Welcome to Week 5 Leverage! Last week, we considered how to handle players who significantly outperformed their projections in the previous game. The goal was to distinguish meaningful changes in expectations from enthusiasm about a recent big fantasy score. This week, I want to get right into the question that’s on everyone’s mind: How are we going to handle the Lions-Cardinals game?
Lions-Cardinals has a Vegas total that sits eight points above every other game on Sunday’s main slate, and both teams have been involved in plenty of fantasy-rich shootouts in recent seasons. Detroit’s defense also just got shredded by Bryce Young on Sunday Night Football, so our opponents don’t have to dig very deep to find another reason to get excited about Arizona’s offense.
There is no shortage of reasons to like this game. The question is how we should build around it when so many of our opponents are likely to reach the same conclusion. Do we need a full game stack? Can we get enough of the production through one or two players? And if we do load up, how different will our lineup actually be from everyone else’s?
To help think through those decisions, I looked at the historical data for slates with at least eight games. Only three since 2022 had a gap of at least six points between the two highest game totals.
2024 Week 15: Bills at Lions
Buffalo-Detroit had a 55.5-point total, nine points higher than the next game on the slate. It then blew past even those lofty expectations, with Buffalo winning 48-42. If we knew ahead of time that the game would produce 90 points, we probably would have felt pretty comfortable loading up.
But the lineups below show why that still wouldn’t have answered every DFS question. The Milly winner rostered Jared Goff, Amon-Ra St. Brown, and Sam LaPorta without a Buffalo bring-back. The optimal lineup used only Goff and St. Brown from the game. We could be right about the shootout without needing to roster players from both sides.
And then there was Amari Cooper. He was roughly 20% owned after seeing 14 targets the week before, then scored zero points in this 90-point game without being injured. I played him in my live final lineup, too — apparently I found the one guy who wasn’t invited to the shootout. Being right about the game doesn’t mean we’ll be right about every player in it.
Meanwhile, Jets-Jaguars finished with 57 combined points against a total of just 41.5. Davante Adams outscored St. Brown, Brian Thomas Jr. delivered 35.5 points, and Brenton Strange provided a useful score at just $2,500. All three appeared in the optimal lineup, and Thomas and Strange appeared in each of the winning lineups shown below.
The two tied Double Spy winners used different QBs from Jets-Jaguars: one rostered Mac Jones and the other Aaron Rodgers. Both used St. Brown as their only Buffalo-Detroit player. Even with 90 points in the marquee game, there was plenty of room to win by building around another matchup.
2025 Week 7: Commanders at Cowboys
Washington-Dallas had a 55-point total, 6.5 points higher than the next game. Dallas won 44-22, so this wasn’t a case where the popular game failed to produce
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