David’s Week 5 FanDuel Lineups: Choosing Chiefs + Chargers

October 9, 2015 - by David Hess

Week 4 was a slightly negative week for my lineups, making it my third losing week out of 4 this season. However, I’m still up overall thanks to a great Week 3.

For the tournament lineups, that’s somewhat unsurprising. Playing in large tournaments is a riskier proposition, and the general pattern for those should be lots of small losses offset by a few bigger wins.

For my 50/50 lineups, however, this pattern is a bit more disappointing, since the goal there is to end up moderately positive most weeks.

New Lineup Research Sources

Four weeks isn’t a very big sample, so I’m not overly worried yet. But it did spur me to do a bit more digging online this week, looking for new info to help me construct my lineups.

I found two interesting resources:

Positional scoring correlation data. A Reddit user tabulated some data on the scoring correlation between every position (both on the same team, and on opposing teams). The main takeaways here for me were that kicker is fairly strongly correlated with every other position except tight end (including with defense), and that opposing running backs showed much less of a negative correlation than expected (to the point where I may abandon my choose-opposing-backs strategy).
Weekly projection tier clusters. A blog called “data, math, etc.” is scraping Fantasypros.com and then charting the distribution of weekly projections for each player. This makes it easy to see at a glance what the consensus rankings are for each roster position. Because this doesn’t take salary into account, it’s not extremely useful for positions with many players and widely varying salaries. However, I did use it this week to help with my defense and kicker selections.

Hopefully some of you find those links useful.

Week 4 Results Recap

Initial 2015 NFL Bankroll: $1,000.00
Bankroll Entering Week 3: $1,114.70 (+11.5%)

Head to Head & 50/50 Entry Fees: $170 (15.3% of bankroll)
Head to Head & 50/50 Net Winnings: -$11.40 (-7% ROI)
Tournament Entry Fees: $65 (5.8% of bankroll)
Tournament Net Winnings: -$27.50 (-42% ROI)

Total Entry Fees: $235 (21.1% of bankroll)
Total Net Winnings: -$38.90 (-17% ROI / -3.5% of bankroll)

Bankroll Entering Week 5: $1,075.80 (+7.6% for the season)

What worked:

A last-minute Matt Hasselback mini-stack. Sunday morning, after Andrew Luck was declared out, I whipped together a quick value stack on his backup-turned-starter, Matt Hasselback. Seth paired Hasselback with Donte Moncrief in a lineup he put together, so I switched it up and paired him with T.Y. Hilton. Together they produced slightly more than 2 points per $1,000. That’s usually not great for a tournament lineup, but in last week’s low-scoring environment, it was actually above the efficiency needed to cash.
Devonta Freeman (RB) … again. Even though he was on my short list of good plays, I only ended up using him in one lineup. That’s too bad, as he scored 3 TD’s for the second week in a row. The lineup I used him in cashed in both tournaments I entered, though the net winnings were only $12.50.
Martellus Bennett (TE). Tight ends continued to torch the Raiders in Week 4, with Bennett racking up 19.8 points on a $5,500 salary (3.6x).

What didn’t work:

“one of the weirder stacks you’ll see”. Remember when I said that about my Dallas stack last week? Yeah, well … I shouldn’t have tried to be so cute. The stack itself only produced 27.44 points on $18,000 (1.5x).
Seemingly … everything. Last week was a low-scoring week all-around. Not only for my lineups, but for lineups across FanDuel. The 1st place lineup in the $2 Million Sunday NFL Rush only scored 186.86 points.

Week 5 Lineups

Head-to-Head & 50/50s

As a quick reminder, the original strategy here was to be willing to pay for volume points at QB & RB, even at the expense of a little bit of value. (However, in reviewing my plays for this week and over the past few weeks, it seems I’ve relaxed the “volume QB” requirement a little. I’ll have to get back on that horse next week.)

In addition, I said I wanted to pick RB’s on opposing teams if possible, and to avoid choosing several players from the same team, in order to reduce correlated performances (and by extension, variance). However, the positional scoring data I linked to in the intro has me re-thinking these requirements a bit. At the very least, I’m going to relax my guideline about picking opposing running backs.

Aside from the recent changes, you can read more background about my current strategy if you’d like.

Here’s my primary lineup for Week 4:

Some notes on this lineup:

In what I doubt is a coincidence, the consensus top values that I came up with at QB, WR, and K were all from the Chiefs and Chargers. In splitting them over my two head-to-head lineups, I decided to split up the QB & WR from each team, since those are the two most highly correlated positions among that trio.
Rivers was the clear consensus best value at QB between RotoWire and numberFire, and Bell was projected as both the top scorer and the best value by both sites. So I’m passing the buck to them if those guys tank. 🙂
Reviewing this lineup as I write the post, it looks kind of like I’m chasing after last week’s heroes with Devonta Freeman (3TD’s) and Cairo Santos (7 FG’s). I may try to look into whether RotoWire or numberFire tend to over- or under-weight the previous week performance relative to FanDuel salaries.

Here’s my secondary lineup:

A note on this lineup:

Owen Daniels was not actually projected as a good play by RotoWire, so ordinarily I’d leave him out. But I want to ride this TE-playing-the-Raiders train until it derails.
I said above I was relaxing the opposing-running-backs guideline. But I figured as long as I already wanted to use both Charles and Forte, I might as well put them in the same lineup.

Tournament Lineups

As was the case last week, my first step this week was to come up with some single-team stacks that seem to have the potential for a big day. Some of these stacks were based on fantasy-points-allowed to each position numbers from this season (using RotoGuru as my source), and others were keyed on a particular player or two who were well-projected by consensus sources.

Here’s what I ended up with:

Chicago — Jay Cutler (QB), Marquess Wilson (WR), Martellus Bennett (TE). This afternoon it was reported that Alshon Jeffery (WR) missed Friday’s practice, after having only limited action Wednesday and Thursday. It seems he’ll likely miss this weekend’s game against the Chiefs. In addition, Eddie Royal missed practice all this week. This seems to leave Marquess Wilson as the top wide receiver target, in a game the Bears are big underdogs in, meaning they’ll likely be playing from behind and passing more. Bennett already leads the Bears in targets, and Wilson seems to be the obvious choice to have an increased role this week. I also considered taking Matt Forte here instead of Wilson, but it seemed the Jeffery/Royal news makes it worth taking a gamble on Wilson to substantially outplay his $4,800 salary. On top of all that, the Chiefs have allowed the most FanDuel points to wide receivers of any team this season. Yes, that’s influenced by facing Denver, Green Bay, and Cincinnati. But they also allowed 53 points to Houston’s WR corps.
San Diego — Philip Rivers (QB), Keenan Allen (WR), Antonio Gates (TE). Keenan Allen kept showing up in my research as great value WR. And Antonio Gates at only $5,500 has the potential to be a great bargain; his salary last year ranged from a high of $7,100 to a low of $5,500.
New England — Tom Brady (QB), Julian Edelman (WR), Rob Gronkowski (TE). Tom Brady was the consensus top QB this week according the FantasyPros tiers I linked in the intro to this post. And Gronk got to sit around and play video games for a week, so he’ll be refreshed and anxious to score a couple touchdowns.
Kansas City — Alex Smith (QB), Jeremy Maclin (WR), Travis Kelce (TE). The Bears’ pass defense has done poorly on a per-play basis against wide receivers and tight ends, but has fared better against pass catching running backs. The main worry here is that Jamaal Charles gobbles up the TDs, but I figure Charles will be the most popular Chief, so I stayed away.
Washington — Kirk Cousins (QB), Chris Thompson (RB), Pierre Garcon (WR). Tight end Jordan Reed (second on the team in targets, 1 behind Pierre Garcon) is out with a concussion. This should mean more touches for the running backs, and also some targets redistributed to other players. Chris Thompson’s role in the running game seems to be trending up, and he’s been targeted nearly as many times as WR’s Crowder and Grant. In addition, Washington is likely to be playing from behind against the Falcons.
Denver — Peyton Manning (QB), Owen Daniels (TE), Brandon McManus (K). I’m swear I’m not explicitly trying to out-weird last week’s Dallas stack. I just wanted to get Owen Daniels stacked with his QB (some guy named Peyton Manning). And despite Oakland’s terrible tight end defense, they’ve allowed very few FanDuel points to wide receivers this year, so I passed on the high salaries of WR’s Thomas and Sanders.

Filling in around the stacks with solid consensus values, here’s the result (click to enlarge):

As I did last week, I’ll be entering these lineups in a FanDuel Sunday Million tournament, as well as a smaller 100-person or 250-person tournament. The idea is that if they do astronomically well, I’ll be rewarded for that in the Sunday Million, but if they just score in the top 1% or so, I’ll get a better return in the 100-person tournament.

The most likely outcome for any specific tournament lineup is that I win nothing, but with 6 stacks, hopefully at least one will still do well enough to recoup my buy-ins, and let me tread water while I wait for a big payout. That strategy worked to perfection in Week 3.

Tune in next week for the results!