Jeff’s Hardcore Core- NFL Week 12
First of all, let me thank all of you that sent congratulatory texts, emails, and tweets that you sent to me. For those of you who have not heard, I was fortunate enough to qualify for the Fantasy Football World Championship on Draftkings this past weekend. Qualifying for the most prestigious live final in fantasy sports is amazing and exciting, but hearing from all of our followers, members, and friends is every bit as good as winning the qualifier itself. It is so great knowing that everybody in Team FGI has each others back and is always pulling for one another, just as any other great team does. 3 years ago this week, Zach and I started Fantasy Golf Insider and it is has been so cool to have such a loyal bunch of folks that we are rooting for every week and we know are rooting for us. I know how good it feels to have others acknowledge all of your hard work, which is why we always give shoutouts on our webcasts and shoot out congratulatory tweets when ever we see another member of Team FGI win. I love when I see the FGI logo at the top of the leaderboards. Zach and I are always texting back and forth about which members are doing well in what contests and let me tell you, we sweat alongside all of you.
Last week was an absolute roller coaster of emotions and I warn you that if you want to skip this story of mine, feel free. I discuss my process and the lineup that won the live final qualifier and have marked it down below. I personally hate bad beat stories. Back in my poker playing days, nothing would irritate me more than people coming up to me and walking me step by step through their poker hand, which every time they made sound like the worst beat in the history of poker. I am just as guilty as anyone of trying to get people to feel bad for me with these depressing stories of improbable defeat by sharing them, but I think I have heard every bad beat in the history of bad beats by now. That was your warning, now I proceed 😊
It started on Friday with golf as everybody and their brother was flirting with the cutline. Popular players like CHIII, Bill Haas, Jamie Lovemark, JT Poston, Ollie Schneiderjans etc, etc. all were going to miss the cut. I did however have a team in the $400 Pressure Putt contest on Draftkings that had the potential to get all 6 guys through the cut. Chris Kirk, Webb Simpson, Kevin Streelman, and Patton Kizzire were all easily through, it was just up to Stewart Cink and Beau Hossler to find a way to find a way to -3 or better. After completing his first seven holes, Cink was sitting at E with zero momentum. I thought at the beginning of the day, he would be able to make a solid run at making the cut considering he was playing the much easier Plantation course, but at this point I had pretty much written off his chances. He then birdied his 8th hole and birdied three of his next seven holes to get to -4, then just par 16,17,and 18 and he was good. Now it was Beau Hossler’s turn. He had pushed it to -4 by his 13th hole and I thought it was clear sailing as he still had a par 5 in front of him. To my dismay he double bogeyed the 14th hole which pushed him under the cutline. That was horrible, but at least we still have the par 5 14th. UGH, water ball, penalty, Why me? He escapes with par, but now he needs to birdie one of the final three holes. I am hopeful, but not very optimisitic. 16th hole-par, 17th hole he has a 15 footer for birdie-miss-par. I have needed a birdie from a guy on the 18th hole about 40 times this season and literally zero have come through for me, so you can guess how optimistic I am. I have to go pick up my kids from school, but have shotracker open on my phone and am concentrating on it much more than I am the road at this point. By now I can see that nobody in this entire contest is going to get 6/6 through the cut, so it would be clear sailing for me if Hossler can just find a way. As I am driving down County Road C, I see that he sticks his approach to 10 feet. As I turn onto Victoria street, shottracker updates and says that he has made the putt, birdied the hole, and will make the cut. I get a text immediately from Zach saying “HOSSLER BIRDIE”, “Boom”. As I pull into the school parking lot, I have a few minutes to spare before school lets out and I am scrolling through the rest of the teams in the Pressure Putt contest and only 1 other team has 6/6 through the cut and they are like 80 points behind me in 65th place, while I am sitting in 7th. Zach texts me again, “Dude, looking at the other teams around you and I don’t see another 6/6 team”. Then, “Ugh…man, it’s just too good”. I respond, “It will be second to Paul Casey”, referencing when we were burned by Casey’s withdrawal at the Fantasy Golf World Championship. At this point, it would take a withdrawal for me to finish outside of the top couple of spots.
Usually I am a bit pissy after the cut on Friday night, but that night I felt pretty good. For those of you that know me though, I am always thinking of things that will go wrong, not sure why, I have always been like that and it is not a fun characteristic. After a restless night I wake up in the morning, eat breakfast with the kids and decide to open up the PGA app as play will be getting started momentarily. I have starred my six players, so they are all at the top of the list on the app. As it slowly opens, I see the two letters that were the only thing that stood between me and the $20,000 top prize, WD next to Webb Simpson. Despite the fact that I expect shit like this to happen all the time, you would think it would be more tolerable, but no, it feels like a dagger to my chest every single time it happens. After repeated attempts by my kids to try and snap me out of the haze I have just fell in, I naturally text Zach saying, “you just cannot make this stuff up”. I am an odds person, and percentages guy and as I sit in my chair, I cannot figure out what the odds of this happening could possible be. Its not even like we are talking about a guy like Danny Lee or Sii Woo Kim, Webb Simpson has not withdrawn from an event since 2009. I was as upset as I have been in quite a while. That afternoon I read on Webb Simpson’s Twitter page that he chose to withdraw due to the fact that his father was really sick and living out his last days. Having lost my father roughly a year ago, I immediately related to the pain that Simpson was in and yet again it forced me to put things in perspective.
Sunday rolls around and despite the fact that Webb Simpson has not accumulated any points, I am still in the running. I am in 5th place and everybody in front of me has Austin Cook and I have Chris Kirk. If Kirk wins, I win. As Kizzire posts two birdies in a row as does Hossler, and Kirk pulls within 1 stroke of the lead with a birdie of his own, I pull into first place. From that point on however, everything else went to shit. Kirk fell back, Cook stormed to victory, and I dropped to 9th place. Perfect.
I tune away from golf a bit disgruntled although I did have an outright on Cook for $30 at 85/1. As you all know, I have been on Cook every week he has played this fall and placed an outright on him for when (not if) he was going to win. So, its not $20k, but $2,500 isn’t anything to sneeze at. As I switch on the Patriot/Raider game I see that I have a couple teams in the Fantasy Football World Championship qualifier that are in the mix. Keenan Allen is going crazy and although I did not have him in my core, I did mix him in to a few teams as a tertiary player, and mostly due to the fact that Sterling Shepard was ruled out and I was doing a ton of last minute swapping. I am about 11 points out of first and everybody in front of me has Keenan Allen, but I have Branden Cooks, so I would need a bomb for a td from him. As my kids are tearing up my mom’s house because we had come over for dinner, Cooks catches a bomb for a td pushing me into 1st place. I open the app and think, here we go, but I notice a guy right behind me has Tom Brady as well as Dion Lewis and Amari Cooper. So now all of a sudden I don’t want Cooks to score anymore, because that guy will gain on me and eventually overtake me with Brady and offset Cooks, plus I cannot have Lewis accumulate points as they run the ball or Cooper to get a bunch of garbage time points. It really is crazy how many variables come into play.
I lead him by about 11 points, so I think there is some room for me and at that moment Cooper catches a touchdown pass, pulling him within 4 points and there is still like six minutes left in the game. The Pats now have the ball and why in the HELL is Brady still in and throwing the ball? If he throws one pass to Lewis I am done and for sure dead if the Raiders get the ball back, because the Pats will be playing more prevent defense allowing easy points for Cooper. The Pats get stopped and the Raiders get the ball back with several minutes left and of course Cooper is still in the game even though they have no chance to win. I see he is on the top of the screen and running a fly pattern and for some reason the Patriots defender stops, leaving Cooper racing wide open for an easy catch, but Derek Carr’s pass was wide and although Cooper caught it, he stepped out of bounds. I thought that was it, that was how I lose it, in the most heartbreaking, unbelievable, garbage time fashion, but not this time. I catch a break and the Raiders turn the ball over and the best site to see when you are winning a GPP, the zero under minutes remaining appears..
The week started great, went to shit, and then got great again all within a three-day span. It is a crazy game we play, this DFS, it brings you to the highest of highs and the lowest of lows.
So, what did I do to win the FFWC live final seat?
Roster: Brees, Duke Johnson, Alvin Kamara, Keenan Allen, Jamison Crowder, Fitzgerald, Vernon Davis, Brandin Cooks, and Chargers Defense. Total Points = 214.3
The past two weeks I had decided to build 100 lineups and enter them into the $5 FFWC qualifier which had approximately 17,000 entries and a max enter of 150 lineups. Using the core that I build and share with Team FGI every week and our NFL lineup generator, I have built several teams that have been really close to having a shot at winning the past two weeks. One player off on the lineups, negative game script, etc have caused those teams to come close, but not win.
I did the same thing this week, build a core of 34 players and about 20 other tertiary players. The amount of tertiary players is a little bit higher than I normally have for 100 lineups, but Sterling Shepard, who I had in about 60% of my lineups was ruled out on Sunday right before the games and I had to pivot off of him all over the place. I did not feel as confident in any one player as I had in Shepard, so I chose to diversity the now vacant ownership. It also forced me to have to switch up a couple of other positions as well as I downgraded from Shepard in several spots, which left me some extra cap space to upgrade elsewhere. The other thing that forced me to do some last minute switching was the concern about weather in Cleveland and New York. I had a lot of Chiefs and Giants, including Alex Smith that I become concerned about with wind gusts expecting to approach 30 miles an hour.
I discussed last minute moves and their importance a couple weeks ago in my column when Zach Ertz and Leonard Fournette were last minute scratches. I hear a lot of people say that tinkering with their lineups is always a bad thing, but I disagree, especially in football. I certainly have shot myself in the foot several times by late tinkering, but between injuries and weather, I think it presents us who are on the ball an opportunity to gain a huge edge over others and edges are very tough to come by these days in DFS.
The guys who I felt strongest about and had the most exposure to on Sunday were Larry Fitzgerald, Brandin Cooks, Melvin Gordon, Alvin Kamara, Vernon Davis, and the Chargers defense all of which I ended up with at least 40% exposure. Keenan Allen had basically done nothing since week four, but he was only $5,900, has upside, and was playing against a Bills team that I thought would quit given the qb switch from Tyrod Taylor. This is the reason I had a ton of exposure to Melvin Gordon. When Shepard was ruled out, I was forced to give more exposure to tertiary guys and Keenan Allen was one of them.
Drew Brees was one of the few guys on this team that I did not have in my core and the only quarterback I rostered outside of my core. Like I mentioned before as I was switching around lineups during pregame, I wanted to reduce my exposure to Alex Smith and I had a little bit of cap room on a handful of teams so I upgraded to Brees, in fear the KC game would become an offensive dud, as it did. In retrospect I should have also reduced my exposure in Hunt, although I felt the wind would be more incentive to run the ball for the Chiefs, but Andy Reid continues to be a poor coach in my opinion and can’t figure out that all he needs to do is get Hunt the ball in space.
Jamison Crowder was a tertiary player who I mixed into some of my lineups, although he did not put up amazing output.
I felt like Duke Johnson would be the beneficiary of a ton of short receptions because of the wind in Cleveland, plus a game script that called for the Browns to be behind and passing the ball in garbage time. Bingo!
Vernon Davis was a real dog, but I am not too surprised because I cannot pick tight ends to save my soul. The Chargers defense were a lock for me on 60% of my teams. I like the idea of a rookie quarterback in his first NFL game playing on a team that was going to quit on their coach, but I had no idea things would be that good, 5 interceptions in the first half!
I want to address the idea of building a core and it’s importance, not just for DFS football, but for all DFS. I hear people say, “well you built 100 lineups, of course you won.” Those people who say that are stupid. Of course you have a better chance with 100 teams than you have with 1, but if it were a certainty that you could win contests by entering a certain amount of teams, than I am uncertain as to why folks wouldn’t always enter that number of teams and be on an island sipping fruity drinks with umbrellas in them. It is because entering any amount of teams does not guarantee you victory. Building a core of players and building multiple teams is a very effective strategy for winning GPPs, which is why I share my core in golf and football with you every week. Does it guarantee that you will win? Do I need to answer that? But what it does do is give us multiple chances with many different lineups, if our core players go off. In the qualifier I had 15% of my teams finish in the top 800 out of 17,000+, so clearly my core hit. My teams with Fitzgerald, Cooks, Kamara, Chargers, and Duke all had a mixture of a few other guys and multiple chances to have a chance and it just so happened on this day. This is why I always advise people to build many teams. If this means dropping down in stakes then that is what you need to do. For instance if your weekly bankroll is $20, I would recommend entering 20 teams built with a tight core in a $1 contest, than one team in a $20 contest. I believe this is the best way to utilize your knowledge and edge on the field. Picking 1 perfect team is very very difficult.
GPPs and especially these qualifiers are tough in general. When first is the $66,000 live final seat is 1st place and 2nd out of 17,000 is $500, it is not for sane people. I always say that if I finish 2nd in the millionaire maker and win $100,000 it would be the worst $100,000 I ever won, as sick as that sounds. Hopefully walking you through my team and thoughts behind my core is helpful. If you ever have any questions, don’t hesitate to send me an email as I am always willing to help out everybody in Team FGI.
Best of luck this week my friends!
Jeff’s Strategy & Hardcore Core- NFL Week 12
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