The Daily Spin – NFL Edition – Week 17

I can hardly believe the regular season is about to end. As always, the months from September through the end of the year always go by in a blur for me as I get lost in the patterns of the week that lead up to each game. Of course, in years where the Vikings make a big move, I am even more immersed than normal. If my tone goes decidedly south in January after another absurd playoff defeat where they get tantalizingly close to playing a home game for the Super Bowl, you will understand where the pain is coming from.

I hope that you all are enjoying a wonderful holiday season out there and have found some ways to look back at this past year of fantasy sports as a time of enjoyment and a diversion from a world that can be perplexing at times. I managed to spend a few days with my in-laws down in the Tampa/St Pete area in Florida which was a lot of fun. We were discussing our favorite childhood restaurants where it was always a big deal to go to on a special occasion and naturally Red Lobster and Olive Garden both made it into the conversation. Now just by the way you read that last sentence and how it hit your brain, I can gain enormous insight into your personality.

For myself, I don’t make it back those old spots all that often, but when I do, I am not going to lie, folks, I always enjoy the experience. I get that it is not ‘authentic’ Italian or that it’s a considered sacrilege to go to a Red Lobster when your right on the coast, but once the topic came up, it was settled and not only did we go to lunch at the Olive Garden, but after spending the day sneaking my 7 year-old daughter onto as many roller coasters as possible at Busch Gardens, my brother-in-law and his wife suggested we complete the full journey and we ended up at Red Lobster to end the day with what I can only describe as the largest Pina Colada imaginable and some shrimp cooked in about eight different, butter soaked, mouth watering iterations. While I do enjoy a nice, upscale restaurant where I expect a little attitude if I order a cheap glass of blended scotch, I’ll never outgrow some of my old favorites…even if it means that I do have a gutter palate as Jeff suggests.

Of course, our story here has a bigger message. Fantasy sports is always the bigger message, particularly around the holidays when someone is trying to tell you about their baby, or the baby that they are going to have or shoving a baby in your face. Fantasy sports allows you to just let go of the moment and fade into a nice, soothing place where you can tune out any unwanted noise and just smile when your loud talking aunt’s voice fades into the abyss. And the bigger message here, before I lose my train of thought is that you don’t always have to pay up to assure yourself of an enjoyable experience……or of a winning DFS lineup. And with Week 17’s arrival, I think the analogy works almost perfectly.

A lot of people hate Week 17 each season. It’s a huge slate full of teams with differing motivations. Some teams are already playoff bound and will take the week to let their starters rest. Other teams are playing for seeding and will make a big push to win. Others are in a win and you’re in, lose and you’e out situation where they will do everything possible to keep their season alive. We also have two types of teams that have already been eliminated from playoff contention. One the one hand, we have teams that found a little bit of heart down the stretch and are making a push to finish the season strong, like the Jimmy G led 49ers who will look to close the season with their 5th straight win. On the other end, you have a team like the Giants who are in total chaos, have already fired their coach and GM and have a locker room that is erupting with problems every week. It’s a lot to try to take in and the updates are coming out faster than you can usually process them.

Fortunately, you came to the right place as I have plenty of time this weekend to sift through all of the data to see who will start, who will sit and where we want to target and also avoid. If you are the type who has trouble dealing with some uncertainty, then this is a good week to pull back a bit on your play as there are going to be some cheap players who become available that you may not have seen all season who are now going to need to find a way into your cash lineups. I personally love playing Week 17 each season for DFS as I am familiar enough with the depth chart of most teams to understand where we are getting great value. It usually allows us to get a few more big names onto our teams as key backup RBs suddenly gain relevance so it just becomes a matter of waiting to see what coaches decide to do over the weekend before the games kick off.

Before I get into the picks for Week 17, I should take a moment to pat myself on the back for ending a short losing streak with a resounding win. When you only play one cash game lineup a week for the sake of being transparent with readers, it does not matter if the write up was good or bad, you either win or lose and that’s how I am going to be judged each week. While I had been pretty unlucky in a few instances this season where my team managed to lose in a bizarre way where a lot of strange things went wrong, this week, Lady Luck was with me in way that is worth an extra paragraph or two to explain.

Each week, after salaries are posted, I always lock in my cash game entries with what I hope will be a lineup that is at least somewhat close to the final team that I end up playing for the week. Last week was great in that there were a couple of injured WRs/TEs out there who had capable backups that were mispriced based upon when news of the injuries filtered through during the week. When you can play a couple of players at or near the minimum salary, but are not worried about a lack of volume, life is good. There were so many good RBs on the board with plus matchups that it was hard to decide which three I wanted to play, as I decided early on that I would use an RB in the Flex spot. With the Cardinals shuffling QBs again, I also had the option of paying way down for a guy in a great matchup against the aforementioned Giants.

However, as game time approached on Sunday morning, the more that I looked at the data, the more I wanted to make a few changes to my team. With the Patriots down to Dion Lewis and the previously deactivated Mike Gillislee, Lewis seemed like an absolute slam dunk play. Also, in looking at the price of Melvin Gordon and his role increasing with the injury to Ekeler, I really wanted to get him onto the team. Also, it seemed painfully obvious that Cam Newton was going to be the QB of choice for the vast majority of cash game player and with a juicy matchup against the Bucs looming, I didn’t want to be on the outside looking in if Cam put up huge numbers and was owned by over half the field. As I rode back home from Lambeau Field with my buddy, Robert, I knew I had to make a few changes so we stopped at a gas station and I started making a few swaps to my lineup, which started with me removing Todd Gurley as his price was just too high for me to use him with the others that I was upgrading to for the team.

Now, I know that I hit the save button for my lineup. I saw the little circle go around and around and then disappear. As we started driving off again, I pulled up the Red Zone on my phone and began to watch the games for the day. After about 20 minutes or so, I quickly wanted to check to see how my team was looking and to see what the ownership percentages looked like. I was shocked when I opened up my team to see that I had my original dummy lineup in place and not the one that I thought I had saved. That was right around the moment that Todd Gurley scored his first TD. Obviously, my lineup with Gurley ended up having a big day and I ended up not having any sort of sweat all afternoon which was nice for a change. Although I was a little lucky in getting the early big start out of Gurley, by the end of the day, it turned out that either lineup would have made it into the green without any problems. Just realize that even people who play all the time at this game make ridiculous mistakes sometimes as well.

The winning roster came together really easily last week. I had four players on the team that were priced incredibly low for the week. The Cardinals switched QBs and went back to Drew Stanton who was only $4,700 and playing against the awful NY Giants. DeSean Jackson was announced as being out for the Bucs allowing me to use $3,000 Chris Godwin in a spot where he had a high likelihood of producing for us. Keelan Cole was surprisingly underpriced at $4,700 coming off of another big game and with several Jags WRs unable to start. Finally, Old Man Antonio Gates regained his starting job at TE for the Chargers after Hunter Henry was placed on the IR in the middle of the week. At $2,500, he was an easy plug and play. With so little spent on those four players, the rest of the team was really anything I wanted it to be among the best players on the board.

I started with defense where the Panthers seemed to me to be the best play by far for the week. They can rush the passer, they were in a big game they needed to win and they were facing Jameis Winston who is always a threat to give the ball away multiple times. They ended up with six sacks, three fumble recoveries and one kick return TD. The only surprise for me here was that only 14.5% of owners played the Panthers for the week.

The other four players were all guys I really liked for the week in the high dollar range. Todd Gurley was coming off of an amazing game against Seattle and is having an MVP caliber season.  thought things would be tougher against the Titans, but he is a volume beast so even at $9,100, I still thought he had a good shot at giving us 25 points. Well, he eclipsed 100 yards rushing AND receiving, delivering the rare double bonus and getting into the end zone twice for an astounding 55.6 point effort. By halftime, his performance put the team on cruise control for the day.

I plugged in Alvin Kamara against the Falcons. After seeing the start he got off to in the previous meeting, I felt like the Saints really wanted to find ways to get it to him on the edge to give him a chance to make some big plays. The stat line ended up being what I consider his floor from week to week as he posted 16 points with 90 total yards from scrimmage and seven catches.

The other two ‘studs’ really ended up hurting the team for the week as Keenan Allen couldn’t get going against the Jets in a really sloppy game that I knew would end up being a challenge for the Chargers as it is the type of game late in the season where they tend to play down to their opponents. Kenyan Drake also fell out of the mix for the Dolphins against the Chiefs as they got behind far enough in the second half so that they abandoned the run. What was frustrating here is that Drake has been excellent catching passes out of the backfield so it’s almost a bonus if they need to ride him in the short passing attack. For whatever reason, he was a total non-factor in the passing game and after a nice start in the first half, gained just 6 yards on the ground in the second half.

All in all, things worked out and I notched another win to improve my cash game mark to 10-6-1 on the season for the columns I’ve put out this season. Hopefully, it will be the start of another nice win streak that takes us all the way through the playoffs and stretches our bankrolls for the golf season ahead. Here is the team I originally entered as well as the team I tried to swap to unsuccessfully prior to lineup lock:

 

QB	Drew Stanton	14.46
RB	Kenyan Drake	5.7
RB	Alvin Kamara	16
WR	Keenan Allen	11.3
WR	Chris Godwin	12.8
WR	Keelan Cole	19.8
TE	Antonio Gates	20.1
F	Todd Gurley	55.6
DEF	Panthers	19
	Total	174.76
QB	Cam Newton	16.8
RB	Melvin Gordon	21.8
RB	Alvin Kamara	16
WR	Keenan Allen	11.3
WR	Chris Godwin	12.8
WR	Keelan Cole	19.8
TE	Antonio Gates	20.1
F	Dion Lewis	35.3
DEF	Panthers	19
	Total	172.9

 

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