Welcome back for the 10th GPP Leverage column of the season. If you missed the Week 1 edition of GPP Leverage, I recommend you take a minute to read the intro from Week 1 to get a feel for the goals of this column.
Week 9 was a great slate for ETR, as we saw many subscribers find their way onto the Geno Smith stacks that were the key to winning most contests on DraftKings. I want to take a minute this week to review Mike Leone’s winning lineup from a leverage perspective. Leone’s lineup looks reasonably contrarian on the surface because the primary stack of Smith, Jaxon Smith-Njigba, and Tyler Lockett only averaged 5.3% ownership per player. We projected this stack to be a bit more owned than it actually was, and Leone did a great job reading the tea leaves and recognizing that this stack had a chance to get squeezed, specifically in his contests. Yet even if the stack had come in with higher ownership like we projected, Leone still found a way to gain leverage on the rest of the Smith stacks by utilizing Cooper Kupp as his bring-back rather than the much more popular Kyren Williams. This allowed him to gain leverage not only by playing a more unique bring-back with similar upside, but also by playing the three strongest RB options on the slate alongside his game stack. With Kupp outscoring Williams by 13.9 points at nearly half the ownership, Leone gave himself a significant advantage over his opponents.
I also tried to attack the Rams-Seahawks game from a contrarian perspective in Week 9, pairing Williams (15.3% ownership) with the Rams’ D/ST (3.9%). While my approach didn’t work out nearly as well as Leone’s, the macro takeaway is that we don’t have to avoid great game environments in top-heavy tournaments just because they may be chalky. By diving into the best game environments with a thoughtful approach, we can intelligently build lineups that have a strong path to success while also gaining leverage on the field.
This week in Leverage, we’ll go game-by-game through the best fantasy environments on the slate to parse through the chalk and explore where we can gain leverage against the field via contrarian constructions of chalky games.
SF @ TB
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