The Daily Spin – NFL Cash Game Edition – Week 17

Two weeks in a row a big holiday evening falls on a Friday. This means that I had to double up on the Red Bull tonight and buckle down to finish up my research for the weekend. These last few weeks have been really wild and I do not think that Week 17 and 18 will be much different. With the Omicron variant spiking all over the country these last couple of weeks, the number of COVID positive tests are unlike anything we have seen over the last two seasons. Even with somewhat scaled back guidelines, this variant seems much more contagious than what we have seen from previous waves which is going to make the playoffs, both actual and fantasy a much more precarious experience than we will likely ever see again.

Most weeks over the last few years, I have 80-90% of my research completed by Thursday night. This season, it barely even seems worth putting anything down in print until Saturday afternoon. By Sunday morning, we finally get the last of the COVID tests and inactives listed and you should plan on joining us in Slack and reading my column again for updates during the final hour and a half before kickoff. There are some key injury situations this week to monitor as well so we need to get more clarity out of Tampa Bay, Denver and Philly in order to figure out which players will be featured this week at WR for the Bucs and Broncos and RB for the Eagles.

Once again, I am going to dive right into the player pool for the week. Last week, most of the plays worked out well, but James Robinson really hurt us when he tore his achilles in the first quarter against the Jets. One point that was brought up in the Slack chat that I want to briefly mention was the idea of good chalk vs bad chalk. What exactly is the difference you ask? This is an important distinction for cash games in all DFS sports, but it is not always understood by everyone.

Last week with Robinson, we had a solid RB that has excelled when given volume over the last two years in both the run and pass game, going up against the worst defense overall and worst run defense in the league. As a bonus, the interim head coach had pledged to get him consistent touches the rest of the season. He was also priced at only $5,900 and projected for around 20 touches. Ownership projections were also coming in at around 70-80% for cash games. In this situation, even if he busts (or gets injured), your team is not toast if you played him. However, if he finds the end zone a couple of times and has the type of day he is very capable of and you get cute and go a different direction, you could be in big trouble. Even if Robinson did not go wild, an average day would easily have him hitting value.

So what is bad chalk? There are a couple of good recent examples that come to mind. Tony Jones on Thanksgiving is a nice example. The slate was short with only three games so there was some reason to gravitate towards the starting RB that night for the Saints. However, there were a few problems that stood out. First, he had never played significant time in a game so we really did not know his role. As it turned out, he was almost completely absent from the passing game. Also, he was going up against one the best defenses in the league. He was also playing with a backup QB. He was projecting really high ownership so it was not a total loss to follow the herd, but we had questionable volume, an ill defined role and a tough matchup. He ended up as a total bust which should not have surprised us.

Other times this happens to us is with wide receiver situations that spring up all the time. One or two starters will go down for a team and suddenly, the DFS universe will anoint the next man up who jumps into a starting slot. While a starting RB is a near guarantee for at least a reasonable amount of touches, WR can be a little trickier. We may believe that a limited target tree should produce targets for us, but that just is not always the case, especially on bad teams. When players pick up a lot of industry steam that are backups that have questionable volume, for a bad team, in a challenging matchup, our bad chalk radars should start to ping. This is not going to prevent us from stepping into a mess a couple of times a season, especially one as injury riddled as the 2021 campaign, but if we pay attention to some of these factors, we should be able to dodge some bullets along the way.

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