Jeff’s Hardcore Core- NFL Week 10

Week 10 of the NFL season is upon us and we are coming down the home stretch already. We are starting to approach the “give up” time of the year for teams and players, but I will talk about that in the next couple of weeks. This week I want to talk about another crucial variable of being successful in DFS Football and that is flexibility and making sure you are on top of the injury report right up until all of your players kick-off. Last week was an extreme example of late breaking injury news, but every single week there are injuries that impact things in some way. At 11:30 eastern time it was announced that Leonard Fournette, Zach Ertz, and Jeremy Hill were both inactive, when they were each expected to be active up until that point. I did not have either of them in my core, but I did have sprinkles of Ertz and Fournette in those contests where I had many entries. However, even if you do not have those particular players,  these injuries impact you because it creates other opportunities. When these late injuries are announced, you need to think quickly. The biggest examples of this last week was with Fournette and Ertz. In Fournette’s case, it was expected that he was going to receive a massive workload against the Bengals at home with a positive game script. Once he was not going to play, we had to take a hard look at who was going to receive this massive volume in his absence. It was obvious to me at least that the beneficiary of the 20+ touches was going to fall on Chris Ivory. It was possible that T.J Yeldon played a role in the offense as well, but I figured Ivory would get the bulk of the carries, the goal line work, and is very capable of catching the ball out of the backfield.

The beauty of late breaking injuries is that not too many people are paying attention. If Fournette would have been ruled out on Thursday, Ivory’s ownership would have been around 10-15%. Instead we were able to get a bell cow back between 2-3% owned. The cherry on top was that he was only $4,400 and it freed up a ton of cap space to allocate elsewhere and upgrade other positions. As it turned out, Ivory got the volume that we predicted with 20 carries and 3 catches on 4 targets. Unfortunately he did not get into the box to make it a total smash, but he scored 13.3 Draftkings points, which was 3X on his price and not bad at all. Even if you did not have Fournette in your lineup you could have shifted from another higher priced back down to Ivory, saved some salary, and moved up to a guy like Baldwin or Julio Jones and it could have made a huge difference for you.

The other example is Zach Ertz being ruled out after coach Doug Pederson said he would play on Saturday. The Broncos are generally a good match-up for tight ends, because their cornerbacks shut down the receivers and opposing teams generally target the middle of the field on them. Travis Kelce had his way with the Broncos the week before. Once Ertz was out we had to see who was going to fill that role and presenting something called Trey Burton. Now Trey Burton is not going to make us forget about Ozzie Newsome, but it was a very plus match-up, he had targets in each of his last four games even when Ertz was playing, and his price tag was $2,500. I wasn’t willing to trot Burton out on 100% on my GPP lineups, but I was willing to mix in 20% exposure just in case he could deliver a decent performance at the bottom salary with not may other owners. As it turned out he didn’t get massive volume (2 catches on 4 targets for 41 yards), but he did spike a touchdown, which  delivered huge value (5X). Even if you did not have Ertz, this presented you a chance to pivot from a guy like Engram or Brate or Graham and save like $3,000 in cap space without sacrificing a ton of volume. An extra $3k to upgrade other positions last week would have been mammoth.

These are both wonderful examples of how we need to keep our eyes and ears open on Sunday morning and before the 4:00 games as well when the actives/inactives are announced, because even if it does not affect the players on our rosters, it might act as an opportunity for us to upgrade and when it happens late like last week, we will be far ahead of most everybody else.

Jeff’s Strategy & Hardcore Core- NFL Week 10

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