The Daily Spin – NFL Cash Game Edition – Week 3

Zachary Turcotte
By Zachary Turcotte September 25, 2021 13:11

The Daily Spin – NFL Cash Game Edition – Week 3

Week 1 should have been an easy win until an outlier game from Davante Adams derailed me, but in Week 2, everything fell into place perfectly and there was never really a point where I was sweating out landing in the money.

Week 2
Justin Herbert 19.72
Chris Carson 15.1
Najee Harris 19.1
CeeDee Lamb 17.4
Cooper Kupp 39.8
Ja’Marr Chase 13.4
Tyler Higbee 1.8
Keenan Allen 17.8
Eagles 1

Total – 145.12

The build came together pretty easily which always helps to keep me relaxed on Sunday morning. If you guys are not in our NFL Slack Chat channel yet, be sure to hop in now. I try to be in there 90 minutes prior to kickoff once the Active/Inactive list is announced for the noon games. I get a lot of DMs and text messages from friends with lineup questions, but if you get into Slack, it is easiest for me to get to all of them there without having to bounce around from one messaging platform to another. Plus, we have a great group of sharp minds in there so there are always people with different takes that can offer you some contrarian perspectives that go beyond my normal chalky adherence.

Week 2 really showed us how the composition of your lineup can change from one week to the next. In Week 1, it was nearly mandatory to play two or even three of the top RBs given the extremely cheap WRs available, but the script was flipped entirely last week as the matchups were not quite as enticing for those top backs and after Week 1, the pricing on the WRs was less accommodative, plus the matchups for the midrange WRs made it much more important to pay up. This led to a much different build overall, but one that is actually quite common for Week 2. You can start to map this out if you take some notes each season. Week 1 always has pricing set up to allow for new players to build star studded rosters with a lot of flexibility. In Week 2, we get a reaction on pricing from DK and FD and typically end up with a much more balanced lineup. The big lesson from the first to the second week is to avoid overreacting. If you did not win that first week, it was likely due to something stupid like what I ran into with Adams. Rather than scrapping your process or chasing too much on the big Week 1 players, take a breath, review your team and see if there were any holes in the decisions that you made. I feel like I made some very small adjustments, but really just stuck to my regular game plan of trying to decipher how each game would play out and what role each player selected would have in their respective offense.

It is interesting the way the lineup worked out for the week. I wanted to build around the very obvious Chargers/Cowboys tilt as the point total was very high, conditions were perfect and the Cowboys were missing a couple of key pass rushers. The game itself busted, but we still got very workmanlike performances from the three players that were utilized. In reality, the scoring could have been even better were it not for the fact that the Chargers had a couple of TD passes wiped off the board due to penalties which left me frustrated over my season long TD prop bet on Herbert. Fortunately, these were all the type of floor performances that I projected at the beginning of the week. I knew that barring injury, the sort of volume that these players would see in the passing game nearly assured us of a 3x performance based on salary (a little less, but close enough). The way that Lamb and Allen are used as high volume, short pass catchers means that we do not need to depend on the long ball to get to value and they are not TD dependent. Both have considerable upside if they happen to find the end zone, but they do not need to in order for them to be a solid cash game play.

The next piece of my lineup was Cooper Kupp who is likely to remain a steady presence in my articles until his price jumps up in a way that makes it difficult to afford him. So long as Robert Woods is healthy, it does help to keep that number from climbing too high, too fast. Kupp is the NFC version of Keenan Allen, a reliable pass catcher who can take a short pass and turn it into a big play. Like Allen and Lamb, he is good for 15-20 points on a normal week, but when you tack on a TD or two like last week, you can get a huge ceiling game like last Sunday when he put up 39.6 points. While he had plenty of ownership, I actually expected it to be higher so his performance pretty much assured me of getting a win.

I did not feel like there were a lot of great plays at RB and knew that I was not going to be able to pay up so I approached the value range looking for volume. Though that volume proved illusory, each of my backs put up respectable numbers. The real key for choosing these value backs is in finding the ones that are on the field for the majority of the game. I looked at guys like Chase Edmonds and Nyheim Hines, but both of those guys are in committee situations which for the most part, we would like to avoid when we have other options. With the Steelers, it is real easy to find volume at RB. They might give one carry to Benny Snell, but that is about it. The rest is going to the lead dog in Najee Harris. He’s not seeing the volume that Lev Bell had in his best seasons, but he’s still the guy. It looked like another bust in terms of performance on Sunday, but late in the game, he caught a third down pass and scored from 25 yards out which put him over the top in value. He was heavily owned so it would not have killed my team if he had ended up with 10 points, but that play got him to 19 so go to go.

The other back I ended up with was Chris Carson. I am not really a Chris Carson guy. He gets lost in the shuffle in Seattle a lot of weeks and he’s not always heavily involved in the passing game so single digit point performances are a part of his profile. Last week, what put him over for me was that Rashaad Penny was out so the percentage of carries would be up as well as passes out of the backfield. Carson had 31 total yards on 13 carries and zero catches. That would normally be a disaster, but we were very lucky in that he managed a couple of short TD runs which bailed us out. He was also fairly heavily owned so it would not have killed me had he busted, but avoiding having 2-3 on your team is the key to staying ahead of curve.

My other receiver also did not make my day easy over the first three quarters of the game. Ja’Marr Chase made it onto my roster as he was still priced a little too low at $5k and he had a nice spot against the Bears who had given up some deep balls the week prior to the Rams. For three quarters, he was held to one catch for 12 yards. Then late in the game, Joe Burrow dialed up a deep ball and connected for a long TD which helped take any pressure away going into the late games. I normally do no like to ‘chase’ a rookie after one promising game, but I needed to save some salary, knew he would carry a little ownership and knew that one big play could happen for him at any given moment. You do not want to build your roster around this type of player in cash games, but having one at WR that helps you to save cap space is a reasonable approach, especially if it unlocks a player with a high ceiling.

The busts of the week came at TE and DEF. The TE position is going to be tough all year. There is Travis Kelce, Darren Waller….and then everyone else. Since Kelce is priced up with the elite WRs, it is always going to be tough to fit him into lineups unless we get a couple of really cheap, high value plays at other positions. Most weeks, I am not paying up at TE since most other owners do not put the pressure on us by going with Kelce in cash games at this price so all I am looking to do is to follow the herd in the value range and hope not to get skunked. Unfortunately, Higbee caught only one pass for eight yards which is definitely a bust. The only saving grace was that he was owned by around 40% of the field so it took away some of the sting. The left me with enough funds to pay for the Eagles on defense and though they held the 49ers to 17 points, they failed to register a single sack or turnover, putting up just one point. Fortunately, they were reasonably well owned and no other chalk defense did anything substantial.

It was a solid week overall. Cooper Kupp carried the team, but I had good balance from top to bottom to get into the green for a nice, profitable Week 2.

 


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Zachary Turcotte
By Zachary Turcotte September 25, 2021 13:11

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