Up above these words is what a million dollars looks like. The winner could be an ordinary dude just like you and me who took the time to do a little research last week before he made 9 decisions and clicked submit. I love helping you guys with your research and doing everything in my power to get you closer to a million dollars or whatever top prize you’re after. One way I can do that is through my weekly game breakdowns another probably more important way I can do that is through my Milly Maker Lineup reviews. Game breakdowns help us a ton for one week, Lineup Reviews help us make better decisions for every week going forward. I’m going to do everything in my power to write up more of those for us.
Main Team Stack: Atlanta Falcons: QB, TE
We talked a lot about this ATL squad in our Game Breakdown article. This game ATL @ ARI had the second highest point total and so the DFS community felt great rostering both sides of this game. Have I ever told you how much I love the game on the slate with the 2nd highest point total? I’m telling you, that’s where it’s at. It’s always on the radar but not quite on the radar enough. Good usually happens when you pick the right sides of the 2nd highest point total. You’ll probably hear me tell you that many, many more times going forward.
Matt Ryan is playing so well this year. He’s hit 300+ yards in every single game so far and at 6400, come on now, that’s incredible value. Austin Hooper was a popular play as well at 37.3 percent ownership in this contest. That’s a heck of a lot of ownership. You know a lot of people go on and on about trying to avoid popular plays but that’s not what wins you the money. Winning involves drafting the right popular plays and the right unpopular plays, it’s a good mix of both that prevails. Everyone else thought they had to deep stack and generally a 3 man same team stack can workout very well, but this winner couldn’t decide who else he liked on the ATL squad so he stuck with who he liked. He probably admitted to himself that he had no idea who else Ryan was going to lead into the endzone besides Hooper and was completely fine with getting a piece of each of those Touchdowns through Matt Ryan. The rest of us chose Julio or Sanu or Ridley (who did ok), but if we were honest with ourselves, we had no idea which one of those dudes was going to have an exceptional game. We did like Ryan though and we knew we liked Hooper, next time we gotta admit what we know, accept what we don’t know, and then play the dudes who we feel confident about.
Generally I’ll tell ya’ll to run your main stack with a guy from the other side but with the David Johnson uncertainty and the expensive Fitzgerald pricing, it was hard to feel good about anyone but QB Kyler Murray and we didn’t have any vacancy at the QB position. So this guy took Ryan/Hooper, accepted what he didn’t know and moved on to the RB position.
RB / RB
Chris Carson was a very popular play. Obviously so, he was 25.6% owned. Again, there’s no reason to get away from high ownership if the play makes sense. We knew Carson was going to see a ton of carries against a very poor run defense. He gets targets, he gets carries, he gets goal line work, and at 6k against the Browns, he made so much sense. This is the type of play that often works out and you should have a lot of in your lines. It’s not a perfect play, no play is perfect, but a clear RB1 with a 6k pricetag against a poor run defense is something you want to be a part of more often than not.
Carlos Hyde is the perfect example of why you shouldn’t be picking players by their fantasy points so far this year, and instead picking players based on their usage and their current matchup. We knew Carlos was super cheap this week at 4400 and was expected to get a heavy workload in the highest game total on the board. Going into the game, we all expected him to get a ton of carries if the Texans could get ahead in the game so as to keep the ball out of the hands of superstar Patrick Mahomes. The price was great and the volume from Week 5, with 21 carries, clearly showed that Hyde was being given the opportunity to succeed for us. Knowing all of that, sometimes it’s easy to hear about a player, admit he’s in a great situation and then look at his stats to that point and see no fantasy-point specific indication that he’ll hit the value you want him to at his price, because he hadn’t done it before! Anyone can look at a boxscore for Christian McCaffrey from last week and tell you that he’s going to score another TD or two in his upcoming game. The people who succeed in this type of competition are those that can look at a boxscore of a player who has yet to hit 4x value of his current pricetag or hasn’t in quite some time, and still feels confident in drafting the guy based on his usage rate and his current situation.
WR / WR / WR
Stefon Diggs was highly touted this week in the fantasy football community. He’s been in a weird situation/relationship with his QB and his team. He’s been injured too. So it’s been hard to feel confident in drafting the guy. After the passing game explosion of the MIN offense last week and the success that brought with it, we knew that Cousins and co. would be repeating the gameplan. We wrote up in our weekly breakdown how MIN Dalvin Cook would be held in check by PHI who has the #1 rush defense in the league. That was expected. So what does that mean for the offense? MORE passes! This made Cousins and naturally his WR1 a fine play, but it also made Stefon Diggs an incredible play too because he would see additional volume redistributed to the pass offense from Cook’s workload just as much as Thielen would, and he’s faster than every player in the PHI secondary. His speed in relation to the PHI D was talked about a lot in the fantasy community this week too, in just about every podcast we listened to. The problem was, well, all of the problems going in with the volume and the team chemistry, etc., but as we saw with Hyde a good play is a good play. In reading interviews from very successful Draftkings players, they usually mention something similar to “usually the best lineups are the ones that make you a little bit uncomfortable”. I think is what they meant. They’re not talking about stacking every MIA player and Bengal, they’re talking about this type of situation: Stefon Diggs who’s underperformed thus far but undeniably has plenty of skill and finds himself in a great situation where his QB has to be throwing more.
Next WR is Terry McLauren. Man… I swear when I saw this pricetag, I knew this dude was going to do well. That price seemed outrageously steep when it came out. 6000! McLauren was 6000 in a game with a low point total playing for a team that said it was going to run the heck out of the ball, oh and also has a terrible QB throwing to him. This is another one of those, where adding him to your lineup you say to yourself “wow, does this feel uncomfortable right now”. Why? Why did this make sense? Well, we knew RB Adrian Peterson was going to get huge volume and at 4500 we were still hesitant to play him. Why was that? Well as a clear RB1 going into the week, knowing that his coach wanted to give him the ball, we still had reservations about drafting him because we didn’t think he was going to hit value. At 4500, in that situation, and still hesitant? That should have been our cue that if WAS was going to win, which I think we and Vegas expected, the WAS offense was going to have to throw the ball to do so against a putrid MIA D and McLauren is the WR1 of that squad. Clear and away, he is the WR1. When we saw 4500, and hesitated on AP, if we still felt like WAS was going to win the game, that would have put us on Scary Terry McLauren. I’m certain that was the thought process in this million dollar winning lineup.
Auden Tate is the last WR pick of this lineup and he was a pretty easy selection in hindsight too. His CIN Bengals were playing against a funnel Baltimore Defense who can stop a run game in its tracks but would let a middle school squad throw all over them. We knew BAL was going to pound the rock on offense, take the lead early and then CIN spend the rest of the game abandoning the run to play catch up and throwing from behind a ton. Auden Tate has emerged over the 2 weeks going into this game as the clear WR2 behind Tyler Boyd. He was getting targets and he and Dalton were developing a consistent rapport. We also knew that Tate was super chalky last week and let everyone down. These are the types of plays that are really good to jump on after they bite the chalk dust, because ‘the what have you done for me lately’ mentality can somehow convince a person that he’s a perfect pick one week and then not even worth our time the following week after a down game. This new millionaire knew that this guy was going to get targets as his team was throwing from behind and he knew that he was going to be low owned because he burned everyone the previous week. I don’t think he chose him because of his low ownership, it was just a nice bonus.
FLEX
Ezekiel Elliott was the most expensive back on the board and had the highest projected volume of all the backs. He was coming off of a few down weeks by his standards and we knew that after a loss, he would get extra opportunity as the team’s top offensive weapon, to try to lead his squad to victory. He gets the catches in the backfield, he gets the goal line work, he gets a ton of carries. It’s surprising that he was under 10% owned when so much RB value opened up salary for a player of this caliber to be squeezed in.
DEF
Honestly, I think new millionaire BBcombes got on the 49ers Defense here because they fit his remaining salary. Going into it, I think he’d agree with me saying that this was the biggest gamble he took in this lineup. He saw the 49ers embarrass the Browns and hoped for lightning to strike again, this time against a Rams squad with a lot of offensive weapons and a pocket passer that doesn’t make the best decisions under pressure. It worked out for him. Other defenses scored more points, but he didn’t need much more from the defense than allowing him to fit the rest of his lineup together while not killing him. They certainly fit the bill.
DFSocean.com 