The Daily Spin – NFL Edition Week 1

Welcome to Week 1 of the NFL season! It’s just about my favorite time of the year outside of majors weeks for golf. The NFL has done such a masterful job in terms of putting together a product where the fanbase for every team feels genuine excitement at the start of each season. The MLB season is such a marathon that our short attention spans rarely allow most of us to take much of an interest until at least the All-Star break when most of us are just hoping that our team has not been totally eliminated from contention. The NBA has seen its product wrecked in recent years with the rise of the Super Team where only about 3-4 teams each year can even remotely be considered contenders. The NHL playoffs are truly a superior showcase of talent and more exciting than any of the other major sports, but checking hockey scores in September is brutal as I wait patiently until April for the real fun to begin.

The NFL has done a great job of keeping us hungry all year. Even the offseason is filled with at least one moment every month where we get at least a little bit excited from the combine to free agency, the announcement of the schedule, the draft and finally getting the players into training camp. Football is the one sport where I genuinely miss the season during the spring with such a lengthy offseason. If you blink, the NBA offseason is over. It’s like having a girlfriend who NEVER leaves your apartment and then she plans a weekend away and it feels like she was not gone nearly enough for you to miss her in the least. Each year, despite the litany of nonsense from the players around the league year after year, I miss the NFL. When I finally had the money after college to afford the RedZone Channel there was no turning back. If I enter the gates of heaven someday, I want Andrew Sciciliano there to make a clever observation about how I eluded that last demon with a quick sidestep as I sashayed my way through the closing doors. The way the story unfolds throughout each Sunday and all throughout the season is incredible to behold. No other sport makes every game feel more meaningful.

It doesn’t even matter if your team is not a Super Bowl contender. Every team has its storyline coming into the season. The Patriots look to be one of the most dominant teams to ever take the field (ummm, well….maybe….) and could become the first team to reach six Super Bowl titles. The Falcons have all the pieces, but can they overcome their Super Bowl collapse to make another run at a championship? Are the Vikings closer to the 5-0 team that started last season or is the offensive line that they cobbled together nothing more than paper mache, ready to crumble at the first injury and leaving Sam Bradford at the mercy of pass rushers around the league? Even the Browns have some interesting threads coming into the season. Can Paul Depodesta take his Moneyball approach from MLB and apply it to the NFL? My instincts are telling me that he is on to something having rebuilt the offensive line and in picking up a number of draft picks over the next few seasons similar to what the Patriots have managed to do over the last decade. Brock Osweiller was obviously a complete misstep, but DaShone Kizer has flashed enough talent this summer to offer some hope to a town that has sent literally dozens of QBs to the firing line since returning to the league back in 1999. Everywhere you look around this league there is intrigue to start the season. As a die hard fan, 2017 is not just a season, but a part of a longer journey where all of us envision our team eventually stepping up to the podium to claim the Lombardi Trophy.

So how do we get through the year without losing our minds as the inevitable moment arrives where our dreams will not be immediately realized, that moment where our team commits the turnover to sink its playoff hopes or the kick that sailed just wide of the upright ending what looked to be a promising playoff run? For some of you, this will happen in Week 3, while for others, it might be a fateful night in Week 16 at Lambeau Field against the Packers. I think you know where I am going with this guys and girl. This is where fantasy football kicks in to keep us thoroughly engaged from Week 1 all the way through the Super Bowl where the true degenerates will pair up players from the big game with those in the Pro Bowl for one last high before we give ourselves completely over to PGA DFS for the next six months. The only real question to ask yourselves now as we buckle up for the next 5 months is what type of playing style fits your personality best?

For me, I have always been drawn to cash games for the NFL. It’s certainly not easy money the way it used to be, but for me, it is the easiest way to prepare for the season. I am good at spotting value and building around that consistently. The payoffs are more modest, but each year, I generally find myself coming out ahead. For others, like Jeff, the rush is all in competing for a seven figure prize or seats for a live final. Winning a little here and there does not move the needle for him so he is ready to take bigger risks in order to win bigger events like he did in Week 1 last season when he won $120,000 across several big GPPs. It’s amazing when those highs roll in, but it is also much more volatile on your bankroll and your emotions so if you go that route, buckle up because the ride is never smooth, but the wins are amazing. As for this column, it is going to be cash game focused so that requires a very specific method when approaching the research.

The biggest thing that I do with NFL each week that is tougher to do in PGA is to come up with a reasonable target to aim at. It’s almost backwards from PGA where I am looking for names that are mispriced and then sliding in players around those obvious values. With NFL, we want to use a point target of 3x each week for DK and 2x for FD. This means that for our $50,000 of salary for DraftKings, we want to aim for 150 points, or 3 x 50. If we work backwards, we can then start to make reasonable projections that get us to our goal. This is not totally foolproof. There are weeks where 150 comes up short and others where as little as 130-135 might be a winner, but it gives us a target. It’s much tougher to do this in golf with every course playing differently and winning scores having such a wide range. You’ll find that this helps enormously if it is something you have not incorporated into your process.

The next step for me each week is to determine the composition of my lineup. You really have to dig into the pricing to see what positional groups are favored for the week. DraftKings has definitely mixed things up this year with its pricing, giving a wider range to the QB position on the low end and expanding prices at the high end for running backs and receivers (it became far too easy to stack DJ/Bell for most of the 2016 season). This week, it really feels like there is a lot of deep value at the WR position. At RB, DJ, Lev and McCoy all seem like locks in terms of determining their workload to start the season so I am much more comfortable paying up to have one of those players anchor my roster and then accepting that I may have a cheap WR or two in my lineups to offset their high cost. If we have a $3,200 WR, he needs to score just 9.6 points, a very low floor that can be achieved with a very modest stat line. This is how my approach will work most weeks. Two seasons ago, I was mostly on the opposite side where I would stack three studs at WR and fill in at RB with backups who were filling in for starters and priced near the minimum. We’ll have our opportunities to do that again this season, but for Week 1, everyone for the most part is healthy so we’ll rely on those players who we know will have a major roll in the offense almost by default.

I don’t have a lot of hard and fast rules when building my cash game roster each week, but I do have a few guidelines that help me out. When I select my QB, I generally prefer to pick one that is playing at home. The same thing goes for selecting a defense. Home field advantage is generally worth about 3 points so take advantage of it when its available. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched friends trot out QBs on the road in what should seemingly be a laughable affair only to then see their star player in a dogfight as the 4th quarter rolls around, needing a lot of output to approach value. This is ESPECIALLY true early in the season.

Let’s face it, parity is the rule in the NFL these days. There are going to be at least 4-5 teams that surprise to the upside that we did not see coming and many more that underperform. Don’t get caught up in last season’s storylines at the beginning of this season. It will get you crushed. The guys with their computer models will eat your lunch for the first few weeks until you snap out your dazed slumber. The Browns were awful last year. It looks like Big Ben has a dream matchup to start the season. He’s also much worse on the road than at home. The Browns are 0-0 and they don’t know that they’re a bad team yet. On paper, it should be a blowout and maybe it will be, but would it really shock you if Steelers struggled a little bit early on and had to grind out a 23-17 win? The same holds true for Cam Newton and the Panthers as they travel out to San Francisco. The 49ers should not be a big challenge for the Panthers, but I can envision a path to victory for them. I’m not saying that I like the 49ers to win, but the season is young and the 49ers have taken the last two teams to the woodshed that have started the year against them. Knock yourself out in GPPs making these sorts of plays, but for cash, airing towards the side of caution will pay off more often than not.

In terms of stacks, I am not really for or against it. If the matchup is right, I will take my shot. After all, if you have a WR with a great matchup, the only way he is going to have a big day is if someone is getting him the ball. However, typically you are going to get priced out of most of these types of situations. You are not generally going to get Big Ben and Antonio Brown at home versus the Saints without paying a pretty penny. I tend to be among the camp that looks for value at the QB position most weeks. I like to squeeze as much value out of good, but not elite QBs that are either mobile or have a great matchup. This season may be a little different, but we’ll have to see how prices end up playing out as the season progresses. You want everything to be in your favor when you stack in cash. You want the road team to be awful against the pass and a particular poor player at CB matching up again your WR. You also want the QB and WR to be priced reasonably well so the rest of your team isn’t sacrificed just for this perfect stack. Again, I typically look to hedge in cash games so I won’t be stacking players too often where as in GPPs, it is almost always the proper approach towards building a winning roster.

Another move that you want to generally (I will always say generally as there is no 100% rule in NFL DFS) avoid is stacking a RB with a QB or WR. We want to target players for a specific workload so I will rarely have a featured RB and featured WR from the same team on my roster. Very rarely will a defense be so bad that each of those players will have the sort of day you need to hit value. There could be a situation where I pair a RB who is filling in for a starter at the minimum salary with a featured WR. That flips the dynamic a lot. Now, just a small workload will get the job done for the backup and that team is also probably more reliant on the star wideout to pick up the slack for the injured player.

Most of these guidelines are pretty straightforward and well known to many of you. I don’t need to explain that you should target high point total games. I don’t need to ell you that you should target WRs who have great one on one matchups against a specific CB. I don’t need to tell you that you want RBs going against teams that are poor versus the run or WR going against teams that struggle against the pass. If these things are not already obvious to you, then you really will want to ease your way in NFL DFS this season. My goal is to make some subtle suggestions in terms of strategy that gain you that extra couple of points each week to put you over the top. There is so much information available for NFL that we’re never going to have an inside edge the way we might in other sports. Everyone will be watching the same shows on Sunday morning with the same weather reports and the same inactive list reports dropping at the same time. Avoiding mistakes, not taking foolish risks and taking advantage of value plays when injuries arise are going to be the biggest keys to coming out on top in cash games each season. Now that the pep talk is done, let’s take a look at the slate this Sunday.

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