DFS Top Plays: Week 14

You don’t have to play cash games to understand why it’s important to grasp them. Players we consider for cash are the ones we believe are the most underpriced, have the best floor/ceiling combo, and feature a relatively tight range of outcomes.

In other words, these are the best plays on the board once price, slate context, and positional depth are accounted for. Those sound like pretty good options for GPPs as well.

The optimal GPP lineup will mix some of these cash-type plays with higher-variance options in correlated lineups. In cash games (where roughly 50% of the field gets paid out), we don’t worry about ownership, game stacks, or correlation. In large-field tournaments, our ACO (average cumulative ownership) should stay reasonably low. Please read this article and listen to Episode 619 of the podcast for more on large-field tournament strategy.

For more tournament content, check out our projections, Gary Hartman’s GPP Leverage Article, and Saturday’s Establish The Million show with Drew Dinkmeyer and Mike Leone.

With all that said, these are our Top Plays considering the following factors: median projection, matchup, upside, and value. Ownership is NOT considered here. Generally speaking, these players are what we consider to be “head-to-head and 50/50 considerations”.

They are listed in price descending order (NOT ranked by “best play”). At the bottom, you’ll find suggested rankings by site once salary is accounted for.

QUARTERBACK

Justin Fields ($6,800 DK, $7.900 FD) – On a week where Jalen Hurts, Dak Prescott, Kyler Murray, and Tua Tagovailoa are all off of the main slate, Fields really stands out, as he is a full tier below Josh Allen, Patrick Mahomes, and Lamar Jackson in price while projecting for more points than Jackson, and only about two points less than Mahomes and Allen. He’s got a very high ceiling at home against a Lions team that has been struggling mightily on defense over the second half of the season.

Jake Browning ($5,200 DK, $6,500 FD) – This is also a week where spending down at QB seems like the most viable route, and while there are many options to do so, including Baker Mayfield, Josh Dobbs, Gardner Minshew, and even Joe Flacco, perhaps no one profiles better than Browning, who had his coming-out party last Monday night, scoring nearly 30 DK points. However, because that was the Monday night game, Browning is priced below all of the names I listed above and gets a pretty solid home matchup against the Colts.

RUNNING BACK