Fantasy Football Daily - 2021 Week 10 DFS Recap

Episode Date: November 17, 2021

Scott Barrett (@ScottBarrettDFB) and Jordan Tohline (@JMToWin) of One Week Season (@oneweekseason) review their Week 10 lineups and DFS action. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/fantasy-points-podcast/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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responsibly. It's time for the Fantasy Points podcast brought to you by FantasyPoint.com. Top level fantasy football and NFL betting analysis from every perspective and angle, from numbers to the film room, with a single goal to help you score more fantasy points. What is going on, Fantasy Fam? J.M. to win here from One Weekseason.com, joined by the great Scott Barrett from FantasyPoints.com, not joined by the great Graham Barfield from FantasyPoints.com

who ditched us this year. Scott, I am glad that you still enjoyed hanging out with me. How are you doing? I'm doing good, man. Excited to talk some DFS. Yeah, it was another weird week to say the least. Oh, boy, was it? And I think that that's kind of part of the theme

that we've been covering this year is it's fun to get on here and talk about teams and players and coaches. And I think that there's an interesting overlap in audiences here, right? Because fantasy points, well, your audience traditionally has been a lot of season-long players. And then Fantasy Points is very focused on season-long and DFS. And then obviously OWS is very focused on DFS, but also less focused on the slate to slate and even more focused on the training aspects of DFS. And so it's kind of fun because.

because I have the background of writing the NFL edge and being really deep into the players and coaches and all that. And you've got the season long background to where we're focused on that stuff. And then also recognizing in this podcast and in the stuff that we talk about that the big picture focuses of like who the best players are. I remember last year you saying Jonathan Taylor was like probably the top one of the top five running backs in the NFL already like after he'd gotten drafted. And it took some time for that to play out. Well, if you're playing season long, just knowing that Jonathan Taylor is that good, has an enormous amount of value because you're looking to say, hey, who's going to be the best player on my roster by week 8, week 10, week 13, week 14, week 15? Whereas DFS, it's more about how do we take the fact that one game sample sizes have crazy things that happen, and how do we account for that and try to make the most money this week when most people will be thinking more about the big picture thing. So anyhow, just kind of a fun combination of things we get to talk about on here because we do get to talk about the teams and the players, but also that bigger picture strategy focused side where we say, hey, on a one week sample size, crazy things are going to happen.

Here are some things to think about in that regard as well. Yeah, so you just hit on two things I think are worth talking about. One, yeah, it's now crept up into every single one of my Twitter group chats. bizarre this season is. I was just talking to Ben Gretsch who writes a newsletter called Stealing Signals, and it's honestly one of the best things in the fantasy football space. And he was saying, yeah, this is 100% the hardest year I've ever done stealing signals. I feel like there are no trends relative to other years. I talked to a number of other guys, especially pro-betters, who are saying almost exactly the same thing.

If you just bet the underdog money line every single game, you're up massively this year. It does. It feels super like a very variance-driven year. That's betting. That's analyzing the NFL. That's redraft. That's DFS. I know a lot of pro-DFS players who are having a brutal season.

And no one wants to hear this, you know, especially from an NFL analyst. and I don't blame you, but it really does seem to be the case. Like, who are the good teams in the NFL? Rams lost again, Buccaneers lost to Washington, and it just seems so weird. Who are the best teams in the NFL? And then from a fantasy aspect, it's even more, you know, prone to variants due to the high number of injuries.

Like, hey, you drafted Derek Henry. Good on you. Like, you're dominating. Oh, wait, now he's out until maybe week 16. That blows. other guys, I just can't even comprehend. Like, why does Darren Wallerstein? Is he secretly hurt?

I have no idea. It just doesn't make any sense to me. And it's just, yeah, a very weird year. The other thing you brought up was Jonathan Taylor. Yeah, so September 17th, I don't know if that was week one or week two. I said Jonathan Taylor already a top five, pure runner in the NFL. Then I got trashed. And I was like, whatever, get back to me in week 14 to every, every troll who responded to that tweet.

And I remember week nine, it was like, oh, boy, that was a bad take. And then he turned it on late. And now, yeah, clearly one of the top five best pure runners in football. And so I'm thinking about this from a redraft perspective. Maybe you can, you can inject some DFS into it. But yeah, one of the mistakes I made this year was I was, I was, I was lower than I should have been on Derek Henry. Luckily, the injury bailed me out.

I was lower than I should have been on Jonathan Taylor, just because every Indianapolis beat writer was like, no, no, no, no, no. He's not going to be a bell cow. I know you all want him to be. But no, no, no, no. They love Najeehien Hines. He's going to be a thing.

You know, I'd bump Jonathan Taylor for carries, but very minimal passing down usage, still inexplicably capped at 60% of the snaps. And another guy, we've talked about this before, but Jamar Chase, like, love Jamar. My model said Jonathan Taylor already a 99.9 percentile prospect. Jamar Chase, the best prospect since at least the Julio Jones, A.J. Green year. And I was like, yeah, you know, love Jamar Chase. Own him in every single dynasty league.

But what I'm going to do, because he's a little pricey, you know, pre the drops and all that other stuff is, yeah, yeah, I'll just, I'll just focus. on Elijah Moore, Ron Dale Moore, these guys who are going in the double-digit rounds, you know, there's more value. And, you know, I think Elijah could just smash year one. Ron Dale, you know, if he gets those manufactured touches,

Cadarius Tony in the last round. And, you know, I spent all this time looking at trends and looking at things that are sticky and historically important year over year. Of course, for running backs, what's massive is Snapchat. It's just,

it's just huge and also, you know, target, target volume. Like, I really want to fade those, you know, workhorse running backs who get a lot of rushing work, but don't get the passing down work. It makes them so game script dependent. They're great in best ball, a lot trickier in start sit leagues where they really flop when their team loses. And one thing I've always harped on, too, is just that you can't miss in the outliers. The outliers are what changed the game.

And like you could have said Rob Gronkowski was due for regression the first 10 years of his career. Patrick Mahomes due for regression. Tyree Kill, due for a massive regression. Rookie sophomore junior season, OBJ, due for a massive regression. And like that's true historically from the macro perspective, undoubtedly true. But you have to be early on those guys and say, no, no, no, no, he's just a freak of nature. Because those outliers are the guys who really can help you. win your fantasy league. Fantasy football operates on the Pareto principle, on the power law,

getting those few players who just, you know, way more productive than everyone else. It's not getting the nailing 10 out of 10 ADP beaters with every pick. It's really just getting those two or three guys who are just absolute monsters. And so I was thinking on my walk this morning exactly about that, It's like, well, Jamar Chase, Jonathan Taylor, 99 percentile by Spork, by my prospect model. Just draft those guys. You know, you could, there's words for sure. Jamar Chase took a full year off. Had a brutal camp, according to all these beatwriters.

Jonathan Taylor was supposedly supposed to be capped at, you know, 55% of the snaps no matter what. Glad to see them come to their senses there. But, yeah, you can just draft those guys and just say, hey, they're, absolutely freaking awesome. And that might just be the route to go. But Jam, what are your thoughts on those two points? You know, just freak outliers and then also just the weirdness of the season. Well, first off, shout out to Ben Gretsch. That's at yards per Gretch, G-R-E-T-C-H. Glad you brought him up. Great Twitter follow. Another thing I wanted to bring up real quickly, you mentioned Darren Waller. I think that sometimes the perception of a player is different from the reality of a player.

I want to run through the week three through 11 stat lines for him just last year. Two catches for nine yards, nine for 88, five for 48, six for 50, five for 27, five for 22, three for 37, seven, seven for 87, seven for 88. seven for 88 and four for 23. Now there were some touchdowns in there. One touchdown game, another one touchdown game, another one touchdown game, another one touchdown game, which those haven't been showing up as much this year either. But then he finished the year on this tear of 13 catches for 200, 7 for 75, 9 for 155 for 15, and that's what everybody remembers.

But we have to also keep in mind that things kind of go in waves with player production. And this is nothing new for Darren Waller. you know, people are short-term focused in their perceptions of things. You know, two weeks ago, Travis Kelsey was dust and just didn't look the same. And he's too old now. But two weeks before that, he was putting up his normal numbers minus the touchdowns. And now, you know, after this game on Sunday night, Roto World's blurb calling Travis Kelsey the top target on the cheap.

You know, it's like these things move in waves. And so you have to, it's like if you're an investing, right, you have to understand how to look at the big picture and not just the short-term movements of these players. And I think that to that point, it's easy to highlight guys like Jonathan Taylor and Jamar Chase and say, well, should have, I should have done this, but there's also a lot of guys who you could say that on that didn't pan out, right? Like, it's easy to cherry pick the ones that we miss. But if we're going to do that, we also have to cherry pick the ones that, you know,

that you weren't high on. and they aren't having a great season or that you were high in and they are having a great season. And I think that what that all just comes back to for me is the level of unpredictability inherent here. So you and I talked about this Brandon Ayuk article that Tim Kawakami wrote for the athletic a couple weeks ago. And the article, the gist of the article, you retweeted it. So for anybody who missed it or doesn't have an athletic subscription and didn't read it, the gist of the article was that the reason Iok hadn't been getting his normal playing time or his normal focus in the offense or the focus in the offense that we as fantasy players expected

was because of his practice habits. And the practice habits being not related to lack of physical effort so much as mental focus. And I was talking to a buddy about this last night. who is a pretty high-level musician. He actually was in Cage the Elephant for six months when their bass player was in rehab and has worked with a lot of big bands in Nashville. And he and I were talking about basically that being deeply focused, getting into the zone, so to speak.

And this isn't just for creative things. This is for work. This is for fantasy. This is for DFS. getting in the zone is not something that you can just flip a switch and do. Being able to dive deep and stay deep, stay deeply focused for long and stretches of time is a learned and developed trait. And so for somebody like Brandon Ayuk, there's a difference between always being the best

athlete on the field in high school, in college, and just going out there and going through the motions and practice running routes and whatnot. And instead, being deeply engaged and focused. in every rep. Treating every rep as an opportunity to get better, treating every rep like it's a game rep. Some of the best practicers, Tom Brady, Aaron Rogers, so on and so forth, are the best NFL players because they treat every rep as an opportunity to get better. So I say all that to say, there's so much that's unquantifiable. Three years ago, two years ago, I guess it was, I was super interested in David Montgomery, his rookie season. That was two years ago. I was super interested in David Montgomery

because I had been thinking about these unquantifiable elements and saying, how do you identify the players who are going to come back each season better than they were when they left the season before? How do you identify the players who were going to always practice hard? Well, it stood out to me that David Montgomery had been an Eagle Scout. It was like, well, here's somebody who has a proven track record of putting in over and above hard work, right? And then like his first eight games or whatever, he was so bad.

It was like, well, clearly the Eagle Scout narrative didn't work. but then he became awesome after that. But there are just unquantifiable things that we just can't know. And so for season long, it's like looking at all the factors that you can and the stickiness of different factors and basically saying, look, we're going to get some things wrong, but here's the bucket of players who are like this to be better than their ADP this year. Here's the bucket of players who are less likely based on all the things that we do know.

But I think that in DFS, there just becomes this element of saying, hey, look, there's all these things we don't know, all these things we can't account for. So let's play off of that. And so, yeah, I mean, I don't think that fully answers the question. But you've had your mic off mute for a little while. So I want to throw it back over to you. And then I'll talk through the bizarreness of this season a little bit on top of that. Yeah, I'll just say specifically with Jonathan Taylor and Jammar Chase, they were like my model's number one talent at, each position over a eight-year sample.

So just like true freak outliers. And you could just say, you know, talent rises to the top always in fantasy in the NFL. And that's probably pretty true. So just like two absolute total outliers. But yeah. And then flow state stuff I think is interesting because as a writer, you really feel that, especially me historically who like back in the PFF days, I would write. 150 articles in the offseason and then four articles per week during the season.

And, you know, most of those articles were 1,200 to 2,500 words. And so, like, if I'm just, and I can just feel it sometimes where it's just not in the groove. I abuse nicotine and caffeine to get me through the season, like, without fail. And then as soon as the season ends, I try and quit it. And that's what happened this past off season. and where I quit it and I just like felt so out of it, out of the zone where I'm trying to write, I redid Upside Winds Championships. And I was stuck on that article for weeks, making a hundred words of progress per day. It was just an absolute mess. And the thing it felt like to me

was like I could not just get into the flow state. Like it just, it was such a slog. It was just, I couldn't put the words together. And eventually I caved and I was like, all right, screw it. Like I need this article to be good. I really care about it. And so I went out. I got a jewel. I got a, you know, coffee or whatever.

And then I just blinked. I just blinked. And then six days later, all the articles were done. And I was insanely proud of it. I thought it was the best work I'd ever done where it was really just like I couldn't get into the flow state without this crush. which maybe it was all in my head. And then as soon as I had that, I really just blinked and just

typing up a storm and it was great. And it felt good right off the bat. Do you throw out your jewel when the season's over? Is that part of the purging? Yes. And so what I do is I'll throw it out. And then like a day you'll go by and I'm just like, all right, I'm miserable. And I'll go buy a new one and then I'll take like 10 hits of it and I'll hate myself

and then I'll throw it out again. And then two days later, I'll buy a new one. And I'm just, like, racking up all this money. And the guy behind the counter at the convenience store is just like, this guy. He just knows. He just knows. And so I just try and punish my wallet. But, dude, it's, like, I seriously have a problem in the sense that, like, I feel like

I can't write without it. But also, I can't write without it. Like, it's just, it's so much better when I have that. But I was talking to one of my Discord subscribers about it. He says it's, like, post-a- acute withdrawal syndrome and you have to wait three months and then but i mean three months without you know my top tier your best work possible that's that's hard to that's hard to cope with yeah yeah i mean it's a shame that that what you need is awful for your body but there are like

there is an element of identifying what's necessary to be able to get um to be able to get good work done And yeah, I mean, going back to like the football player thing here, it's like the, yeah, so like Jonathan Taylor and Jamar Chase, you can set them aside as like isolated like places where you can look, right? But I think that it's, I can't tell you how long, I guess I won't go into deeper details about why this was the case. But I can't tell you how long the narrative around David Najoku was just waiting for. the breakout because he's such a freak athlete. But, you know, there's a difference between being a freak athlete and being a good football player. Like, watch that game against the Patriots. He got that soft, you know, ball knocked out of his hands in the end zone. He made another, like, crucial wide open drop. I guess not crucial. They were losing by a ton, but like wide open drop deeper in the game.

And it was the same thing that I saw with Tony Pollard early in his career. People were like, oh, man, this guy's amazing. He's going to get, he's got to get the ball more. And then you're like, do you watch these games and see how many mental mistakes he makes? And the margin for error between victory and defeat in the NFL is typically so thin that football plays are choreographed orchestras of 11 players who all have to be doing their part. And if one player doesn't do his part, the whole play often breaks apart. And the difference between winning and losing a football game is often just two or three plays that could have broken one way or another.

You could even look at that Buccaneers and Washington game from Sunday. And if the Bucks stop Washington at any point on that 20-play drive to end the game, they probably win that game. Hold them to no points or to a field goal, and Brady's going to drive the field with two and a half minutes or four minutes or whatever he would have had left to tie the game. and then you go to overtime and the better team probably wins the game. And so just like all those third down plays that Washington kept converting,

each one of those basically, you know, if any one of those goes the other way, the game's over. And so these players who can't be consistently relied on at the NFL level to produce like professionals and to play like professionals, they are not going to see the field because them messing up on two plays in a game like that takes away all the good from them. And you know this is like a former PFF guy, right? Because that's what PFF does so great at is identifying all the pieces of a given play

and how they're all working together and who's doing their job and who's not. And so, yeah, these guys who just aren't able to play at the professional level. And that's the crazy thing, though, is like David Nogoku hasn't gotten better. Tony Pollard has gotten better. And so it's kind of just, it's hard to see from the outside. who's going to get better and who's not. And I think that the, like, by and large, this, the voices in season long, not necessarily, like, the ESPN voices, but like the Scott Barrett voices, the guys who are putting in the work on a deeper level and not just getting makeup put on to go on TV. Like, they do a, like, you guys do an amazing job of actually sorting through everything and knowing, like, getting right with a high degree of accuracy, who are going to be the best.

plays throughout the season. It might not seem like that to an outsider who's just like, oh, man, like early season ADPs are always wrong, but it's like, yeah, but they're way more right than if most people were trying to come up with this on their own. But it's just there is so much that's up in the air each NFL season that we don't know, take away injuries even, and just who's actually showing up this season better than they were, which teams are better, which coaches have their feet under them and which teams are going to get better throughout the season, right? Like, look at the Miami defense. All of a sudden, the Miami defense is good again. Well, three weeks ago, four weeks ago, they were a defense that we were attacking relentlessly in DFS. But teams do get better throughout

the season with good coaches, with good players. And so, yeah, there's just, there's a lot that we can't account for. And so I think that's been part of like the outliers this year, the craziness, the randomness of who's winning games and how they're winning games and what's happening on a single week. It's been heightened for what we've seen in the past, but I also kind of take that as just small sample size noise, right? It's been 10 weeks of football, and it's just been kind of a random stretch where,

I mean, we just went through Darren Waller's stretches from last year, right? He had this random, like, eight or nine week stretch where he wasn't really producing, then this four-week stretch where he was just going nuts every week. So it's kind of like that in the NFL, right? It's just, we've had a 10-week stretch where things have been really wacky, and they probably feel even more wacky than they really are because we tend to perceive ourselves having a high level of certainty. It was highly certain that the Bucks were going to handle Washington because of the way that that Bucks team is built.

The strengths of the Bucs team, the deficiencies of the Washington team lined up perfectly for the Bucs to do really well in that game. but from like an actual micro level, you know, you play out that game 100 times. We're going to have a game like that 10, 15, 20 times in that spot just because that's the way things happen in the NFL. And I think that also I'll say this last thing and then throw it over to you for any additional thoughts here. But I think that back in the day, like 15 years ago when all of us would follow one team, our own team, we would see more clearly the ups and downs, of that team and what that team was good at and what they were bad at and where they sometimes fell apart. And it made more sense to us when if you're a Bucks fan and you follow them day in and day out and you're reading all the beat writers and listening to Sports Talk Radio, that in a way,

like the random loss makes more sense. Whereas if you're looking at all 32 teams, you expect things to play out with a higher degree of certainty than they really do on the micro level. And so, yeah, I think that I want to throw this over to you for any final thoughts you have. And then I think it's interesting to kind of talk through some of the ways to manage this to turn it to your favor in DFS. Obviously, there's not, there's not like a blanket thing you do that you just become profitable in DFS by accounting for these things. But I think there are some interesting things that we can talk about that can be accounted for in all of this. Yeah. So, I mean, this is something we harp on every week.

and for some reason I always seem to forget it. But yeah, there's just a massive amount of variance in the NFL. You know, any given Sunday, Washington beating Tampa, San Francisco beating the Rams for like the fifth game in a row inexplicably. And it's just you can profit on that in DFS tournaments. You know, people are so certain the chalk's going to hit. And, you know, it's never as certain as you think it is. and there's a way to profit on it. So for me, the first step for any DFS player should be identifying the most certain elements.

What's interesting is this last week, the Bucks passing attack was the most certain element on the slate. Yeah, we talked about it on the show. Yeah, and it just didn't play out. And that doesn't mean that anybody who identified it, as the most certain element was wrong. Like I just said a moment ago, like if we play out that game 100 times, there's going to be 15 or 20 times where it plays out like that. And so the, in fact, you can look at,

we have a tool on OWS, the Advanced Odds tool, which is in the main menu, the Edge Plus menu, but you can see like it basically shows the win percentage likelihood based on like the over under and other factors, right? And so even a game like that, I'm sure that Washington had a win probability of like 15 to 20 percent. So you have to understand that crazy things are going to happen. When you look at a game, it's easy to be like, oh, there's no way Washington could win because it's hard to work through in your mind the ways that can happen.

But once you start working through it, we wouldn't have worked through it the way that it played out, right, where the Bucks passing attack really couldn't get anything going. But you can work through it in your mind and say, okay, early turnovers, early scores, then this defense is able to kind of shift the way that they're playing things, understanding that this team is more one dimension. and, you know, and then they can kind of put together some longer drives with short area passing. And like, you can piece together how these games play out the way that they do. So one of the first things that I want to think about in DFS is where the most certainty actually is. And a lot of times it's where you perceive it to be at first glance, but probably about 30% of the most certain spots are spots that you don't see at first glance or spots that seem really certain aren't really certain. And so the first step for me is kind of identifying

where the most certainty is, the next step for me is trying to poke holes in that certainty and then kind of constantly comparing it to other spots on the slate. And then the next step for me is understanding the type of tournament you're in. If you're in a small field tournament, say like a thousand or fewer entries or 500 or fewer entries, you want to wrap as much of that certainty on your roster as you can. And as long as you're building a unique roster, piecing together players uniquely, you don't have to worry that much about ownership projections,

like raw ownership projections. You can just get high certainty plays on well-built rosters, and you're going to be in position to cash when things don't go great, and you're going to be in position for first place when things do go great. As you get into larger and larger tournaments, you have to move further and further away from the certainty and get closer and closer to embracing uncertainty. Finding places where you can say, okay, where can I bet on something failing? You don't even have to describe how it fails. But where can I bet on something failing and bet on optimally,

not just bet on, hey, this might fail. Let me go to this spot. But optimally say, if this fails, what benefits as a result? So like take the Bucks passing attack. One way to look at things is, okay, if everybody's on the buck's passing attack and they fail, well, then I would take the running back from this team because maybe the running back's getting all the points. Well, what we know about the buck's offense and the match against Washington, it wasn't particularly likely that the bucks were going to score 35 points before Nett was going to do all the production. And Evans and Godderman would disappoint that way. So then you say, okay, well, that's not how I want to pull this lever here.

But what else could you do? Well, if Brady fails, then another high price. quarterback is moving past Brady. So rosters that build around Josh Allen and Stefan Diggs, where you get a quarterback and a wide receiver in the same price range as Brady and Mike Evans. Well, now you know that the Brady and Evans rosters don't have Josh Allen and Stefan Diggs, so you kind of end up being able to benefit in that way. And so, you know, if we looked at things objectively, what was a better play last week?

Tom Brady plus Mike Evans or Josh Allen plus Dipon Diggs. Tom Brady plus Mike Evans. If we played out that slate over and over again, that's going to produce at a higher level more often. But as you get into larger and larger field tournaments, you have to be more and more willing to say, okay, let me take the certainty everybody has and play off of that in some way.

And you don't have to do it on all nine spots on your roster, but you have to find one or two places where you're pulling a different lever than everybody else is pulling. optimally a lever that like hits the jackpot if the lever that everybody else is pulling comes up empty. So in other words, everybody's betting on this guy. Like a great example in the past has been if everybody's on Devante Adams, then you can play Aaron Jones and hope that Aaron Jones is the guy getting the catches and the touchdowns. That hasn't really been the way to play things this year. But finding spots like that where it's like, okay, everybody thinks this guy's going to succeed.

But if he doesn't or example we've often used on OWS is the Titans offense from last year, right? Like if everybody's on Derek Henry, the way to play that is a way to not play Derek Henry. It's a way to not play Derek Henry isn't to just fade him, but it's to play AJ Brown and Ryan Tanahill instead saying, hey, do we think that the Titans offense is going to fail? Or do we think that Henry's going to fail because other pieces on the Titans offense are the ones getting the points? And so the larger the contests you're in, the more rosters you have to beat, the more willing you have to be to say, okay, let me let me let me go of what seems so certain. and let me move in a different direction. But the starting point should still be identifying where the actual best plays are. And Scott, I'll throw this over to you because I want to get your take on this in particular.

But the best way to do that isn't listening to what everybody's saying. The best way to find the most certainty is to try to poke holes in things yourself inside of a bubble where you're thinking through things without outside noise. And then you come out of that bubble and you can kind of see what other people are talking about and kind of help poke holes in your arguments from there. But optimally, you identify the highest certainty spots on your own and then move forward from there. So that was a lot. But, Scott, let me throw that over to you for any thoughts you have on that.

Yeah. So my only comment is we talked about the increase in cover two from opposing defenses last week. Patrick Mahomes is getting. you know, significantly slowed down by cover two matchups. Jacksonville to beat Josh Allen increased their rate of cover two. Also a lot of rolling safeties. And it really slowed him down, though that's a coverage shell that he historically struggles against.

And Washington jacked up their rate of cover two against the Buccaneers to beat them. Bruce Ariens said after Tom Brady got hit on the first series, they weren't going to risk throwing the ball downfield with the cover two shell and getting their QB hit because the protection didn't hold up. It was a quote from Rick Stroud. And yeah, so I mean, I have a hard time believing that there is like any secret sauce, any magic coverage shell to slow down opposing offenses. Like every coverage shell has its liabilities.

I mean, but maybe the greatest of all times. was Tampa, the Tampa 2 defense in their heyday, which was a cover 2 defense. But yeah, and the weirdest thing about this is historically the best quarterback in football at targeting cover 2. We know this from West Huber's work is Tom Brady. And the number one wide receiver against cover 2 is Chris Godwin. And maybe he was just banged up or something. But, you know, it's just interesting that once again, cover 2 plays.

plays an important theme and one of the biggest upsets of the season. So I guess that's my only thought there. You said something about digesting other people's work. Something I find interesting when talking to some of the best DFS pros and Johnny in particular, they go out of their way to listen to as much fantasy podcast content as they can. but they're not trying to find the best content. They want like the donkeys. The big name, high download fantasy shows with very middling analysis.

And they want to absorb as much as that as they can just to get a better sense on ownership. Like, okay, what is the field going to play? What are the fish going to play? You know, this big name guy who's, you know, someone of a clown but has a big following, likes this player a lot this week. Okay, good to know. So I can find out who to fade or who's going to go under-owned, the different avenues of attack, things of that nature.

That's it. That's all I go. Yeah. So first off on the cover two thing, right? Like cover two's been around a long time. I remember there was an, article, I think it was in the 70s, that Belichick and Nick Saban got together. This is before they ever coached together with the Browns. They had been introduced to one another by Belichick's father

who knew Sabin through the college circuit. And they were working, I think they were working for two different NFL teams at the time. And so their head coaches, their bosses, would have been upset to know that they were hanging out together. And so they drove, I forget where it was, like upstate New York or something. This is a true story. And they got like basically rented a house together for like three days or a week and sat down together to break down basically like a particular coverage type and how you would like maximize the all of the elements around using that coverage type.

and then also like the best ways to beat that covers type. And I'm pretty sure if I remember the story correctly, it was cover two. Like these are not new problems, right? And so in the same way that the game is always evolving. And teams, nobody can stop the chiefs. And nobody can stop the Rams of Jared Gauthic quarterback. What do they score 30 plus points in 14 of 16 games the year when they ran 11 personnel, 97% of the time, and went to the super.

Bowl and nobody could stop them. And then somebody figures it out, produces a blueprint, and other teams use that blueprint and add their own wrinkles. And for a little while, the offense can't beat that look. And then the offense figures things out with new concepts and new things that they put together. And now that look doesn't work anymore. And so I think that this, this whole cover two shell thing is an interesting, it's an interesting story. It's something like when Levyon Bell and David Johnson emerged in their roles. And it's like it's part of the fabric of the DFS story, right? Like three years from now, people are going to reference back to the 2021 season when there

was like the three or four week stretch when everybody was talking about the cover two shell with in-depth knowledge as if, you know, we're all football coaches now. But the reality is none of this is, none of this is new. And none of this in my mind is super. actionable so much as if, I'll say it like this. Somebody like Blender who, you know, is similar to what you're talking about with Johnny and some of these other DFS players, right? It's not about listening to all these podcasts to find out who to play. It's listening to all these podcasts to find out which chalk is more fragile and which chalk is more robust. In other words, hey, this guy's

predicted at 12% owned. This guy's predicted at 12% owned. But this guy who's projected to it, 12% owned has been talked about on all these like popular podcasts and this guy who's 12% owned I haven't heard his name at all. So the guy who everybody's talking about is probably going to be higher owned than this projection expects. And so that's a more robust projection. And so I want to play off of this certainty of the field. Well, the same thing, you know, Blender has talked about when he sees somebody say shadow coverage, his first thought is, okay, I want to play that wide receiver. Not because, that wide receiver is in a good spot,

but because people are going to overrate how bad the spot is more often than not. And so there are certain circumstances where, like, let's say it's Dorel Rivas covering somebody in shadow coverage or even Stefan Gilmore a couple years ago or Marshawn Lattimore against Mike Evans. There are certain times when this is super actionable, but other times where if everybody is overrating

the difficulty of this matchup and this guy who should maybe be 12% owned is 3% owned. Maybe it's a guy who's typically 20% owned and his ownership should be cut in half because the matchup is tougher. But his ownership is being cut down by like 90%, 85%. Well, then it's profitable over time to play that guy. And so that's kind of how I'm looking at the whole cover two shell mania is everybody is going to feel really smart right now because they can talk about coverages in a way

that they are typically able to. And by everybody, I mean like the average DFS player. And they're going to talk about how, oh, well, this team probably can't succeed because of this cover two shell. And then teams are going to figure out, you know, hey, here's some stuff. Here's some concepts that we can put together that are going to, you know, make it impossible for this defense to beat us. And now the defenses have to adjust.

And so I'll kind of play things in that regard just by saying, if the field is overrating their certainty on things, I want to. to swing the other way. And it's an interesting, like, it's an interesting world that I'm in because part of my job is doing all this deep research and finding out what the most certain things are, but then also the other part of my job is identifying places where everyone's overrating their certainty. And so there's the blend of like, yeah, there is a lot that we can know, but we don't want to overrate what we know. And if the field is overrating what they think they know, we can play the other direction to kind of make more money off of that.

right i i think that's a good point but we're also 40 minutes in and we haven't recapped week 10 at all uh jam how did you do this last week what was your strategy were you successful i would say that we've sort of recapped week 10 but uh yeah so the yeah i played um the i was playing in the game changer which is a single entry 1500 buy in 270 entries and then the Juke, which is $400 buy-in, three-entry max, and again, under 500 entries. So I was focused on certainty. And so for me, it was Brady plus Evans plus Godwin. And then the two cheap running backs, Ingram and Dearness Johnson, we can get into the

thoughts behind eating that chalk. And in fact, all of this was chalk or, you know, that element right there was chalk. Not a ton of rosters that played the two. guys together as far as combinatorial ownership because a lot of people it was like pay up at one of these expensive attractive running backs pay down for one of these guys and choose between the two. But yeah, those guys were both kind of easy to lock in for me and then the Bucks passing attack. I liked Dan Arnold more than Ricky Seals Jones, but because of the ownership and the fact that Ricky Seals Jones fit into the story I was telling with the Bucks passing attack.

I went with Ricky Seals Jones. Unfortunately, he picked up that hip injury in the first half, and his three catches for 30 yards ended there. And then I kind of tied that up with a really interesting play, which was Devante Adams plus Marquez Valdez Scantling. And a lot of people were on Devante Adams. A lot of people were on MVS, but almost nobody played them together,

and nobody thinks to play those two together without a quarterback. And the thinking is, well, if one of the ones, of these guys is having a big game, it probably takes away from the other guy having a big game. But the reality is in six of their last 17 games, when they were on the field together with Aaron Rogers, they've combined for 50 plus points, which they needed about 44 points just to keep you on a 200-point pace. So in over a third of their last 17 games, they have combined for like four and a half X plus or more their salaries from last week. And I think it was four or five of Marquez Valdez Scantling's 15 plus point games

had also been 30 plus point games for Devante Adams. So basically more so like MVS having a big game opens things up for Devante Adams. So they actually work really well together. And so that was one of my like, it was like if we played out this slate 100 times, Brady plus Godwin plus Evans are going to score 70 plus combined points like a good 65 to 75 times. They had done it in all three games without Antonio Brown so far this year. And then obviously the matchup set up great.

And then if we played out the slate 100 times, there's probably a good 35 to 40 times where MVS and Devante Adams combined for 50 to 60 points. So kind of from that grouping right there, I felt like if things fell in place the correct way on the correct week, I could get 90 plus points from the Bucks passing attack, 50 to 60 points from these two Packers, and then I'm sitting on 140 to 150 points already from those five players. And then you've got, I have room for all I did on my, I did two rosters. I had the bills defense on one and Cardinals defense on the other.

And then the rest of it was the same. And it was like, if I can get 150 points from these five players, while I still have these two like workhorse running backs, I still have my tight end and I still have my defensive defense. special teams that most people aren't on. So it didn't work out, but I was extremely happy with the build to an extent that, like I said, the only way I varied my two rosters was two different defenses just because I couldn't find a sharper, small field way to build than that.

I spent several hours poking around in that roster and trying to find like a higher certainty path and couldn't find it. So I just stuck with that and switched the defense from one roster to the other. But yeah, it didn't work out. But the week to me felt really straightforward, and variance kind of fell against what I needed. And again, I would have played things differently if I were playing in like a large field tournament. But in the tournaments I was in, that was what made the most sense for me. What about you?

How many rosters did you put in, had things come together for you? Yeah, I think the MVS plus Adam stack is really interesting. I did a Twitter space is late Saturday night with Ryan Hodge. And someone asked me about, oh, a Rust dub stack. And I know that's so popular, but I decided to dig into the numbers live, and it's so suboptimal. It is so subopt. I know people want to play it every week. It gets hyped every week. But I ran the correlations, and together Lockett and Metcalf have a negative 0.40 correlation.1.5, if R squared. And basically what that's saying is,

is whenever it's basically locket scores 35 and metcalf scores nine or metcalf scores 35 and locket scores four in which case yeah it you should really just stick to one rather than stacking both so i thought that was interesting just wanted to hit on that real quick and how did i do um i i either broke even or i slightly profited uh i went i went pretty chalky I was actually a lot chalkier than I thought. Tight ends was only Dan Ardold and Tyler Conklin that worked out well.

Running backs were Dearness Johnson, Mark Ingram, played both pretty chalky. And then either Jonathan Taylor or Christian McCaffrey or D'Andre Swift. So not too many misses on my running backs. Swift, I think, should have went nuclear. Love Naji. and Deonté early in the week totally bailed on them with Mason Rudolph starting.

But I did play Mason Rudolph. And I wrote it up as like, he's in play. Like he's just so cheap. He's in play. It pains me to say it, but he's in play. And I didn't really like advise to play him. But I was sitting there Sunday morning. I was just like, no one's going to play him.

He's 4,100. I like the teams I can build with him. Screw it. So I went heavy on Mason Rudolph. It actually worked out in a week where a lot of the top quarterbacks flop because otherwise I'm looking at Brady stacks, Rust stacks, things of that nature. Although it pains me because basically Tuesday of last week or Wednesday, Jake Tribby wrote up in first look, Dak Prescott easily the best quarterback play of the slate, looked at that and went, yep, first guy I wrote up for the XFP report, C. Lam who has bested Amari Cooper and XFP every game this year, but one, coming off of the league

high XFP in week nine, not a lot of productivity or efficiency, but he came into that game with like a slightly banged up ankle, but was more or less fine. And so I just thought it was a great week to go back to him. And then by the end of the week, you know, maybe Thursday, someone told me it's chalk and then I just like never really went back to it. But that was maybe a mistake. So QB hit at value. All my running backs hit. Wide receiver is where I really screwed up. And like even post hindsight, it's just like, I don't know what I would have done. But yeah, a lot of Devante Adams, Mike Williams, Mike Evans, Tyler Lockett,

all those guys, you know, underperform my super lofty expectations for them. So it wasn't a huge day, but, you know, with a lot of other teams busting and all the other positions hitting, it was easy to turn a profit or at least break even. One interesting play is Ramandre Stevenson, who I really liked. I just didn't end up playing. I thought he made perfect sense as a leverage playoff of Deerunis Johnson because I didn't think it would have been surprising to me if the Patriots won. Actually, they were, I think, three-point favorites, in which case, you know, Deeranis Johnson,

not a lot of catches this year, but Felton out as well. you can say he's somewhat game script dependent, whereas Ramandre, a player I loved, my model loved, definitely game script's dependent, so all that positive game script would work in his favor. I think the Millie Maker played all three, which was really sharp. Although Johnson and Ramandre are probably maybe negatively correlated in a vacuum, but maybe not with Johnson set to see like 95% of the snaps. Yeah, so I guess that's my full thoughts on the slate. Yeah, I like a lot of the things you've hit on.

I'll start from back to the front or the most recent to the first things you said, but remandre. So for me, I seriously consider that one as well. And I'll just kind of use this as a point of instruction for listeners who are kind of trying to grasp the ins and outs of DFS theory and strategy and whatnot. So the reason I ended up playing Ingram and Deeris Johnson, and not remandre was because I was playing in small field tournaments. And Remandre Stevenson was on paper, if we played out the slate 100 times, right?

Remandre Stevenson was a lesser play than in particular De Ernest Johnson, mostly because the Browns are so run-centric and literally didn't have another healthy running back. And so the workload was so locked in there. And you can even, one of the things I talked about last week is the Patriots don't give up touchdowns or running back. I went through the numbers going back to 2016, and every year but one, they have been top three in the league in few as running back rushing touchdowns allowed because of the way they designed their defense. I won't go into all of that right now. But even with that, to me, it was like, well, De Ernest Johnson is step one. Step two was Ramandre, in my mind, was very close to Mark Ingram, only because Remandre's role, we knew what it was.

Mark Ingram's role, even though we thought we knew what it was, it, you know, it wouldn't have surprised any of us if Sean Payton did something totally different and Mark Ingram weren't as involved as we were expecting. Now, you can say the same thing about Romandre Stevenson, but I felt confident that, hey, Remandre is getting the, you know, the early down work on this offense and he's going to be involved in the past game, not on third downs and passing downs, but he's going to get some looks in the past game. And so Ingram was a slightly better play than Ramondre. And since I was playing small field tournaments and felt like my Devante plus MBS combo was going to be very low owned and worked well together.

Like if Devante had a big game, that increased the chances of MBS having a big game and vice versa. So that that lowered my ownership. The fact that I was able to get up to the Bills' defense and Cardinals defense lowered my ownership. The fact that I was on Ricky Seals Jones instead of Dan Arnold was a way to lower my ownership. And so I decided to say, look, I'm not going to try to guess between Ingram and Romandre. I'll take the guy who's the slightly better play. But if I have been getting into larger field tournaments, what I would have almost certainly done was play Dierness Johnson and Ramandre and said, hey, maybe this is negatively correlated.

But I am getting, I'm betting on a very clear game flow. And if that game flow plays out, I'm getting the two guys who could end up, maybe Ingram gets seven points and gets, you know, vultured near the end zone by Tassum Hill and isn't super involved in the past game and kind of gets stonewalled on the ground. You know, if Ingram hadn't had that touchdown, his output looks very different. And so the thinking would have been, hey, as I get into large field tournament, let me swing over to the slightly lesser play in Ramandre and play him in this spot. So, yeah, I think that's a very sharp take on considering that one. I also think that the Mason Rudolph one is extremely sharp. And it's one I didn't think about. And what I'll say is something I've been saying about running backs, right?

Like there were a lot of great running backs last week in the like the 8K price range. But all of them scored, you know, like 20 to 25 points. and it's been very rare, like Echler has a few 30-point games. Naji has one game where he, you know, inched past 30 points, took 19 targets to get there. Dalvin Cook has, I believe, zero 30-point games this year. And over the last two years, what's made Dalvin so, such, so worth the salary is he's basically been like the Deontaine Johnson of running backs in that he almost never goes over 30 points, but he always gets to that 20 to 30-point range in the past.

And so just the consistency made him worth so much. But there aren't a ton of these high-priced running backs anymore. Christian McCaffrey will get there now that he's back in the swing of things. But this isn't Levi-on-Bell and David Johnson. These guys aren't going for 40 points on a regular basis. You're paying a lot of salary for 25 to 30 points. Typically, the cheaper running backs are only going to get you 12 to 15 points. So it's like, well, whatever, I'll take the 25 to 30.

It's not a great salary multiplier, but get those points of running back. So this last week, with the cheaper running backs being in place who could get you 20 points, it was like, well, do I really want to spend an extra 3K, 3,500 in salary to try to get 25 points? Or can that salary be better spent elsewhere? Well, the same thing could be said about quarterbacks, right? Like, Kyler isn't running this season and obviously he didn't play. Lamar Jackson wasn't on the main slate. It wasn't a spot where you would expect Josh Allen to have to run much because he should be able to pick apart this.

defense through the air. Tom Brady doesn't run. And so you're really paying a lot in salary for like 25 to 30 point gains. And people kind of just are auto doing that. Whereas like then you get down to like the Heinekees and stuff and it's like, okay, well, yeah, this guy could put up 22 to 24 points. There's just more risk. One thing I didn't really think about was Mason Rudolph's only 4,100. And he can get up to that 18 to 20 points. Why would I spend 7,500 for 25 to 30? if I can get 20 points for 4,100, right? And that salary can be better spent elsewhere. So super sharp take there, one that I didn't even think about this last week.

And then the last one I want to hit on is you talked about D.K. Metcalf. And, well, basically, Russell Wilson in the double stack. But let's even take DK. Metcalf. And I think this is so important. It's something that DFS players just don't do enough is actually look at what a player has done. Past production doesn't tell us what's going to happen in this next game, but it does give us a context for what a player's range is. D.K. Metcalf almost always costs around 7K, sometimes as much as 8K. That means that we're targeting about a 30-point score from him.

D.K. Metcalf has played 41 games in his career. How many times has he scored 23 or more draft king's points in 41 games? seven times. That means that 34 times in his career he's scoring under 23 points, oftentimes 13 points, 18 points, 12 points, 8 points, 9 points. Okay, so when you have a player like that, the question then becomes, yeah, but if he goes off, he might bury me for not having him. So again, we said he needs to get to about 28 to 30 points. How many times has he gone above 30.7 points in his career once in 41 games. There's been one time in 41 games where not rostering DK Metcalf meant you probably can't get first place because he put up such a

big score. So it's crazy to me that people not only auto play Metcalf at this price, but then also want to play the Metcalf and Lockett pairing, which has literally worked out zero times. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's worked out once. But it's like, you know, to think about this thing, being owned at a relatively high level, and people just don't take the time to go back through the numbers. If you're playing DFS, if you're taking the time to listen

to this podcast with us an hour in, well, take the time to like five minutes to flip through a player's past production to get a better sense of, you can go to a pro football reference to a player's page or fantasy data.com, you can type in a player's name and actually look through their draft kings logs

or their fan dual game log and actually have a better sense of what individual players actually score, what their range is, because that can help you to have a better sense of what you're rostering and why you're rostering them and where the field is incorrect. So yeah, Scott, I love you bringing that up about the D.K. Metcalf and Tyler Lockett staff. And I just want to take that a step further and just talk about D.K. Metcalf because I think that people just, they kind of get stuck in a rut of thinking and don't step outside of that to challenge things. And the more you challenge these things, the better off you're going to be.

Yeah, I remember we talked about Aaron Jones. on a phone call earlier this season where you were like people are overstating his upside. It was something like he had, let's say, you know, five games over 25 fantasy points over the past three seasons, but four games of, you know, 38 points or more. And so people, and like now, if you look at it, the percentage obviously dropped because he's had one this season, one massive blowup game. And people are overstating that or they're worried about the burying the upside and they're overplaying it. And I think that's true. But then I'll come back to Tyreek Hill where like it just scares the crap out of me, not playing him, not having at least a little exposure in any given

week just because he really can. But back to the broader point about how you're saying, yeah, there's not really a David Johnson levy on Bell of old among the running backs this year. I think there are. I think there's two right now. I think it's Christian McCaffrey and Jonathan Taylor. Taylor now in Uber Belkow, 85% of the snaps, getting legitimate passing down usage. But outside of that, yeah, you could say, hey, maybe we should just go back to like that one year Devonta Freeman was like the only Belkow where you pay down at all the other running back spots. And with quarterback, I mean, like quarterback's tricky. I just pulled it up this week. Oh, oh, you can play Josh Allen in a great spot or hey Lamar Jackson who runs for a hundred less or

Kyler Murray for a hundred less than that or Mahomes for 300 less than that or Prescott for 400 less than that or Jalen Hertz for 400 less. And it's like yeah. Yeah. I mean like all these guys are are fairly even in terms of smash upside. So why not just deviate towards the cheaper guy? Yeah, and I think that every, you know, obviously every week is different, but understanding that is important because then you don't just auto play what everybody else is auto playing and attack the slate the same way everybody else is attacking it. Instead, you say, what am I actually spending 8K plus four at running back? What am I actually spending 7K plus four at quarterback? You know, if the other options are a bunch of running backs at 5K to 5500 who, you know, will get 12 to 3.5.5.000. You know, will get 12 to 3.5.5.5. 15 points in a good week. Well, sure, you've got to pay up for the running backs who can get you the points. If the other options are a bunch of quarterbacks in the 5K to 5,400 range, 5,500 range, who are as likely to get you eight points as like 18 points, then sure. But, you know, every week you have to look and say, what can I do differently? Or like when I, when I,

I, I like the running backs this last week, like the Dalvin Cook, Austin Echler, Najee Harris, Christian McCaffrey. I like those high-priced running backs more than I liked Devante Adams this last week. Why did I play Devante Adams instead? Because of what we were just talking about. Devante Adams has Barry Me Upside. So if Dalvin Cook has his great game, it's probably 30 points. If Echler has his great game, it's probably 30 points.

Christian McCaffrey, obviously, he can always go for 40 plus in any matchup, but given the state of that game and PJ Walker quarterback and the match against the Cardinals, I didn't feel comfortable and confident that I was getting 40 plus points from him. And so I was like, well, I don't, I'm not necessarily predicting that Devante has a 40 plus point game here. But if anybody from this group can put up that type of scores, like what you talked about, Tyree Kill, like account for that.

And so for me, it was like Devante Adams. And then I looked at ownership projections and saw that he was going to be pretty popular. So then it was like, how can I offset this? And I started poking around and kind of found the MVS pairing where it was like, oh, okay, if Devante has a big game, there's a decent chance that MBS has a big game as well. And if MBS has a big game, that almost certainly means Devonte is having a big game. So let's pair them together to kind of lower the combined ownership on them. But yeah, it's, you know, thinking about how you can get to first place rather than just which players you like.

And a lot of times getting to first place is those outlier scores. Tyree Kill puts up 50 points. You have to have him on your roster that week. Devante Adams puts up 45 to 50. You have to have them on your roster that week. And so kind of accounting for that as well is part of the game. Yeah, this was a fun. This is kind of like a little bit more.

less structured and a little more free-for-all in our approach to this week's podcast. But I think that what we covered was extraordinarily important for anybody who stuck around and listened to everything and is what people need to be focused on as DFS players instead of the content that people typically want. The content that people want is what they're given, but it's often content that is negative EV for them as players. And so kind of being able to dive into these things is really valuable because this is what DFS is actually about, understanding how to piece together rosters for different contest types

and what to look for and how to think through things and play off the certainty of others and all that. So, yeah, Scott, you have anything to add before we get out of here? Yeah, the only thing I'll add is there's a good chance we're probably not going to record next week just because Thanksgiving week is absolutely brutal for fantasy football content creators. But I guess we'll see. Yeah, I am down for that because I've got family coming in town and all that. I figured you would be. But yeah, we will, I like that plan.

Pick us back up the next week. We will be here. And yeah, thanks for hanging out, as always, for Scott Barrett for FantasyPoints.com. I am J.M. to win from one weekseason.com. We will see you back here in two weeks. And we will see you at the top of the leaderboards this weekend. Thanks for tuning in to this edition of the Fantasy Points podcast. Remember to subscribe, rate, and review on your favorite platform.

And come join the roster at FantasyPoints.com.