TJ's #Taek: Week 8 NFL DFS GPP Recap

Week 8’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.

More GPP Strategy: QB | RB | WR | TE | DEF

DraftKings Week 8 Millionaire Winning Lineup

Most Rostered Players

Week 8 was heavily determined by who landed on the right chalk. Four of the seven players on at least 20% of rosters failed to reach double-digit DK points while the two most popular players on the slate both eclipsed 30 points.

On the Joe Holka Show, I discussed Week 8’s ownership conundrum, with no players projecting for more than 30% ownership, a situation also highlighted in the Week 3 GPP review. The late-breaking Calvin Ridely news only made ownership projections more muddled. In a week with low ownership projections across the board, GPP players should have been more willing than usual to lean into the chalkier plays since there was less leverage in being contrarian than in weeks where there are players with ownership well over 30%.

In the Week 8 GPP Last Look show, Jordan Vanek and I explained that one of the best ways to be contrarian would be finding unique salary tiers. This week’s winning lineup did just that. The three most popular quarterbacks on the slate were $7,100 or more and the four most popular running backs were $6,500 or more. PiRez paid down, which led to an inherently exclusive roster construction.

This week’s winning lineup had an average ownership of 12.7%, the second-highest average of any winner this year. The most unique players in the lineup were running back Michael Carter and tight end Pat Friermuth.

In addition to being in an unpopular salary tier, Carter was playing against an offense that had four players with ownership above 10%. Without many heavily-rostered players on the slate, rostering a player opposite a team with so many players carrying above-average ownership is one of the ways to get heavy leverage on the field. Carter had seen his touch share steadily rise in recent weeks and was one of the few sub-$5K players with heavy touch upside, especially with a new quarterback.

Being contrarian at tight end made sense in a week where five of the seven tight ends in terms of fantasy points per game were off the main slate. With such a weak pool of players at the position, not much was needed as only seven tight ends exceed 10 DK points and just one topped 15 points with 18.9. Week 8 was just the second time this year where no tight ends on the main slate eclipsed 20 DK points.

For the sixth time in eight weeks, the Millionaire winner has used a wide receiver in the flex. This is a spot where roster construction can give players an edge on the field—top scorers are flexing wide receivers more than the field and the field is flexing tight end too much. Among top-10 Millionaire lineups this season, 63% have flexed a wide receiver and 9% have flexed a tight end compared to about 56% and 14% for the field.

FanDuel Week 8 Sunday Million Winning Lineup

This week’s Sunday Million winner didn’t have any players that jumped off the page in terms of low ownership besides Micael Carter but there were some trends that went against what we’ve seen from most top lineups on FanDuel this season.

This was by far the most popular quarterback to top a Sunday Million this season with every other quarterback in a winning lineup having a rostered rate under 13%. It was also the most expensive quarterback used in a winning lineup since Week 1.

Player correlation was used far less in this lineup than typical winners, with just four total correlated players. It was the third time that a winning roster used a running back with an opposing player in a secondary stack meaning that a bring-back with a running back has now been used in more winning lineups than a bring-back with the primary quarterback stack.

TJs Final #Taek

The idea of the bring-back option, or rostering players from both teams in the same game, is one that is heavily utilized but probably not well understood. Most DFS players that consider a bring-back do so by rostering a player—usually a pass-catcher—opposite their primary quarterback stack in hopes of a back-and-forth shootout or at least some garbage time heroics from the player going against the quarterback.

While this certainly has merit, it is a strategy that usually succeeds through volume more so than touchdowns, which might explain why the primary quarterback stack with a wide receiver on the other team has had more success on DraftKings than on FanDuel, where touchdowns and game flow often supersede volume.

This doesn’t mean that FanDuel players shouldn’t be considering bring-back options, though—they should just be looking for different scenarios. On Both FanDuel and DraftKings, one mini-correlation that has been prominent among top lineups is a running back with a player from another team, usually an opposing pass-catcher.

Consider league-wide correlation numbers from the games that we typically target the most for GPPs, potentially high-scoring games. Using the 4for4 DFS Correlation Tool, filtering for games with an over/under of at least 50 and teams that are favored by three or more on FanDuel, we see that running backs actually correlate more with the opposing passing game than quarterbacks.

When building GPP lineups, it’s important not to fall into lazy narratives trends that have been popular for the sake of being popular. One of those is the bring-back option. Every week is unique but, especially on FanDuel, GPP players might consider putting more emphasis on their mini-game stacks while sticking to one side of the ball in their primary quarterback stacks.