The Daily Spin – NFL Cash Game Focus – Week 13

As we enter the home stretch of the NFL season, I am feeling really good about where we are at this point in the season. After two solid wins last week with Thanksgiving and then Week 12, we continued another profitable season where grinding out cash games week after week has led to a steadily increasing bankroll for the 2018 NFL season. It is not always the most exciting way to play NFL DFS each year, but for me, it has proven to be a winning approach.

When I examine the style of player that I am in PGA or NFL, cash games have always been the best fit. Where Jeff is always looking out to the edges for that peripheral player that will be low owned to help take him over the top to maximize his ceiling each week, my focus has always been much more on exploiting value, examining and evaluating ownership trends and projecting specific amounts of touches and points for certain players all with the goal of pulling together a team that has a very specific point total target for the week.

That is not to say that I will not put together a few GPP rosters now and again just for the pure entertainment of targeting a massive payday, but I find that I am not as interested in building 100 rosters for NFL. It’s a little more tedious than PGA where I am not necessarily worried about specific player stacks or having the right balance on a roster when game stacking. To be one of the greats at massive, multi entry GPP contests, you really need to drill down deep and dig into every roster that you generate to make sure that it makes sense and maximizes upside while also being just contrarian enough in a couple of key spots in order to differentiate yourself from other competitors.

If I were to attack GPP contests with a larger bankroll next year, my thought would be to focus on bigger contests where I enter just a few lineups against smaller fields. Much like PGA, these contests do not require you to get all that wild with your builds each week. You can put together a modified cash lineup with a game stack focus requiring just a few small player swaps in order to maximize a potential point ceiling. The tradeoff here is that if this going to be the approach, it will require a bigger outlay of dollars during the season and they will be spread out over far fewer entries which means that results will be much more volatile than what I normally am comfortable with. I like being able to put $1000-2000 per week into cash games (filling single entry contests first) and knowing that I am going to end up with a $5-10k profit by the time I wrap up my play during the divisional round of the playoffs. To some, that’s not going to move the needle much. They want to take shots at the big GPP prizes that might pay them six figures. I cannot argue with that as each of us is looking for a different type of sweat each week while watching the games. My goal is slow, but steady profits and an attempt to use DFS as a vehicle where I can add to my bankroll at a regular, easy to calculate pace.

Going into Week 13, there have been a ton of shakeups, injuries and videos to work through in getting us to this point and as always, I am glad that I waited until early Saturday morning to grind out my article as Friday afternoon brought us perhaps the most jaw dropping news of the season when TMZ released a video showing Kareem Hunt in a hallway scuffle outside of his apartment  with a 19 year-old woman. Needless to say, his career with the Chiefs went from being a superstar on his way to a massive new contract in the next couple of years to unemployed and on the Commissioner’s Exempt list while the NFL finishes up its investigation, unable to continue his career until the NFL decides on how long they wish to suspend him. It’s just an all around sad development for all involved.

Of course, the fantasy implications should be immediately obvious to us this week. With early pricing, Spencer Ware is the MUST PLAY chalk of the week for cash games. At $4k and up against the Raiders, he is in line to get the bulk of the work this week and should see 15-20 touches between rushes and targets against a bad Oakland team. Do not get cute here. Take the free square being offered up for cash and roster Ware. He’s in position to score a lot of points as the lead back and he is going to be massively owned, probably at least 80% for cash games. If you skip out on him and he has a monster day, then that is a wrap on your hopes of winning for the week. Plus, the salary cap relief here is just enormous and allows us to do some really fun and creative roster builds that are rarely available to us in cash games.

Before I dive too deep into my article, I want to talk about something that I heard earlier this week in listening to some folks on SiriusXM discussing roster builds for cash games. The idea was that it was a huge mistake to ever play a QB/RB combo or a WR/RB or WR/TE combo stack in cash game. I am going to raise my hand here and kindly object to this stance. As with any question that someone asks when it comes the DFS, the answer is almost always: It depends

I would love to have hard and fast rules for every decision that I make each week, but I just don’t think that is a great way to operate in the world of DFS. It is too mechanical. It might be a good philosophy for someone just starting out to try to help them in building generally good habit patterns, but once you understand the game, hard and fast rules can be a trap that choke off obvious value. This week is one of those situations with a player like Spencer Ware. He’s $4,000 this week. What does he need to do to hit value for his price this week? How about 15 carries for 60 yards and 3 catches for 30 yards? Does that seem doable? And those don’t even account for what happens if he accidentally falls into the end zone at some point.

So tell me this, why would I not be able to play another Chief this week? Patrick Mahomes has not been under 20 points in ANY GAME THIS SEASON. Are you really telling me that I can’t play Ware and Mahomes because we are so terrified that Ware is going to put up 50 points and leave Mahomes with nothing? That’s nothing but foolishness. You have to play Ware this week and this should not mean that Mahomes is now unplayable in cash games. They actually pair perfectly together since I think Ware won’t quite have as much of a role as Hunt would have had which means that he’s likely to be close to the projections I posted and Mahomes will throw the ball a little more than we originally would have anticipated at the beginning of the week. Can Ware hit the piddly totals I posted above while Mahomes tosses the ball for 300 yards and 3 TDs? I think so. Much like investing, we do not have to stop investing in a sector just because we already own a stock there. Sometimes we have room for two stocks in the same sector.

Think of it the way we do every week when we’re going through the math while building our roster. If you want to play two players from the same team, figure out what each would need to do in order to satisfy the demands of their respective salaries. In a situation where one player is extremely low, it brings the overall total down to something that is very manageable. In this case, we are targeting 12 points for Ware and I have seen him projected for anywhere between 15-20 points this week. Now, if the Chiefs were not playing the Raiders this week, it would change the equation. However, even if Ware is a total bust and only posts 7 DK points, what do you think that means for Mahomes? Do you think that maybe he ends up with massive numbers if the run game does not do much? That seems likely to me. In this situation, since 80% or more owners will have Ware, you are not damaged at all by his poor effort, but very likely rewarded with the effort of Mahomes since many people are terrified of ever playing a QB/RB combo. The real question here is how likely are the Chiefs to go busto against the Raiders? It’s a little higher than it was yesterday as losing Hunt….forever…will be devastating personally to many players on the team, but it’s still a really juicy matchup so I am not going to tell you to back away. After all, these guys are not the Vikings.

It would also change things if you wanted to pair two expensive players on the same team like Tyreek Hill and Travis Kelce. Now, you have $16.1k of salary to account for and your target is 48.3 DK points. You either need them both to play really well or for one to have a super massive game to carry both players. In 11 games, they’ve missed that mark clearly in 6 of 11 games, been just a point or two under in two games and exceeded it just three times. There is plenty of merit to the argument that stacking like this in cash is the obvious wrong play when you are using two expensive players from the same team. You are not going to get away with using ODB/Barkley stacks very often so do avoid devoting huge chunks of your salary cap space to two skill players from the same team when they are BOTH on the expensive side. Just remember, when you fill a slot with a player that is so cheap and who is going to be wildly popular, that does not mean you need to automatically toss every other skill player to the side for the week just for the sake of diversification. Understand that like everything else in this world, NFL DFS requires a little nuance of thought.

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