The Daily Spin – NFL Edition Week 11

As I was sitting at FedEx Field last Sunday cheering on the Vikings against the Redskins in a back and forth tilt, things were not looking too good on the fantasy side early on. Outside of the game I was watching live, most of the other games appeared to be low scoring and the limited action that I could see on my phone was not making things look very positive for any of the players that I had built around for Week 10. By the second quarter I just shook my head and decided to just ignore the box scores to focus on the game at hand and figured I was just going to have to chalk the week up as a loss.

After the Vikes won, we enjoyed the visiting fan triumph of being able to walk back to the car with a cheering throng of other purple clad fans and as we brought back out the tailgating gear for Round 2 while traffic cleared out, I figured I would take a look at the damage on DraftKings and do a postmortem on my roster to see where it had all gone wrong. What I saw surprised me, however, as going into the late afternoon games, it appeared that my team still had life and with four players still left to take the field, I began to think there was perhaps a chance I could still get back into the green by the end of the day.

Once we arrived back at the house after the game, I plugged my phone back in to give it some juice after it had died and as soon as the home screen popped up I raced to check my scores again, hoping to have a sweat and this time, I was even more surprised than before. Not only was my team solidly in the green, but there was not even going to be a sweat during the late action on Sunday. I was so far ahead of the cash line that there was no player left who could possibly ruin things for me. After the final Sunday afternoon game had ended, my cash game team had managed to get into the money by about 20 points, a remarkable turnaround after I had initially written my team off very early in the day. How had this happened?

In looking back at last week, I can hardly imagine a week where I have played NFL DFS where the chalk has gone bust more than it did in Week 10. The Steelers again proved that they are unplayable on the road. Nearly every big time running back had a slow day and several of the biggest value backup players that were very highly owned went busto. So here is how things broke down for my roster for the week.

At the top, as is almost always the case each week, I paid up to lock down the best QB in the best matchup on the board in Matthew Stafford at home against the Browns. I know that most weeks you’ve been able to get away with punting the QB position and letting some scrub throw a couple of TD’s to easily get you to value and that looked like the right play again last week, but I just had too many reservations before the Bucs/Jets game. It looked windy and without Mike Evans, I felt like the Bucs were somewhat capped in terms of upside and the road team Jets didn’t inspire me much either. I briefly considered Eli Manning, which would have worked out with some late garbage time points, but I did fear that the Giants would simply lay down against the 49ers as my thought was that Ben McAdoo had lost his team over the last few weeks. Stafford just looked to be an affordable, bust proof play and he put together a big second half to rally for me after a slow start against the Browns. We got three TD’s and over 22 points which got us off to a nice start for the day.

At the running back position, I laid out precisely what I was going to do in my writeup last week. Once it was announced that Matt Forte was out, it made Bilal Powell an automatic play for us. He was cheap, had a great matchup and the last time he was in this spot, he mashed and posted a monster day for us. I knew he’d be 70-90% owned, so the reality was that we were making a purely defensive play where we would save salary, but not receive much benefit from any upside in his performance. It’s a spot where it just doesn’t make sense to fade sense to fade that player for the reasons I discussed in my column. If he goes off and everyone but you own him, you lose. It’s just not a risk worth taking, especially when the matchup looks that juicy. Unfortunately, Powell as awful and posted almost nothing for the week, but with over 85% owning him in the cash game contest I was playing in, it really did not matter as it hurt the field pretty evenly overall.

The second spot at RB, it seemed like an obvious spot to pay up to get LeVeon Bell in what appeared to be a great spot against the Colts. While playing Steelers on the road is not always a great move, the game was indoors on turf and last season, both Bell and Antonio Brown shredded the Colts on Thanksgiving so I did not think there would be a lot of resistance for Bell to get his points as the script looked like it should be perfect for him to get 25-30 touches, which he did get, but somehow could not manage to put up much of a fantasy effort for the week, totaling just over 16 points.

Since we knew we were paying up for Bell, we had to go to the WR position with the thought of having to be a little more efficient with our dollars for the week. With Mike Evans out, it looked like a decent spot to pay down to get Adam Humphries against the Jets. Given his extremely low price of $3,100, he would not need to do much to get to value or even exceed it substantially for the week. Unfortunately, like Powell, he did next to nothing and posted a paltry 3.7 points. However, we were again fortunate in that 54% of owners had Humphries on their roster which meant that it was not the deathblow that it would be in other weeks. His ownership number came as no surprise as he was talked up plenty in the industry throughout the week so again, playing defense did not hurt us.

The other two WR spots went to Sterling Shepard and Julio Jones. Shepard was a pretty obvious play that I brought up as one of my favorite plays in my column. He was up against a non-existent secondary in San Francisco and was targeted all day long in trying to keep the Giants in the game in the second half. He was also extremely chalky and owned by 56% of the field, but went off for over 28 points which greatly helped to offset a couple of early busts. Julio, on the other hand, never really got going last week. I expected a back and forth, higher scoring game, but the Cowboys struggled without Zeke and it turned into a second half blowout for the Falcons who did not need to force the ball downfield and instead controlled the clock for the later stages of the game, limited Julio to just under 12 fantasy points.

As I had chosen to pay up a bit for a couple of players, I ended up diving down at the TE position for Garrett Celek from the 49ers. Punting at the TE is always a little unnerving, especially when dealing with a backup like Celek. If you take a zero there, you’re almost always dead for the week. Fortunately, the Giants have been so inept against the TE all season that I felt the risk was worth it and was rewarded with him getting into the end zone and putting up over 16 points. This proved to be the turning point for my team, but I said all along that it was really going to be either Celek or Rudolph and seeing that I just could not afford another $2,100, Celek ended up being the play.

At the Flex spot, I felt like Carlos Hyde was in a great position to do some damage against the Giants. With Beathard playing QB and no Pierre Garcon, Hyde has become the featured player for the 49ers to utilize on offense. I expected a lot of carries and a few catches in a game where it felt like regardless of how things played out, there was no script where Hyde would not get his touches. Hyde ended up with 98 yards rushing, just missing out on the bonus, but only had two catches for six yards. While 12.4 points wasn’t an awful effort, it felt like we received his floor in terms of performance which was a slight disappointment.

Finally, on defense, I locked in the Lions who produced a defensive touchdown which helped get them going early and propelled them to 14 points for the week. I just can’t express how important it is to put a good team on the field defensively each week. Just pay up and get the team that you know is going to put up some points. This has been a huge factor in my success this season as week after week it seems like my defense has managed to get into double digits for points. The Browns are a turnover machine so if you just want to stream the defense for whoever they are up against in a given week (hint, hint for Week 11), I think it is a sound strategy.

All in all, it was an interesting week. We stuck to our fundamental strategy of looking for value through quality backup players and paying up for players in great matchups who we would have expected to get a lot of touches. Some of those value plays were a bust in Humphries and Powell, but others like Celek and Shepard more than made up for it which meant that as long as the rest of our roster mostly held serve, that things would be okay. We had the right philosophy at RB and the WR’s that I focused on in the mid tier value range gave us a nice path last week. Even had I opted to pay down from Julio, my next player up was Robert Woods who had an enormous day for the Rams against the Texans so there are just certain days where things are going to fall together perfectly and I was fortunate enough to have that happen last week as there were plenty of ways where things could have come off the rails if I had chosen to construct my roster differently at the top.

 

QB	Matthew Stafford	22.66
RB	Leveon Bell	16.2
RB	Bilal Powell	3.6
WR	Adam Humphries	3.7
WR	Julio Jones	11.7
WR	Sterling Shepard	28.2
TE	Garrett Celek	16.7
F	Carlos Hyde	12.4
DEF	Lions	14
		129.2

 

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