The Daily Spin – NFL Cash Game Focus – Week 7

The weeks just keep flying by this NFL season as they always do and I am feeling good going into Week 7 after a big week last week where just about everything went right for me in cash games and I was just a player or two away from really doing some big things in the Millionaire Maker, which was again won with a backup QB on the cheap getting paired with a very cheap, punt play at WR which opened up the world for the newest millionaire. While this sounds like somewhat lucky, and let’s face it, anytime you win a GPP on that scale it requires some luck, there is a method to the madness that is applicable when we go about building our cash game rosters as well.

Each week, when we approach our cash games, we should be doing it with a particular strategy in mind. I rarely show up to build my teams just trying to fit random pieces together. You want to avoid situations where you build most of your team, but then find yourself trying to justify two or three players in the last couple of open roster slots simply because their salary works for what you need. This happens a lot when you put together your PGA lineups as well, maybe even more often. You will put together a great cash game roster of five players, but then find that you have backed yourself into a corner for the last golfer as you do not have the funds available to get a sixth that you had originally targeted. The temptation here is to start looking at names you had ruled out before, but now, come back to for salary purposes alone. In golf, this can be a cash game killer given that you only have six players and losing some to the cut is obviously much more difficult to overcome than a mediocre performance in NFL on a nine player roster.

With this in mind, before I ever build a single team, I always make my player pool first. Of course, there are usually 3-4 positions where I know that I definitely want to use a specific name, but when I go about working on the rest of the team, I want to structure it so that I am at least working with the right puzzle pieces to bring me victory at the end of the week. When you take this step, what you will find is that in assembling your cash game teams, you will naturally find ways not to complicate the picture for yourself. If you have $16,000 to spend on your last three players, you are probably not going to stray to the high end of paying $9k for a top RB knowing that you do not have two $3,500 players among your pool to make a move like that work out. However, if you don’t approach these situations with some type of plan, it becomes very tempting to scroll to the bottom of the Flex position page to start seeing if there are a couple of cheap players that could possibly make sense and pretty soon, you will have talked yourself into a couple of names that barely touch the ball all day.

I will say that the process each week does have some amount of flexibility to it. I never go in with the thought that every position will play out the same way each week, but you will start to notice certain patterns over time. Up top at QB, you will notice that the pricing is generally not very restrictive. On DK, you never really see a large gap in salary between the top guy on the board and the value names at the bottom. At most, this range tends to run between around $4800-7000 for the position with the only outliers being on the low end when a surprise starter is named. When you look at the QB position, you obviously want to evaluate matchups and game flow, but you should usually try to be careful with how much you spend here.

With QBs where the prices are in a tighter range, generally the only time to pay up is when the highest priced player is a near sure thing not just for a great game, but for a monster game, something close to a 30 point effort. In looking at our 3x-3.5x rule for players and with the increase in scoring and more scoring friendly rules, there just are not a lot of QBs going busto from week to week, at least not many that are worthy of consideration. With the QB position, this is the one spot where our guy is going to start just about every play with the ball in his hands. If we know the style of offense each team runs and how well the opposing team defends against certain things, we can very easily start to project points for any QB. Since the best players at the other positions tend to be much higher priced than an average player in those groups, it makes a lot more sense to budget your funds at QB where the differences in output are not usually nearly as significant as they are at RB or WR.

When I am selecting my RBs each week, the first thing I try to do is to find my favorite play at the position and plug them in. Right now, that play each week has generally been Todd Gurley, but each year it is different. At RB, there are very few locks on the board from week to week. Most teams do not have a dynamic talent at the position and as the league continues to shift more and more towards the passing game, many teams run a platoon of sorts at the position where two or three players are always in the mix for touches. I want to find the teams where the top back is a three down player who rarely comes off the field for a break and who is guaranteed 20 plus opportunities per game via carries and targets. The list of names who qualify here is very short.

Of course, at the RB position, some of our best opportunities come through injuries that get reported on throughout the week, or in the case of the Browns this week, a trade. This happens every season and is something to be alert to during the week before building your rosters. This is the reason why I would ever hesitate to start building teams until at least Saturday afternoon once the final injury reports are issued and players get ruled out. What we are hoping for is to find a cheap backup that is now going to be a lead back for a team. QBs are the easiest to gauge when trying to determine a stat line, but a starting RB is the next easiest to figure out. If you know the way a team schemes and how they operate the offense, you can assess the value of a backup taking over a starting role very quickly. James Conner of the Steelers in Week 1 was a great example of what we are looking for in a backup taking over a starting spot. We knew the Steelers tend to utilize a three down back approach and that Conner was capable of being a pass catching back. When you can find that situation where you have a backup that will get close to 20 touches, it almost doesn’t even matter how good of a player he is or the matchup (almost), the volume alone is usually enough to get them the points they need to meet value for the week.

The WR position is a little bit different than the RB position in that catches are slightly more difficult to project than carries and even the star wideouts tend to be more volatile than most starting RBs. Think of a player like Julio Jones from week to week. He is almost always going to be on the radar as a WR to target most weeks unless he has a lockdown CB on him, in which case he might only be a GPP option. Some weeks, he is going to score 30 points, other weeks, maybe 13. We’re obviously going to try to target him more in the best situations, but with receivers, there is very rarely a player that we will automatically target every single week regardless of the matchup the way that we would a top back like Gurley this year or Leveon Bell in previous seasons. Antonio Brown has been about as close as anyone has ever come at the position, but even then, there were still weeks where I preferred to pay up at RB instead.

The situation also pops up routinely where a top WR is ruled out due to injuries each week. This is a much different situation to evaluate when looking at the backup. Typically, teams utilize a sort of priority among their receivers each week where the top guy might get 25-30% of the targets and then that number gradually declines as you progress to the second, third, fourth and fifth options. Most of the time, when a backup replaces the number one WR for a team, he does not simply assume the same target share as that player. Rather, in most cases, he slides back to being the third or fourth option which means that we need to do some additional evaluation. Are we dealing with multiple injuries to players on offense? Does his team normally pass the ball more often than not due to scheme or necessity? Is the specific game expected to be high scoring? Does the defense have injuries in the secondary that would make the matchup even more appealing? The last thing you want to do is to assume a certain role and target share based solely on the starter in these situations at WR. You will find players that you can pay down for, but it is not quite as easy as it is for RBs.

The TE position is always a tricky one to deal with. Right now, there is rarely a player here worth paying up for from week to week. Gronk has been that rare player in the past, but he’s become more of a role player this season as the Pats have evolved into a team that is able to run the ball more and also has a decent group of receivers with the acquisition of Josh Gordon, the return of Julian Edelman and a couple of others they mix in. It’s no longer all that affordable to pay $7k for Gronk on a cash lineup if he is posting 5 catches for 70 yards and not getting into the end zone routinely. Travis Kelce is a nice option from time to time in cash, but again, the Chiefs have a number weapons on offense and are not locked into having to go to Kelce consistently to move the chains, especially with the emergence of a downfield passing game under Patrick Mahomes.

Almost every week, I am looking at two things at the tight end position. The first thing I want to see is that the player I am using is the clear first option for his team. It is bad enough to have a running back by committee situation, but even worse when it is a TE share scenario. It makes it tough to judge who is going to be the guy in a given week, even when the matchup is solid. This naturally leads to the second area that I look at which is, which defenses are the worst at covering tight ends during the year? It sounds simple, but this is the most effective way to choose a TE most weeks. We are looking for teams that are sloppy at the LB and safety positions in the middle of the field, but we also want to make sure that the offensive team is also capable of exploiting this weakness. It does not do us any good to target a TE with a great matchup if he averages two targets per week.

Finally, on defense, it’s position where people are prone to making mistakes in order to make the rest of their roster work. I always want to try to get the best matchup possible here if I can make it work. I prefer to get the home team when I can, but will go for the right road team if the situation looks good. We want to find defenses that are able to pressure the QB consistently. That is about all that we an control most of the time. If a front seven can keep the opposing QB off balance, it will usually lead to mistakes, which will lead to sacks, turnovers and hopefully defensive scores. The weather is also something worth factoring in as when conditions outside deteriorate and the winds and snow or rain pick up, it naturally slows the pace of the game down by forcing teams to run more often to move the ball.

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