CFB Large-Field GPP Breakdown: Week 1

It’s Christmas in August for college football fans. We got a little taste of the 2025 CFB season with four games last Saturday. Week 1 will deliver the main course, as we get five straight days of college football. There’s even two games on Sunday this year.

Most DFS diehards are rejoicing that mostly every team now has to release some kind of availability report. While that’s great once the season gets going, it does add a bit more uncertainty at the beginning of the year. My thesis is that coaches are more inclined to not release depth charts now since they have to produce weekly statuses on their teams. Or they don’t take them seriously and put out a depth chart that has Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, and Leonardo DiCaprio characters (looking at you, New Mexico).

Enough of my rant. I’m not going to do an in-depth recap of Week 0 since it was a short slate. Plus, beckbeck18 is still trying to figure out why everyone played Matthew Henry, and I don’t want to spill the beans.

There are enough games to keep us busy this week, so let’s dive into the Week 1 slates:

Week 1 Preview

• We already have our first bit of drama for the 2025 CFB DFS season. DraftKings released pricing for their main slate last Saturday, and boy was it something. They eventually took the slate down and reposted pricing after I’m sure they got a fair amount of complaints. It looked like they literally just made everyone $1,000 cheaper and called it a day. I hope it’s not an indication of how pricing is going to be on the site all year.
• DK has a 12-game main slate. The games themselves aren’t really appetizing. Even though you get the marquee matchup of Texas-Ohio State, it’s not the greatest game for DFS purposes, and most of the plays are priced up. Other than that, you have a bunch of teams you’ll see all year (Penn State, Alabama, Georgia) and some you probably won’t for the rest of the season on a main slate (Nevada, UMass, Southern Miss).
• The 14-gamer on FanDuel is much preferred. It sounds like, according to psufans, FD is going to try and step their game up this season. As long as they do, I’ll try and give some more in-depth notes on them in this article. I won’t pretend that their games are that much better than DK. You do, however, get some much better DFS environment games with the night kicks of Georgia State-Ole Miss and LSU-Clemson. Pricing is also much more palatable on FD.
• You probably knew this note was coming, but I love these kinds of slates on DK where pricing is tight. I’ll expand on this more in the Contrarian Thoughts section.

Expected Chalk, How to Play It

Ryan Browne, DK Price: $5,200

Expected Ownership: 37%

Browne finds himself back in West Lafayette after transferring to North Carolina for spring ball. It was probably the right call, as new head coach Barry Odom named him the starting QB for the Boilermakers. Purdue opens up as 17.5-point favorites and have a 33.5-point team total.

Darddogs’ take: OVERWEIGHT (probably around 60%)

DK pricing is tough. This might be the only slate all year where Browne is in play. Last year in one of his starts against Illinois, he ran for over 100 yards. Browne also gets a new offensive coordinator from USC, Josh Henson. The Trojans’ QBs threw for nearly 3,500 yards in 2024. Ball State was pretty dreadful against the pass last year, giving up 281 yards per game to opponents through the air. Brown is cheap, has a good matchup, and rushing upside to boot. You can’t ask for much more from a $5,200 QB on this slate.