commiserating with you in our Slack Chat Channel about the ups and downs of the contests we compete in is such an amazing feeling and I cannot express enough the level of gratitude that I have for all of you who have come here over these last six years to share in the journey with us.

Now it is time to talk about football. With the 2020 season upon us, it is time to get back to the business of winning a bit of money so that we can prove to the women in our lives that the pursuit of being absorbed by football for 3, 6 or (gasp) 9 hours on a Sunday truly is worth ($$$) our time. Truth be told, I’ve loved the NFL long before DFS was around. Even as a kid in the pre-NFL Ticket days, I was just as eager to see which games would be televised in addition to the Vikings. My family did not have cable growing up so that meant I would have access to 2-3 games in total on Sunday, but I never missed a Sunday growing up from about the age of six onward. In fact, one of my favorite opening weekend stories revolves around one of the first years that I was a real die hard fan at the ripe age of 7 when the Vikings, who had been 3-13 in 1984, beat the then defending Super Bowl Champion 49ers, 28-21. It also features the rookie debut of a well known receiver for the 49ers out of Mississippi Valley State. Take the time to watch the highlights. You’ll thank me later for this blast from the past.

What I loved about that game as kid was just how fast fortunes could change in the NFL. One year, your team can be at the bottom of league and the next year, you are stunning the defending champions. Of course, in my mind as a child, that immediately made the Vikings the favorites to win the Super Bowl that year, but that is another lesson I had to learn the hard way many times growing up. What I want you to remember out of this is that Week 1 brings a clean slate to each season and though we certainly have an idea about which teams are going to excel, there is a learning curve every year and we need to be on top of things early on in order to stay ahead of our competition each week. Remember, the vast majority of casual DFS players are going to be even more behind than usual this year without the preseason games to help get their attention on the NFL in August so I think if you are well prepared, there should be an edge we can exploit to our advantage.

As most of you know, my focus is on cash games each week, the contests on DraftKings and FanDuel where around half of the entrants win and double their money and the other half walk away with nothing. Most of you have had some success with me over in PGA contests of this style over the years as well as the last few in NFL as well so little introduction is required. However, given that it has been about 9 months since we have played cash games for football, it is good to go over a couple of the finer points in distinguishing between the strategy I employ for PGA vs NFL.

With PGA, the big difference from NFL is that there is a cut after the first two rounds which completely changes the way you have to think about building your roster. Imagine building your NFL team where at a each position group, the bottom half of players were eliminated after the second quarter. That is the dilemma with golf. If players do not start out well, there is no garbage time for them to make up for it over the weekend. You need to pick steady players that can get through the cut and get four rounds under their belt which typically means you take less risks at the top and bottom of your lineups.

With the NFL, unless a player gets injured, you are going to get four quarters of action out of each of your players. In your head, you can map out the flow of each game and see how each player will be involved or how their role will develop as the game unfolds. In many cases, you do not expect certain players to get a lot of action until their team is way behind so the mindset is definitely a little different.

Another major difference is in how we approach injuries for football. In golf, when one of the top players in the field withdraws from a tournament before it starts, he is replaced in the field by the whoever is next up on the alternate list (sorted by an overall ranking system for who has priority). Typically, these are not even golfers that we would consider for our lineups. If they were not good enough to be in the field to begin with, then there is a huge drop in talent. They get added to the field, but they are sparsely owned at best and have little upside.

Contrast this with the NFL where following injuries is one of the biggest keys to success in winning at DFS. Each week, it is incumbent upon us to watch the injury report from Wednesday through Friday to see who is practicing and who is limited, especially for the running back position. Most teams carry a lot of receivers so a backup getting in does not immediately mean they will see 10 targets, but when a starting RB goes down, you better know who his backup is and how he will be used by the offense. These lower priced players need to find their way onto our cash game rosters as they are usually very cheap, but you can map out the number of touches they are likely to see based on that team’s RB usage and they will often easily exceed the points needed to hit value based upon their salary. They will also tend to be very heavily owned so that if you skip out on owning them and they do even better than expected, you might have missed out on salary cap relief as well as a performance that puts everyone else in front of you trying to chase the rest of the pack down.

Given the way the pricing is set up most weeks, you will be able to use a stars/scrub approach of packing in some of the more dependable players to anchor your lineup while punting with some cheaper players who should still see plenty of touches. In GPP contests where you are trying to differentiate from the field, it does not usually make as much sense to chase these types of chalky plays as you are limiting your ability to separate yourself from the rest of the field, but in cash games, it is important to follow these sorts of plays. Remember, with cash games, we only need to be better than the last team to make it into the money since we win the same amount as everyone else. We do not need to get creative and in fact, most of the time I will discourage it. There are no extra winnings for finishing at the top of the leaderboard for these contests. The key to being a great cash game player in all sports is not in finding the contrarian plays, but in avoiding making silly mistakes and taking risks that offer little upside, but have ugly consequences when they do not pay off.

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