Jeff’s Hardcore Core- NFL Week 16

The best way I can describe week 15 is a minefield. The least amount of booby traps you were able to step on with core players, the better chance you had of succeeding. Fortunately, I was able to dodge many of them, but certainly not all. Many of the chalkiest players throughout DFS went belly-up causing the payline to be much lower than usual. Be sure to keep that in mind when you are tracking your teams on Sundays. You might not be absolutely killing it early on, but you also have to consider what other players outside of your core are doing. If guys like Eric Ebron, Ju Ju Smith-Schuster, Rob Gronkowski, Leonard Fournette, Saquon Barkley, the Jags defense, etc are all crapping the bed, most of the field has hit a grenade as well. We will go in-depth about week 16 and talk strategy and core players, as we always do, but first let’s talk about my good and bad calls from last week.

What went right? Here is my quote from last week regarding Dalvin Cook- “One of my favorite plays at runningback the last few weeks because of his price and ownership has been Dalvin Cook and he is on nobody’s radar”. For this reason he become the player I had highest exposure to last week. Unfortunately, he didn’t turn out to be very under the radar (20-25% in GPPs), but still I was glad to have him as he went off against a Miami defense that I have been talking about targeting with runningbacks ad nauseam all season. With the price point I also had a ton of Joe Mixon as he was the Bengals main weapon against the Raiders.  In the same game Tyler Boyd was on pace to have a really nice game as he caught a touchdown early, but left midway through the game and couldn’t keep adding to his 13.8 points in the first half.

I talked about playing a lot more Thursday-Monday slates last week than I normally do, because I liked a ton of guys available, especially in the Thursday game. Damien Williams was obviously a monster with 30 DK points, but Justin Jackson posted 17.5 and Rivers had 23. Most of my rosters had the Jags defense, which turned out being lesser owned than I anticipated. Although they did not produce the 15 points that I was expecting they still got 10 points, which is far from a disaster for a defense.

What went wrong? Patrick Mahomes hit about his floor of 18 DK points last week as Damian Williams snagged a couple scores from him. The Patriots/Steelers game, which I was high on turned out to be a bust. Brady, Edelman, Smith Schuster, and James White all badly under performed and took down those rosters in which I had stacked that game. T.Y Hilton had been tremendous and especially at home but he put up a clunker. The tight end position continues to be the abyss and Vernon Davis and CJ Uzomah were awful. The only consolation is we faded Eric Ebron and rather than getting squat for $5,900 we got squat for $3,500.

A couple of items to note for the last couple regular season weeks. 1. Be aware of the teams that have nothing to play for. I talked about this a few weeks ago how some teams just mail it in the end of the season if they are out of it. If a guy is dinged up and on a team that has nothing to play for, be careful. Leonard Fournette is a great example of that last week. Rather than continue to feed him the ball, they went to alternatives like rookie David Williams. Keep in mind this can also come into play for teams that will be in the playoffs and want to make sure their top players are healthy going into them. We see this particularly in week 17 if teams cannot improve their playoff position even with a win. Weeks 16 and 17 can be very good for those of us who follow very carefully what is going on.

Good luck this week Team FGI!

Jeff’s Strategy & Core- NFL Week 16
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