CFB Large-Field GPP Breakdown: Week 0

Well, we finally made it.

I’m pumped to be back for another year at ETR. Our content is without question the best in the industry when it comes to CFB DFS.

Before I get into the Week 0 slate, I wanted to start on a bit of a soapbox.

If you’re unfamiliar with this article, my main goal is to show you how a large-field GPP CFB DFS player actually goes about building lineups on any given Saturday. It does me no good to give advice or strategies in this article that I’m not going to follow myself. If I say I’m going to full fade a player or situation, that’s what I’m going to do. Obviously, things can change between when I write this on Friday and when games lock on Saturday. That’s why it’s so important to be in the Discord leading up to lock. Injuries happen, players randomly sit, depth charts change, and you have to be locked in if you’re going to play CFB DFS and expect to win.

If the slate landscape changes suddenly, so should the way you’re building lineups. Our team does a great job of giving subscribers the best chance to react to those situations successfully.

With all that being said, I spent some of the summer changing the format of this article to better align with what I want it to accomplish. I want to give you the best product I can while, most importantly, being transparent about how I’m actually playing these slates.

You won’t catch me writing an article about a slate that I’m not playing.

Let’s dig in, shall we?

Week 0 in 60 Seconds

DraftKings gave us a seven-game main slate to open the season. I’m not going to complain. We’ve waited long enough for college football that they could have given us New Mexico State-San Jose State seven times, and I probably still would have played.

The first thing that stands out is how condensed the slate is around a handful of really strong projection plays. Jayden Maiava is clearly separated at QB. At RB, it’s Micah Ford, Jai’Den Thomas, and Jekail Middlebrook. Duce Robinson is on an island all by himself at WR.

QB gets pretty interesting once you get past Maiava. There isn’t a huge projection gap between the next five or six options. That should give us plenty of ways to get different without having to play somebody who makes us want to throw up when we click their name.

RB is much more condensed. Thomas, Ford, and Middlebrook will be the starting point for a ton of builds, and The Solver is pushing pretty hard toward using a third RB in the FLEX. WR is the opposite. Duce is clearly at the top, but there are a bunch of cheap and mid-range options who make roster construction pretty easy.

My first read on the slate: I don’t think we need to get crazy at QB and RB. There are some really good chalk plays that I’m more than happy to eat. The bigger question is how we combine them and how we choose to break away from the most obvious lineup construction.

What’s the field going to do?

If people are leaning heavily on projections and The Solver, there’s a pretty obvious path to building lineups on this slate.

Maiava is going to be the starting point for a ton of builds. At RB, it gets even more condensed. The combination of Ford, Thomas, and Middlebrook shows up together in more than half of the 400 standard optimals, and an RB lands in the FLEX in nearly 75% of them.

I also ran a set with the low-variance setting turned on. That actually pushed The Solver even harder toward using an RB in the FLEX, up to 82% of lineups. The exact Ford-Thomas-Middlebrook trio dropped to around 32%, though, as guys like Ousmane Kromah and some of the other RBs started mixing in more. That tells me that three-RB builds are definitely optimal, but it doesn’t mean they all have to start with Ford-Thomas-Middlebrook.

QB2 is much more spread out. Maiava-Hayes is the most common pairing in the standard optimals, but it only shows up around 28% of the time. Maiava-Alejado is right behind it, and then you start getting combinations with Kim, Stokes, and Daniels. None of the QBs outside of Maiava are going to get crazy in terms of ownership.

WR is where the salary relief starts coming in. Duce is obviously going to be extremely popular, and then you have Devereaux along with cheaper guys like Dixon-Wyatt, Trader, and Coleman showing up in a bunch of builds.

It looks like the generic, button-clicking lineup construction right now would look something like:

Maiava + mid-range QB2 + three RBs + Duce + two cheaper/mid-range WRs.

There’s nothing wrong with that build. I’ll have plenty of lineups that look similar.

The biggest thing for me is this: If I start a lineup with Maiava, Ford, Thomas, Middlebrook, and Duce, I’ve already eaten a ton of the same construction as the field before I’ve even filled out the rest of the lineup.

All that means is you’re going to need to get different with those last three spots. Luckily, that’s not that difficult to do on this slate. Trust me, things are going to get weird.

Solver vs. Field