Scoring was down again this week and running backs continued to be inconsistent. The Draft Kings “Perfect Lineup” was 310.40 points, but the Millionaire winner was able to take home the big check by scoring only 256.7 points. With 3 games on Thanksgiving, it makes sense that scoring would be down a little in daily fantasy.
Then again, there was some of that defensive weather out there that didn’t seem to matter much in the Denver/New England game.
Brock Ossweiler, huh?
Running back ownership is still all over the board as owners seem to be looking for cheap options so they can load up on receiving. Of the highest owned RB’s under $5K on DraftKings, only 1, Spencer Ware, performed at a level to help you cash anything decent. CJ Anderson ended up being a great value at $3,500, but he was only rostered by a tenth of a percent of owners.
The “running-back-by-committee” approach of NFL teams these days also plays a factor in the lack of clear cut star running backs to invest in. The Perfect Lineup points out that of the top-10 players who’ve scored 20+ points, none of them are RB’s. Adrian Peterson is one of the few backs who gets a high percentage of his teams snaps and touches, yet even he gives up snaps to the likes of Matt Asiata and Jerrick McKinnon.
This leaves us analyzing RB matchups against defenses a little more in depth…Paying attention to backups, third-down specialists, and short-yardage guys. On any given week, John Kuhn can score 2 TD’s. Or David Johnson can emerge from the three headed beast in Arizona to be the only top level healthy running back on the team right now.
How The Weekly DFS Winners Won
With the Seahawks being the highest scoring team of the Sunday-Monday slate, it makes sense that they would provide the best stacking opportunities. The winners from both DraftKings and FanDuel stacked Russell Wilson and Doug Baldwin.
Both teams also got a ton of help from ODB Jr. and Adrian Peterson.
DraftKings
“keasy” wins NFL week 12
Keasy’s 256.70 won the million dollars by almost 7 full points. Keasy went with a full, and usually not advisable stack of QB-RB-WR from the Seahawks. Rawls wasn’t needed much as the game went to the air for most of the last 3 quarters. While Rawls didn’t have a great game, he didn’t have a horrible game either. He was also highly owned, so he hurt over a quarter of all teams entered into the tournament along with Keasy. The Wilson-to-Baldwin stack more than made up for the whiff on Rawls, as both were owned less than 3.3%, while scoring a combined 79.7 points.
Rawls and Kansas City were really the only “misses” for Keasy. They spent high for AP and ODB and got a pretty good return even though they were both highly owned. The differentiation came with Jarvis Landry, Julius Thomas, and Amari Cooper who all had great matchups and performed up to expectations.
If I had to guess, I’d say this team was built more around Peterson, Beckham, Landry, Thomas, and Cooper and then Kealy went on to figure out who they could fit into the other four roster spots for cheap.
FanDuel
Bigneo won on FanDuel with 4 of the same 9 players Keasy used to win; Wilson, AP, ODB Jr., and Baldwin.
The rest of Bigneo’s lineup was
RB2 – C. Ivory
WR3 – S. Watkins
TE1 – J. Reed
K – B. Walsh
D – Minnesota
With AP, I guess you could call that a Minn stack.
Working from the bottom up, Minnesota had a mediocre game against a flailing, injured Falcons squad and scored 12 points. Blair Walsh chipped in 8 points. If you’re not familiar with FanDuel, that’s not a great output from a Kicker.
Reed continues to be healthy, and when healthy, he’s a huge part of the Washington passing offense. It’s too bad Washington shut down their passing game at the half when they were up by 20 against the Giants because it almost came back to bite them in the rear.
Sammy Watkins flashed his brilliance for the second time this season. There’s no doubt that the guy has skills, it would just be nice if he could string a few nice games together.
Chris Ivory rounded out Bigneo’s lineup and got himself a ho-hum 17.2 points while the Jets mixed in a nice ground game due to them having a nice-sized lead against the Dolphins. (That big lead is actually what helped Jarvis have such a big day)
Happy Holidays,
J.A.G.
Great Reads To Explore
- This weeks Vegas NFL Lines
- Fan Duel vs DraftKings Basketball
- DFS Hockey 101
- Growing list of daily fantasy tools (lineup optimizers, projections etc)
- Play DFS without a salary cap at DraftPot. Review and promo code.