TJ's #Taek: Week 15 NFL DFS Recap

Week 15’s winning lineups from the biggest contests on FanDuel and DraftKings can be used to tease out lineup-building strategies and offer clues on how you could have landed on a similar team. Reviewing your hits and misses each week is imperative if you want to be a profitable DFS player but examining winning lineups is also a useful exercise in cultivating a winning approach.

DraftKings Week 15 Millionaire Winning Lineup

A week after we saw the most contrarian winning lineup of the year in the Millionaire, the chalkiest lineup of the season took down DraftKings’ biggest weekly contest—the roster included four of the five highest-owned players in the tournament. This lineup was a perfect example of how a low-owned stack can easily offset a highly-owned core. In most cases, the Buccaneers’ high-volume passing offense would have been very popular against the Lions’ suspect defense but Rbx88 leveraged Jameis Winston’s thumb injury and Mike Evans’s absence into the most important differentiator of the week. With Evans out for much of Week 14, Breshad Perriman was only targeted five times, third behind Chris Godwin and Justin Watson, but Perriman’s 14.9-yard average depth of target going into Week 15 indicated that he could be the boom play with Evans out. As it turned out, Perriman needed only six targets to do his damage on Sunday. Pat James highlighted Kenyan Drake as a contrarian play in his weekly column, noting Drake had accounted for a huge percentage of Arizona’s fantasy production when the Cardinals had been successful in recent weeks.

FanDuel Week 15 Sunday Million Winning Lineup

This lineup was one of the more contrarian lineups we have seen from a Sunday Million winner this season with seven players owned in fewer than 10% of lineups, the most in a winning lineup to date. It was only the second time in 2019 that all three wide receivers were in fewer than 10% of lineups but only the defense was in fewer than 5% of lineups. While this build is analogous to the Week 14 DraftKings winner, in terms of the number of low-owned players, an off-the-radar approach was necessary to counter a running back owned in nearly half of all lineups.

After Marvin Jones was put on Injured Reserve, many owners looked to Kenny Golladay against a poor Tampa Bay secondary but the fact that Danny Amendola had seen a 22% target share with David Blough under center flew under the radar. That number jumped to 32% against the Bucs. The tough matchup against San Francisco kept owners off of Julio Jones but without two defensive linemen and cornerback Richard Sherman, San Francisco’s pass defense looked vulnerable for the second week in a row. As the season winds down, it will be especially important to keep an eye on inactives rather than team strength of schedule, as teams out of the hunt may err on the side of caution with banged-up veterans.

TJ’s Final #Taek

With Week 17 mostly focused on which teams have something to play for and who will actually be active, this is the season’s final recap. While Week 16 isn’t as crazy as the year’s final regular-season slate, there will be plenty of situations to monitor throughout the week and there will certainly be some surprises come Sunday as it pertains to playing time. We already saw an example of that on Monday night with T.Y. Hilton’s pitch count. Especially in cash games, it will be important to remember that some players who have offered safe floors all season could suddenly cede touches to backups, especially on teams already eliminated from playoff contention. Keep this in mind when building lineups over the final weeks.