The Daily Spin – NFL Cash Game Edition – Week 3

Zachary Turcotte
By Zachary Turcotte September 26, 2020 00:37

The Daily Spin – NFL Cash Game Edition – Week 3

The arrival of Week 3 is usually the signal to fantasy owners that they now are experts on how the league is going to play out for the rest of the season. If Player A or Team A played a certain way for not one, but two weeks, then that is the signal that most people need to make up their minds moving forward. While there is some truth to what we’ve observe here in the early weeks, we want to make sure that we are not getting complacent and missing out on opportunities that are staring us in the face. Daily Fantasy Sports is a game of match ups and computing fair value based on price plus volume, an ever changing number that we have to figure out every week.

One of the questions that I am asked most often when constructing my cash game lineups each week is in what sort of point total I am looking for when selecting my players. This is important in giving me a sort of road map to follow in building my team. Now some of you may not be totally familiar with the idea of a lineup building strategy that changes based on the type of contest entered so I want to take a little time to walk you through what goes on in my mind when building different lineup based on the payout structure.

When we play in cash games, contests where beating half the field gives us a prize of doubling up our money for the week, I always try to start with a metric of 3x for DraftKings and 2x for FanDuel. So, if we use FanDuel for our example, you have $60,000 fictional dollars to build your team with. If we lop off the last three zeroes, we have 60, which if we multiply by 2, we get 120, that’s my point target starting point every single week when I build my teams. Now that is not to say that I am not trying to eclipse that number dramatically with my build, but generally speaking, if I hit that target, I know I am in good shape to beat half the field and win my cash games. For DraftKings, you do the same thing except with $50k as your starting point and then use 3x for your multiplier to get 150 points. With a full PPR and bonuses, the cash line for DK is always going to be higher.

So now that you have your targets each week, what you want to do is to figure out with each player that you are adding to your team how close they individually fit into our formula. If you are looking at a TE for instance, like Hunter Henry for example, his price is $4800 on DK for the week. If we use our rule and move the decimal over three places, we get 4.8 which we then multiply by 3 to get 14.6, which is roughly what Henry is going to need to score in order to hit that 3x value that I am looking for this weekend. Is he a good value for the price?

Let’s take a look at Henry’s numbers to figure out what we are working with and how comfortable we can be with our projection. In Week 1, Henry was targeted 8 times, caught 5 passes for 73 yards and no TDs (8/5/73/0) for a total of 12.3 points. In Week 2, he posted a line of 8/6/83/0 for 14.3 points.

We want to think about Henry in terms of what a baselines performance should look like during the season. If we look at his three year career, he’s become a bigger part of the offense each year, even with some injuries. If we extrapolate a bit on the 12 games he played a year ago, he would have likely ended up with around 75 receptions, 900 yards and 7 TDs. I think those numbers are likely close to what we could estimate for this season based on what we know and his early roll in the offense. If you wanted to give him a little bump and say 80 receptions, 1000 yards and 8 TDs, I wouldn’t argue with that as he’s already on pace to exceed the receptions and yardage totals. What that would give us as a baseline would be 5 catches per week for 62.5 yards and .5 TDs. If we run the DK calculation on that gives us an expected average of 14.25 points per week out of Henry as an expected average. Are we done yet? Not quite.

So now we know approximately about what to expect out of Henry if we look at his game log as one big blob of data and slice it up into 16 identical, average pieces. But we know that during the year Henry is going to have games where he’s right around the average, some games where he’s way above the number and others where he’s barely involved in the offense. So at first glance, it looks like he’s priced appropriately for what we need to hit value for the week, but then we need to apply the matchup and game script to see how the rest of it fits in.

This week, the lowly Carolina Panthers travel to LA to take on the Chargers. That works well right off the bat as the Panthers have one of the worst defenses in league, were poor against the TE last season and lost Luke Kuechly to retirement leaving a big hole in the middle of its defense.

If we look at the game script, though the Panthers lost Christian McCaffrey to an ankle sprain last week and that the Chargers are favored by 6.5 points, this game is not likely to be a blowout as the Chargers have moved to much more of a ball control style of offense that emphasizes the run game and shorter passes to RBs, the TE and slot receiver. Finally, we look at the individual match up in which Henry is slated to be covered by LB Shaq Thompson. It’s a clear mismatch that favors Henry who should find himself open all afternoon. With a rookie QB under center, it is likely Henry remains a safety blanket for Herbert who had good chemistry with him in his debut last week.

So how does this all compute for me? My quick, back of the napkin analysis here on this one player would point me towards him likely being able to exceed our 3x target this week. Of course with TEs, it is easier to slip out of the offense, but I would say on the low end, we would get a 4/40 performance and on the high end something like 8/100/1. To me, that’s enough to bump him up off of his baseline projection and add a few points. This is more likely to be one of his higher ceiling type of games versus a team he can exploit.

This is how I try to analyze every player each week as I put together my recommendations and how I determine if they make it into my column. It’s a methodical approach each week that focuses on breaking down a true value based on my own points per dollars estimate to try to hit a target as opposed to simply shooting for a higher ceiling point total.

So how were my results last week? Not quite as good as Week 1 for my DraftKings cash team. Some weeks, you are done earlier than others. As I flipped through the channels at around 12:10pm last Sunday, I found the Vikings/Colts game and the first image that hit me was Paris Campbell going off on a cart. He had a 7 yard carry on the first drive for Indy, took a hit, hurt his knee and ended his day and potentially his season. It was a devastating blow as my last lineup decision came down to Campbell or Diontae Johnson for the Steelers. Both guys were at the same price, but the Vikings secondary is so bad that Campbell edged out Johnson for me, which proved to be my downfall.

Johnson had a monster game, Campbell scored .7 points and my cash game team went up in flames. That is one of the pitfalls of only firing one bullet per week with cash lineups on each site. If you take an early injury, it is usually crippling and very difficult to overcome. When Davante Adams left the game for Green Bay after the first half, I knew my week was definitely over. Week 2 decimated a lot of good players, but for the most part, the FIE folks did really well. We had a good roadmap at every position to build winning rosters, we just needed to avoid the key injuries along the way.


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Zachary Turcotte
By Zachary Turcotte September 26, 2020 00:37

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