GPP Leverage: Week 1

NFL DFS is back! After months of debating depth charts, projecting workloads, and talking ourselves into our favorite players, we finally get a full Sunday slate to put those opinions to the test. I’m sure we’ll all feel great about them right up until the first round of goal-line carries.

Welcome to the first NFL GPP Leverage column of the 2026 season. I’m excited to be back for my third year writing this article and talking through one of my favorite parts of tournament DFS: how to build lineups that offer leverage against our opponents.

For those who are new to Leverage, the goal of this column is to help us think through the slate. Each week, we’ll look at the slate primarily from a macro perspective before providing some micro examples. The individual players make the macro ideas concrete, but understanding the reasoning should help us find additional ways to apply them in our lineups.

I’ve shared this quote from my Leverage-writing predecessor Drew Dinkmeyer in each of my first two seasons writing this column, and I’m going to share it again because it captures exactly what I want readers to take away from each article:

“The examples I highlight will be in my portfolio of lineups, but if you want to improve considerably as a GPP player, mastering the concepts is more important than copying the answers.”

That becomes especially relevant between Friday afternoon and Sunday kickoff. A player who looks like a great leverage option when this article is published can become one of the slate’s most popular plays by kickoff. When that happens, we should revisit what made the play appealing and whether the new ownership changes our decision. Ideally, the discussion here gives us a useful starting point for making those adjustments as news, projections, and market sentiment evolve throughout the weekend.

With those shifting slate dynamics in mind, I plan to change the structure of Leverage slightly this season. I’ll organize the discussion around how I see the slate playing out as a whole, using individual players and expected chalk to illustrate those ideas. This should help make the column more useful and relevant throughout the weekend. It should also allow me the capacity to include a data analysis project each week — if you ever have an analysis idea you’d like to see included, don’t hesitate to reach out!

I also want to preface that my own perspective comes primarily from playing small-field tournaments on DraftKings, but my goal is for the macro ideas discussed here to be useful across DFS platforms and contest sizes. For those particularly interested in FanDuel, we have revamped our coverage for FanDuel NFL this season, and that will include new written coverage released on Saturdays in addition to the FanDuel Examination show on Sunday mornings hosted by Andrew Wiggins.

Alright, with all of the intros out of the way, let’s get into the slate.

Week 1 gives us plenty to work with from a leverage standpoint because even our strongest expectations come with unanswered questions. We can have good reasons to expect an offense to improve or a defense to remain strong and still see something different on Sunday. The challenge is deciding which alternatives are plausible enough, and rewarding enough, to build around. We don’t need every popular assumption to be wrong. A lineup can benefit quite a bit from getting one meaningful disagreement right, especially when the rest of its pieces fit that outcome.

In fact, our fantasy-point projections at ETR have historically been roughly as accurate in Week 1 as in all other weeks of the season, as shown in the table below. This demonstrates that, although the field will tend to IKB (the Adam Levitan-popularized acronym for “I know better [than the projections]”) more in Week 1, we actually don’t need to get as far off the board from projections as we might instinctively think.

While it’s reassuring that our projections have historically held up just as well in Week 1, we certainly will get some spots wrong. And if we can predict or take shots on which spots those might be, we can gain considerable leverage by having our lineups play into assumptions that disagree with the market. Let’s walk through a selection of games on Sunday’s main slate and briefly consider how we can gain leverage by going against the most common assumptions in the market.

Jets at Titans