The Daily Spin – NFL Cash Game Edition – Week 7

Last week was one of those weeks where I look back at my column and feel great about my analysis, but end up frustrated with my result as one or two decisions ended up haunting me and kept me from getting into the green on Sunday. There were only a handful of choices that determined the winners from the losers last week, but the differences were stark. The most notable decision came for me in two spots where I could have used Derrick Henry and instead opted for other players. When I look at the result, I obviously feel like a complete donkey faced clown, but it is always easier to look back after the games are done and to be hypercritical.

Most of my team came together reasonably well as I built it out last Saturday. Up top, we had a nice value play in Ryan Fitzpatrick going up against the Jets. He played fine and threw three TDs in the first half. The problem was that the Jets were never competitive at any point in the game so Fitz did not really have to push the offense at all in the second half as each team more or less took a knee the last two quarters in grinding out the clock. It’s a shame since even a little push would have kept the Dolphins moving.

At RB, David Montgomery looked like a nice option for the Bears against the Panthers, who are awful against the run. While the effort was not terrible, he got stuffed near the goal line a number of times and never really had any big plays to push a decent effort into a big fantasy performance. For his price, I still love the play given his role in the offense, but he did not do much more than an average floor performace.

At WR, Kenny Golladay was in a great spot against the Jags, and through he did not get many targets, he still turned them into 4 catches for 105 yards so it proved to be a good day. Since the Jags were not very competitive, the Lions did not need to force him the ball which capped him out, but for his price, this was a fine performance.

AJ Brown was an obvious value last week against the Texans and rewarded us with two TDs including a beautiful, late game TD with four seconds remaining to send the game to OT. With no Corey Davis available, Brown was assured enough targets to make him more than viable as a cash game option.

The other WR I used was Jamison Crowder. I originally had Chase Claypool, but really wanted to get Crowder in as he’s been a target magnet all season and was again last Sunday, seeing another 13 targets come his direction. While he was only able to catch 7 passes for 47 yards, this is a game of opportunities so even though Claypool had a short TD run and outscored Crowder, he did it on only 6 opportunities. Crowder had six less points than Claypool so this was not a disaster, but I am fine with making plays like this even if it means I occasionally go against the chalk.

At TE, we had a great performance out of our punt play in Trey Burton who found the end zone twice and eclipsed 20 points, huge numbers for a $3100 player, which opened up a lot of options for the other players I was able to pay up for.

This is where I needed to make some decisions. Originally, I had the Dolphins as my defense all week against the Jets at 2900. It was a great spot for them as the Jets are awful and have little ability to move the ball or score. That was going to leave me with 7200 per player for my last RB and Flex. I really wanted to work Alexander Mattison into my lineups for the week as I anticipated him have a Dalvin Cook style role in the offense where he’d see 15-18 carries and likely 4-5 catches. Given Atlanta’s struggles on defense and that they are perennially bad against pass catching RBs, this felt like a slam spot for Mattison who had racked up over 100 yards on the ground the week prior against Seattle after Cook had left the game. Unfortunately, the Vikings played so poorly to start the game and Kirk Cousins threw three early interceptions so that the Vikings eventually had to abandon the run almost entirely.

The last spot I had a tough time with. I wanted to play either Adam Thielen or Derrick Henry, but needed an extra $100, which forced me to drop down off the Dolphins to the Titans, a dumb decision in retrospect. The Jets are just too bad of a team to pass up such easy value in a game like that where I knew there was a chance that the Titans and Texans could get into a back and forth high scoring game. That was the first mistake.

The next mistake was selecting Thielen over Henry. The Falcons defense has been so bad against the pass this season and I expected a back and forth, high point total game so that I really wanted to work Thielen into my lineup as he has seen a ridiculous number of targets and has made the most of them. My issue with Henry is that he does not always have a big role in the passing game for the Titans so that if he does not go over 100 yards rushing or get into the end zone, he will end up with a bunch of games during the year where his fantasy numbers miss the mark. I think in this case, it was a mistake to pay up for the Thielen/Mattison stack. The Vikings are way too inconsistent to be counted on this season and with a backup, we really should only be looking at a play like that in a situation where they are really cheap relative to what the salary would be for the normal starter. Cook was hurt before the pricing came out so rather than getting Mattison for $4500, he got a big salary boost.

Also, just as a practice for strategic purposes, it is almost always better to lean towards using a starting RB in the flex spot most weeks. With WRs, targets are variable from week to week. Even stars are going to have games where they disappear inexplicably. That usually does not happen with RBs, especially ones that can be targeted in good matchups. We knew last week that Henry was going to see 20+ touches against a bad defense while we were ‘hoping’ that Thielen would see 10+ targets against the Falcons. NFL DFS comes down to calculating projected opportunities per game and what is likely to happen for those touches. Henry had a much more certain path than Thielen to success last week though in plenty of circumstances, we would have gotten big numbers from Adam as well. In the end, I came up about 20-25 points short of the cash line for the week, but it really just came down to a couple of decisions. Hopefully, I will be able to learn from those mistakes and put my knowledge to use for all of us the rest of the season.

 

Week 6 Team
Ryan Fitzpatrick	5900	18.04
Alexander Mattison	7200	4
David Montgomery	5800	13.7
Kenny Golladay	6200	17.5
Jamison Crowder	6100	11.8
AJ Brown	5600	22.6
Trey Burton	3100	21.9
Adam Thielen	7300	14.1
Titans	2800	-2
	50000	121.64

 

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