The Daily Spin – NFL Cash Game Focus – Week 9

As we pass the halfway point, I have been rotating back and forth between wins and losses for my personal cash game teams this season. Last week was another nice win as my team started off well and then hung on through the final minutes of play at the end of the day. It’s been an interesting year in the way that cash games have change since we first started playing back in 2014. It’s incredible just how many details are now readily available to us as players that just a few years ago, you really had to pay lose attention to take advantage of for your teams.

I remember at the beginning of the season on opening Sunday in 2015 that the starting RB for the Rams was going to be out for the game, I think it was Tre Mason at the time. Bennie Cunningham was the backup that day and was min priced that week. I did not think anything of it. In fact, I don’t even think I knew about it until the game had already started and I caught it as the game was going against the Seahawks. I remember looking at my cash game team that day and then looking around at a handful of teams and noticing that Cunningham was on around 20-25% of teams that day. I thought to myself, why would anyone want to start him against the Seahawks? These guys must be crazy. Well, Bennie rushed 16 times for 45 yards and caught 4 passes for 77 yards for a total of 16.2 fantasy points for the week. In my head that day, I remember thinking that the guys that did that were really just lucky. How could they have played this mediocre player against a team who, at the time, was known for having one of the better defenses in the league?

Of course now, a situation like the one I mentioned above is not just common, but almost a weekly occurrence. Think of the way the game has changed just over the last three years. We track injuries more closely in the NFL now than ever before. As a Vikings fan, my team has battled injuries all season long so each week, starting on Wednesday, I start to check the injury report. In that report, we see which players are injured, what the injury is that they are dealing with and how limited they were in practice. This continues on Thursday and then Friday. By Friday, teams give an official assessment of where players stand for the week by placing an injury designation on the players who began the week on the injury list.

Typically, you will know by Friday who is in and who is out. There are still some players that receive the ‘Questionable’ designation, but generally, with a minimal amount of research, we can get a pretty good sense of who is going to play or sit. By Sunday morning, teams playing in the early games announce who is in or out 90 minutes before the kickoff. On ESPN, they list everyone who is officially inactive for those teams that day. This was not always the way things worked for fantasy owners. Many times, we just had to make an educated guess years ago and hope that our instincts were correct. Now everyone has updated information on players and also knows well ahead of time the implication for a starter being out for the week.

By Wednesday, there are clear value plays that have to be considered and by the end of the week, we have a very strong indication of how that player will be deployed as a backup. Not only do we know about these plays, but just by checking the pulse of the industry, we can get a sense of just how heavily owned many of these players will be each week. By Sunday, when lineups are locked, it’s no longer a situation like we had a few years ago with Cunningham where ownership numbers might be 25% for a min priced starting RB, it could be as high as 70-80% the way it was just a couple of weeks ago for Nick Chubb after the Browns traded away Carlos Hyde.

What does this mean for us as fantasy owners moving ahead? Obviously, with information so readily available, we can no longer afford to be too casual in our approach if we are trying to approach this as a money making venture. Playing the cheap RB in cash is fine, along with then paying up for the pricey RB, but this tightens down the number of positions where we actually have some discretion each week. Where rosters were once wide open in cash games and you could get a little creative, that is not the case in many of the contests that we will be playing. This is why it is so important to get your spots in single entry locked into place ahead of time. If you are scurrying around on Sunday morning looking for cash games, these options will be full and you will be up against the multi-entry giants of the game, further squeezing any remaining edge.

We also need to make sure that we are not getting careless in our process each week. Here are few key pointers to think about as you do a final roster check each week:

1. Generally, we would rather use players at home than on the road
2. Same rule applies to defenses, even though there will be situations (this week) where it is okay to play a road defense if they are particularly strong and going against a backup who is particularly bad. Even in this situation, you should never feel like it is anything near a lock as was the case with the Bears taking on Brock Osweiller in Miami. Oakland also probably thought they were in an exploitable situation against the 49ers this week, but obviously that did not work out at all either.
3. WR vs CB – this is imperfect, but we want to start with WRs on teams that are facing teams who are poor DVOA against the pass and then work down towards the individual matchups. Just because a player has an elite one on one matchup, does not necessarily mean he is in play. It does not matter how good of a matchup we have if the player we are looking at does not get targeted that often.
4. Are the RBs we are using going to get enough volume to create value for their price? Again we consult the team vs team matchup to see if we have an exploitable situation, but we need to account for backfields that split touches and in particular, split the passing game from the running game.
5. Did I miss any key injuries this week? You have to know who is injured or who will potentially miss time each week. There are going to be 2-3 low dollar plays out there that the majority of the field will be on for the week. If you miss any of these plays, it could mean missing out on unlocking some huge value at other roster spots.
6. Do the players I have selected fit well into the potential flow of each game? For example, did I select WRs who will be involved the entire game and targeted throughout or did I take some who may see little action with their team well ahead in the second half? Did I pick RBs that fit well into the flow of the game regardless of the score or do I own one who will see little use when his team as a big underdog, falls behind early?
7. Weather check – It is now November and we will start to see the winds and snow become an issue for certain teams as the season wears on. Winds can be a huge issue for QBs to deal with. Just ask Sam Darnold a couple of weeks ago against the Vikings. No matter how good a matchup looks on paper, if the QB can’t get the ball to his wideout with the winds howling, it’s going to kill your team. Some DFS owners ignore this as it is easy to be complacent early in the year when the weather is generally nice everywhere.
8. Where is my team vulnerable? You are usually going to have one or two lower owned players to fill out your roster each week that can make or break your team. These are the players that you need to most closely analyze before you hit the submit button each week. If Todd Gurley is a bust, there is not much you can do but to shrug and move on. There will be 60% of the field in the same position and if you did not know the result ahead of time, he’d make your lineup almost every week. It’s when you own someone like Kenny Golladay like I did last week and you are very lonely with the field owning him in the low single digit range that you are taking on a lot of extra risk. You need to identify these situations before you put your teams in play and really understand why you made the play since it will probably be the one that wins or loses it for you that week (Golladay’s awful effort nearly cost me last week).

The message here is an important one for folks who are serious about their play every week. You need to pay close attention to the games. You need to have reliable data sources available to help you to sort through the noise. Most importantly, you need to establish a replicable process that you can use each week. The days of easily being able to steamroll the field are behind us at this point. Everyone will have data available so our biggest edge comes from tuning in and really having eyeballs on everything that is happening and understanding how to take advantage of it.

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