GPP Leverage: Week 6

Welcome back for the sixth NFL GPP Leverage column of the season. If you missed the Week 1 edition of GPP Leverage, I recommend you take a minute to read the intro from last week to get a feel for the goals of this column.

Note that this edition of Leverage will be a bit different from our usual format, as I want to focus on the macro trends we’ve observed through the first five weeks of the season. This week’s column will not be discussing topics specific to the Week 6 main slate. 

Much of the industry chatter coming out of Week 5 has been related to how hard the chalk smashed on Sunday’s main slate. The winner of the $20 Milly Maker, which contained a whopping 161,764 entries, was one of the chalkiest I can remember for such a large contest. The winning lineup contained three players with ownership of 30% or more, and its only player whose ownership stayed in the single digits was still 7.1% owned. Moreover, this lineup rostered five of the players included in Adam Levitan’s cash lineup, which was our second-most optimal lineup on the slate from a base projections perspective. Emeka Egbuka was the only player from this lineup that wasn’t featured in our Top Plays table.

The questions that many DFS tournament players (aka GPP bros) are asking are along the lines of “Why is the chalk smashing?” and “Do I need to start playing more chalk?” Perhaps the reason for the chalk hitting so much recently is simply that projections are getting better. As Levitan tweeted earlier this week, Weeks 1, 4, and 5 of this season yielded three of ETR’s top seven weeks ever for projection accuracy. While it’s certainly possible that these three weeks have been flukey outliers, our backtesting shows that ETR’s projection accuracy has notably improved every single season, and I expect that it will only continue to get stronger.